Lonna Cunningham

I’ve been dealing with delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder since the early months of 2011. The anxiety, sleeplessness, and ongoing chest pains are the legacy of the chaos that took over my life when my first husband’s brain tumour took hold and turned him into a stranger with a familiar face. During and after his illness I had so much on my plate that I just kept on pushing through life: oh, I acknowledged that things were difficult and I did what I could to deal with the pain and loss and grief, but there wasn’t a lot of room in my life for that kind of work. I had a child to raise, bills to pay, a life to rebuild. The old troubles were tucked away in the hopes that time would heal the wounds without any further input from me.

Well, time alone didn’t do it, in the past several months I have done a lot of work facing the old hurts and finding my way along the difficult road to forgiveness and healing. Just Keep Knitting is the result of that work: both the story it tells and the knitting projects that I created as I worked on the book.

It is my hope that the story of my past, combined with the reflections on forgiveness, faith and fibre (knitting is indeed a healing art) will shine a light of hope so that perhaps, someday, there might be just enough light for someone else to find a way out of the dark.