Meet the remarkable Felix Hewison-Carter, someone I ‘met’ by following her on Twitter many years ago as @felixthefemale. I was a magazine editor at the time and I asked if she’d let me have a photo of one of her old fashioned typewriters for a letters page we were introducing. She’s funny, multi-talented, smart, wry. Gloriously dark – although I’m sorry to say, that’s come about as the consequence of having to deal with serious health challenges in her life, as well as loss. She makes so many things beautifully, including fantastic soaps. It’s Felix that introduced me to the joy of sweary crafting. Find out more about her:
Tell us a bit about yourself
Per all my social media bios; ‘chronic pain, acute whinging’. I worked in IT – mostly in planning for large projects and programmes – until some autoimmune diseases started ganging up with existing joint problems and chronic migraine and turned me into a very unreliable person indeed. So now I spend a lot of time on the sofa, and find embroidery to be an excellent outlet for both big feelings and silliness.
How did your Little Book of Grieving book come about, and what does it mean to you?
My father died and I sewed a book about it, is the shortest version. He died suddenly, and we were all plummeted into that ice bath of shock, which thawed over time into grief and all its usual bedfellows of regret, guilt, anger, disbelief, and so on.
One of the tricks to living with pain is to listen to it, by which I mean – observe it. What shape is it? How big, where exactly is it sitting, and is it smooth or bumpy or sharp or misty? The idea is that the more strongly you can visualise the pain, the more distance you can create from it. It’s still there, just as loud and ugly, but it can exist alongside you, you aren’t consumed by it.
Grief is pain, and so I observed it, and I saw that there are things you can prepare for – anniversaries, specific places or things – and also times where it just swamps you without warning.
About a year later I was trying to describe this on a random forum to someone who’d lost a parent at around the same time, but seemed a little stuck in their grieving and I had the idea to describe it as being both a particle and a wave (because it feels as elemental as light), and that while you can’t do anything about the waves, you can wear the particles down by deliberately engaging with them. And something went ‘ping’ and I worked the text up and started finding images that explained what I meant.
It was sweet and sad to work on, going back into memory to find the things that most said ‘Dad’ for me.
For example, the girl/woman wears a certain shade of green because I wrote a book about a girl running away to sea with pirates when I was seven, and Dad ‘published’ it for me (took it into work and used the then-cutting-edge photocopier to make copies I could force on the rest of the family) and I coloured the girl’s dress in green. And my Spotify algorithm has been permanently skewed by reminding myself of all the records he played the most. I shared it on social media and people responded really strongly, which I hadn’t expected at all. I was just grieving my own person, but a lot of people got in touch to tell me about their people, and their losses, and that reading the Little Book had helped them, which is where I run out of words and can only say ‘oof’.
What’s the project you’re currently working on?
It’s a bunch of can’ts. Feel free to misread that 😉
It’s a quilt of tessellated, angry words, coping words, whinging words, self-portraits, typed out side effects for commonly prescribed drugs, and an unwinnable game of snakes and ladders where the ladders are things like ‘a med that works’ and there’s a corresponding snake of ‘ssside effects’.
And the dice only goes up to two. And then I’ve taken some of the pain descriptions I’ve been collecting and scrawled them across the already-completed bits, the way pain stomps over your carefully made plans. It’s going to be tricky to finish, because people keep doing stupid things like promoting ‘ear seeds’ on primetime BBC, and I can’t not add that reference to a panel on woo…
It’s been a lot of fun to be honest, but I really do need to finish it soon.
What’s your view on how, as a society, we handle grief, and how we
might do it better?
I went to a talk on the physical process of dying recently, and how as a culture we’ve stepped away from the deathbed, to the point that we no longer recognise the physical stages of death. For example the ‘death rattle’ – you hear those words and it sounds like a terrible thing, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all, it’s the sound of a body that has passed registering and being discomforted by the small amount of fluid that naturally accumulates in the back of the throat and that we clear without noticing. It’s the sound of someone dying safely. Isn’t that a lovely concept?
And if we don’t recognise death, if we can’t engage with it, we’re not going to deal with grief very well either. Death will come for all of us and for all of our loved ones too, but we live in a culture where people can be made to feel in bad taste for bringing up loss and grief.
So let’s recognise it, and make space for it, and let things take as long as they take.
And maybe exercise societal pressure wherever we can so that employers don’t expect bereaved parents back at work after two days. For example.
I’m so grateful to you for introducing me to sweary crafts. I’ve found it to be very therapeutic. When did you start and why do you think swearing helps so much?
I was having a bad day so I embroidered ‘Everything is shit and it keeps getting worse’ on some black fabric, then added a stylised floral motif to make it look pretty. Cheered me right up, especially when a letter carver friend offered to swap me one of his marble “Arse”s for it.
Since then there’ve been regular outbursts, which tend to find homes with people who need them. My work tends to be narrative – the sweary ones are the shortest stories.
Why do I think it helps?
Well, there have been a few studies that show that swearing increases your pain tolerance – fuck yeah.
If you could say one thing to a grieving person, what would it be?
Be kind to yourself, it sucks.