As some of you may have guessed by now, chickenitis is personal with me. Here’s our family story.
My nephew was a type 2 diabetic who had a rare, and very severe, reaction to the medication that he took to control his blood sugar last year. He sustained major organ damage at that time, the worst being to his kidneys and liver. He made lifestyle changes hoping that his liver would heal, but by this spring it became apparent that he would need a liver transplant. He broke the news to his extended family in a text message this April, and my sister requested that I make them all emotional support chickens. I pulled out some yarn and got to work.
Not long afterwards he went on a trip to Hawaii that was paid for through friends; the last picture I saw of him was a selfie taken while standing in the ocean.
A few days after that picture he was home again, returning early from the trip because his health was declining. Soon after his return he was in an emergency room, and two days later my sister let me know that his condition was critical and that he was nonresponsive. He did manage to rally and fought on for more days in the hospital, but when it became clear that his kidney function was too marginal to allow liver transplant surgery, he was moved to hospice care and arrangements were made to allow him to go home.
Shocked by the speed of his decline, horrified that the bottom had fallen out in the city of his mother’s birth, Honolulu, Hawaii, I bundled up the two emotional support chickens that I had ready to go and express shipped them to his home. I worried that they wouldn’t make it in time.
They did not make it. He died the afternoon before they arrived.
The next morning, I woke up to a text showing his swollen-eyed girlfriend hugging the chicken that I had knitted for him.
It was heartbreaking, but I was grateful that the chicken had arrived for her right when she needed it, and happy to see she had claimed it. My sister kept the second chicken, the reddish-purple one knit from homespun, for herself. That chicken quickly became a true emotional support huggable. She took it with her for the memorial barbeque with his friends. She slept with it. The chicken traveled into the mountains on the day that they buried his ashes, along with those of a beloved dog, near a waterway where he used to camp. Raspberry brambles were planted on the site in living remembrance. In my mind, the color of the chicken is linked to the color of the future berries that will come from those plants. Bittersweet memories of a wonderful man gone too soon, a living memorial of berries, and a knitted chicken all somehow linked by the sorrow that has been placed to rest in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
Emotional support chickens are just… cute little knitted chicken shaped pillows to hug. They are also symbols of love and support when you need those things desperately. They are something to cling to in bad times. Sometimes they are all a knitter can do for another person in need, and sometimes they are just what that person needed.
Now you know why I will never, ever decline a request for an emotional support chicken. Two more requests came this week. I have a spreadsheet and everything. For these people, in the memory of my nephew, for my sister, I will knit every single one of them a chicken.
I invite you to join me.
Knit on, my friends. Knit on.
Yarn, Books & Roses 