How repairing a shirt can help mend a grieving heart
Kate Thériault is working through grief by using their late dad's ties to patch their favourite shirt
Contributed by Kate Thériault
As I sit in my mother's sewing room, needle and thread in hand, about to begin mending my favourite shirt, I am aware that on this cold and rainy October day, my heart needs mending too. I send a needle through layers of fabric. It feels like an active prayer for healing, one stitch at a time. I hope the same calm and compassion that washes over me will, with time and dedication, mend all things.
I began hand-stitching as a young child. As soon as I had the dexterity to thread a needle, I was embroidering flowers on to pillowcases with my Nanna Jean. Much to my Nanna's dismay, I quickly became a rebel embroiderer, preferring to freestyle my stitches, attaching fabrics together, creating intricate and abstract patterns of my own.
Growing up in wartime England, my Nanna developed a deeply ingrained ingenuity and practical sensibility. For her, mending and repairing your material possessions is an unquestioned necessity. When she taught me how to darn a sock, she also taught me to value my belongings and resist fast fashion.
Marrying my freestyle stitching inclinations with my Nanna's fix-it sensibility led me to visible mending, which comes from a Japanese tradition called Sashiko. The idea behind visible mending is to fix a garment with a patch, securing it with repetitive lines of stitching in a way that accentuates an area once torn. The resulting repair creates beauty where there once was destruction and is a celebration of what that garment has been through. Glancing down at my denim shirt, elbows worn through and ripped apart, I see the hole we feel in my family.
What dad left behind
My sister and I were blessed with two dads in this life. Our birth parents divorced when I was a young child and my mother met and married Michael when I was a teen. He was a soft-spoken man of integrity and inner strength and he came into our lives as a powerful restorative force.
Michael shifted my worldview at a pivotal moment and created a safe and empowering space where I was free to be myself. His love gently encouraged me to uncover my true purpose as an artist. My sustainable clothing company, Cedars & Sage, was born in the cedar tree forest behind my parents' diner. My mom often said it was as if Michael metaphorically drew a line in the sand around us, stepping fully into parenting my sister and I, holding us like his own. He didn't have to, but he chose that work; all the challenge of teenage daughters and all the joy. He embraced it all. He chose us.
When we lost my dad, my mother lost her business partner, her husband, the love of her life. Our family-run, Huron-shore diner lost its cook and the heart of the business, with just tiny fragments of his handwritten recipes left behind. Walking in the fall woods here and watching this close-knit community come together to support my mother and keep the diner going, I remember this quote: "Mending happens all around us. All the time," from the book, Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts.
Mending clothes, finding resilience
Sorting through dad's clothes this week, my broken heart felt called to use his favourite, goofy ties to patch the elbows of my favourite shirt. These stitches will add depth to its story. Taking the time and care to do this is one small act of resilience; honouring what hurts, and celebrating the grit and determination required to keep going, for myself, for my mother, for their diner, for this community. Like the thread holding the layers of these patches together, this act makes me stronger.
I feel a deep grounding as I slow down to be present and remember that with time and dedication, all things can and will heal. I expect my grief to arrive as waves of memories crash to the shore, like the lines of stitches running over the holes in my shirt. I hope to hold the pain of this great loss with the same gentleness that I now hold my shirt. With its patches made of my dad's ties, it will always be a reminder that he was here on this earth, that he loved us so deeply and that we loved him too.
