My Aunt was a seamstress by trade. She could hem your pants, fix a snap, mend, quick as you please. But her hands slowed as she got older, and the trade fell with her. Why fix something when a cheap replacement could be purchased? It’s a throwaway society – for both clothes, and my Aunt it seems.
She was my favorite Aunt. Quite often I would stop after school to see her, and my mom would send along a small item every so often that needed mending. It helped my Aunt feel useful. She would sit and sew, talking away, with a grin that touched her eyes.
I visited less as I grew older, and time turned my Aunt despondent and depressed. Less chatting and more staring into space. Some of this was just plain age – she was 87 after all – but some of it was the lack of feeling that she had a place in society and something meaningful to do. When I did bring something for mending, she would do it slowly, sloppily, without her previous care. Quite often she would have three or four bleeding fingers when she was done, from the needle missing its mark. Quite often the piece of clothing would have bloody evidence of this as well.
Once I got to college I barely had time to visit at all anymore. My mom would mention my Aunt from time to time. She was miserable in her new nursing home and cried much of the time. I felt terrible to hear that, but there were friends, and dollar drafts, and finals and boyfriends. I made up my mind to visit her during a break.
I brought her a small sewing kit, with a magnifying glass and a few articles of clothing that I no longer cared about for her to mend. That old smile lit up her face when she saw what I brought. The lady at the nurses’ desk told me she hadn’t seen her like that in forever. I left to meet friends feeling a little too self-satisfied.
We all woke to the sound of the phone in the middle of the night. My mom came in and muttered something and told me to hurry and dress, and we took off for the hospital. All she knew was that my Aunt had some kind of accident and had lost a lot of blood before the aides had found her. When we arrived a half hour later we heard the horrible details, choked out by a crying nursing home RN while we waited for the doctor to give us an update.
After showing her new sewing kit off at dinner, she returned to her room to watch TV. She was as cheerful as they had seen her. She told everyone she finally had something to sew. The aides checked her at 10 pm, and she was out in her chair. They decided to let her sleep. By the time they checked her again at midnight, she had been hard at work for a while.
She used the little sewing shears to painstakingly cut up the length of both legs and arms, losing so much blood in the process that her chair was in a puddle. She sewed these cuts up with the pretty cornflower blue thread from the kit. Then she went to work on her face, cutting across her forehead and both cheeks, and sewing these up with sunflower yellow. The fingers of her left hand were sewn to each other with a lovely grass green. Lastly, she sewed her mouth shut with bright red. I cannot image how much pain she was in this whole time, but when the aide found her she was barely awake and smiling, mouth stuck in a garish grin. Her heart stopped on the way to the hospital and had to be restarted. Right now it was touch and go as they fixed her cuts, pumped her with blood, and tried to stabilize her heart.
I could hear my mother repeating that it wasn’t my fault, as I sat in stunned disbelief, but I just couldn’t answer. Everything had tunneled away. If she died now, my bruised mind supposed, she would die happy. It had been so long since she had sewn anything. And we all knew how she loved to sew.