The sleeves of the Zelda pullover are progressing, but slowly:




I think I still have 30-some rows to do, including the sleeve cap shaping. They're getting kind of uncomfortable on the needles.

I knit on the sleeves for a while last night, then switched over to the Kent scarf:


It's funny where a person's mind goes when they're knitting. I found myself thinking of my cousin (the one who took his life last December) as I was knitting on this. I don't know why - perhaps on some level the scarf looks to me like something he would have worn. I could picture his blue eyes and his sandy-red-going-slightly-grey hair, and I thought of how he seemed unbelievably tall, especially when I was a little kid. And I could remember the way he talked and laughed.

And then, I got all sad, and had to put the scarf aside.

Intellectually, I've processed it. Intellectually, I've done the mental gymnastics necessary to me for me to sort of understand why someone in good physical health and surrounded by people who cared about him could do that. But emotionally, I'm still sad and kind of angry and wishing he hadn't done it. Emotionally, I'd like to go back in time to before he did it, and take him by the shoulders and shake him and take him around, one by one, to all his relatives, and go, "These - these are the people you will be hurting if you do this thing. These are the people who will still be asking questions about it years later. These are the people who will find their rest interrupted by questions and who will find themselves thinking of unpleasant things when they should be relaxing."

And I realize, intellectually, that that wouldn't have been all that helpful. But emotionally - it takes a lot of time for me to deal with it.

I've lost a lot of people - mostly friends - that I cared about over the past few years. Most of them went down fighting, they kept living and trying and hoping and doing what they could to cheat death for a few more days or a few more hours, a chance to say "goodbye" or "I love you" to the people around them, until they just got too tired and had to rest. And having seen that, I can't understand on a very deep gut level why someone who was not in physical pain, who had all kinds of a support system, would willingly choose to go like he did.

I mean, I "know" why. I've had the reasons explained to me, on a brain-level they make sense. But I also don't "understand" why, on a heart-level, if that makes any sense.