Grief is a Quilt

In response to loss we get busy making meaning, recreating what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss, a wondrous response to caring and finitude in general

- Jonathan Lear

My father died under the walnut trees, in a year when there were no walnuts. 

The prior year, there were many: green globes tucked under their canopies of serrated, pinnate leaves. I collected them before they fell, and cut into them while they were still soft, cramming the oxidizing halves into jars to soak in Everclear, for a liqueur that might be palatable in a few years. In Italy, these green walnuts are collected on June twenty-fourth, to celebrate the Feast of Saint John the Baptist. This nocino might be the only liqueur the famous ascetic would enjoy, its black and tannic taste so vile that even those most dedicated to a digestif shudder when I present the bottle at the end of a meal.

I visit Kansas every July, arriving a few days after the Feast’s prime walnut-collecting time. The walnuts, when they exist at all, are still green. When they don’t exist, the cicadas still hum from the scored branches, and the cardinals pipe from their canopy. The year my father died, the trees were walnut-less but still leafed out and green, hosting their retinue of noisy, winged residents.

Certain trees, like oak and walnut, have mast years when they overproduce. Their fruit spills onto the ground beneath their canopy, leaving far more than even the most starved deer and squirrels can consume. In the year following such abundance, animals who rely on such food see population explosions; white-tailed deer are more likely to produce twins. The trees seem to communicate with one another about when a mast year should occur, whether by pheromones on the wind or underground messages carried by the mycelial threads of mushrooms. The mechanics of such things are beyond the reach of science for now, but the mystery makes it no less true.

Other years, the trees might produce just a few fruits in response to poor environmental factors—heat, pests, or other stressors. Mast years get the trees through hard times, statistically increasing their chance of survival, ensuring their existence beyond the lean years. People do this, too, when they save up money for a few years to take a lavish trip, or to pay for a child’s wedding. They do this for the same reason the trees do, but in the inverse—living frugally in service of a future they know is not assured. The memories of such extravagance feed our souls through painful times, when our limbs ache and our palms are empty. I recall my father describing, with rapture, the gossamer shavings of white truffle over a plate of pasta in Italy’s Piedmont, an after-dinner glass of bitter liqueur crafted from local herbs and weeds.

When I visited my parents in Kansas, I was always occupied with projects. I inherited their Midwestern sense that I was only as good as I was productive. A satisfying day was one in which I could neatly list all the tasks I accomplished. A bad day was one in which I didn’t get anything done. During the July visit before my father died, I was busy with a vat of indigo and other natural dye efforts. I draped all the surfaces in their laundry room with scraps of test fabric and hung swaths from the trees on the patio to dry in the summer sun. Dad and I passed each other over and over in the house that week, in the hallways and the kitchen, hastening to our various obligations. We gathered in the evenings over a cocktail to discuss the day’s triumphs and failures. We also fought that trip, and when he took me and my children to the airport, we hardly spoke, though I hugged him at the end and told him I loved him.

Just a few weeks later, he was gone. I arrived on the night he died, twelve hours after the event. I was stunned and disembodied, but the walnut trees were the same. The intervening fortnight had not altered their aspect in the least. They stood over the spot where he died. There were still no walnuts. I wondered if the sounds of the cicadas and cardinals tracked his last earthly sensation.

The next summer, I spent the whole month of July in Kansas. We counted the days to the anniversary of my father’s death, and the walnuts came back. I started making a quilt using fabric dyed with the walnuts that came the summer after my father died, from the same trees that stand over the place where he died. Walnuts are rich in tannins, so they’re ideal dye material. With this natural mordant, the deep, warm browns they produce on cotton and linen are fast.

My father died under the walnut trees by the old red barn, under the old yellow tractor that belonged to my mother’s father. The dye in the walnuts from those trees is now in fabric that is going into a quilt that will rest on the bed in an upstairs room where I stay when I come to visit my mother. On her own bed, which she downsized from a king to a full, is a quilt made from the indigo-dyed fabric, fabric dyed while my father was alive, fabric he might have noticed and even brushed with a hand as he walked past where it hung to dry. Fabric dyed as I was passing him in his house, not paying attention to much besides my own sense of what I needed to get done, in order that I might feel good about how I was spending my time. 

There is both asceticism and indulgence in this quilt. There is the frugality of using materials I have on hand to create something useful and warm. The muted colors of the natural dyes signify some abstinence, a making-do. There is also the absurd amount of luxurious time it takes to make a quilt. Time I could be spending with other people I love, like my children, my husband, my mother. Instead, I trim and sew, piece and rearrange until I like what I see before me. I am creating order here, I am creating something, in the face of obliterating truth. I am trying to make something that will last, that will keep my loved ones warm, and that will help get us through the seasons. When the quilt project is finished, we will still have the nocino to drink. Every year we will try a thimble-full, and hope that time has mellowed and rounded its bitterness.

Fabric metaphors abound when people get to talking about the span of human life. The threads that connect us, the ties that bind, the warp and weft and snipping scissors of the Fates. Human lives are woven together by threads visible and unseen. The relationships between us fray and need mending, and my grief is a quilt. I take tiny pieces of my life, my reality, and arrange and rearrange them until I find a pattern that makes sense. Until I am satisfied by the image before me and willing to fix it into a square that I can piece into the larger project. I have to trust that the final result will stretch in all directions, will hold the past and the future at the same time, and that in these threads, my father will live forever.

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About the Author

Gillian is a civil servant by day, and an aspiring writer the rest of the time. She moved from New Orleans to San Diego in 2022 and writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays. She has poems forthcoming in A Year in Ink and The SCOP.