Too often, we miss the heart of life. We race around trying to do everything, be everything, and get everything, but there is so much more. Sometimes, it’s not until we have lost something or someone that we realize this intense truth. We scramble to manage on in the best way that we know how. We have to continue. But often, it’s hard to get back to joy after loss. It’s hard to feel ourselves and to let people in. But it is possible.

It has been 2 years since we lost my Father. Throughout that time I have found comfort in doing some of the things that he loved, searching through his treasures, and creating patterns and art that have his memory threaded through every inch.

I want to share a little bit about each of those avenues. Each of us deals with grief in different ways, but these have filled my time with joy over the last two years, and to be honest, they have also helped me to cry and to hold my sadness in the right way.

Things that He Loved

I have the great privilege to carry on some of what my father started. He started his business Swanson Boat Company to develop traditional wooden boat resources for those who love wooden boats. I carry on the tradition making marine tallow for oar leathers and putting together his leather oar kits. It means that I get to speak with traditional boaters on the regular.

You cannot believe how much I love hearing from my father’s clients, colleagues, and the friends he gained from shore to shore. Very soon after he passed away, I realized that I had been given this gift of resurfacing memories through getting to involve myself in the things that he loved to do and I’m so grateful.

Searching Through Treasures

There are things that we have to leave behind when we pass away. It is part of life. You may have felt a fear of this, thinking that people will find things that you wrote or what you had collected throughout your life and judge you. And actually, if that’s the case for you and I, it is a telling thing for us to reflect on.

My kids and I have had some fun looking through the artifacts he left- bows and arrows, wood carvings, and more. Treasures can be the things that we collect, but they should also be the words we pray, think, feel, and communicate. I have treasured the writings he scribbled: To record memories, weather, and gardening. To pray the things in his soul that poured out, needing answers. To deal with pain and joy. To pass on to others. To reflect on how everything he had were things to be grateful for.

This week, my mother handed me a box of letters and cards collected after my birth. I found a card that my father wrote me three days after I was born. I’ll share just a small portion:

Besides allowing me to begin to know Him, the most truly wonderful thing the Lord has done for me was to bring me together with your mother. With her, love grows and takes on new meaning every day. With you (and being there when you were born, too), I have received a third truly wonderful gift.

He will never know what a blessing it was for me to read these words. To think of the joy he experienced as he reflected on the good gifts that he had received in my birth, the gift of my mother to him, and the gift of God enabling my father to know Him.

It made me realize how much we have lost when we forget that the treasures that really last are the relationships that we are given and make, and the way that we nurture them. That is something that will never be able to be dissolved, even after death.

Memories in Thread

I know that nothing I make really starts with me. First of all, for me, it starts with the inspiration of nature and relationship. Somehow through those things intermingling and by the work of the Spirit, something is born out of love. It isn’t the highest art form of creation, only One could do that. But it is a whisper of the One who created first.

The Mackinac Boat was one thing that really inspired my father early on in his days in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He studied the boat itself, but also the ways of those who used it and how it was a staple in the Great Lakes.

There is a term “Crossing the Bar” which is an old nautical saying. Often at the mouth of a harbor there is a sand bar protecting the harbor, which has to be crossed going in and out. The saying refers to crossing the bar for the last time.

It’s clear to me from my father’s writings that the unseen things were always what inspired him the most. The veil of what we cannot quite behold, but that we know will await us when we pass. Just like Reepicheep sailing to Aslan’s country in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.

Sunset Sail is a quilt for my father. I realize that my father’s sun has set, but a new one will come that is so much brighter and lasting than anything we can imagine, and for which we hope. Just like Reepicheep would sail in every vessel and use his four legs, even “sink with his nose to the sunrise”, I want to press on. I want to watch all the sunsets, be present with the people that I have been given as a gift, and hope in what is to come.

Until next time, write a love note for someone to cherish forever
<3 Kate