A quilt is a treasure that follows its owner everywhere.
~Quilt Sayings
I used to work for a national Alzheimer’s research program at a university. We wanted to thank the many Alzheimer’s patients who volunteered to participate in our clinical research studies. But how?
As a quilter, I knew that quilts could soothe and calm anyone, from a tiny baby to a homesick college freshman. I suggested to my boss that we give lap-size quilts to the participants. I knew that the patients would appreciate them.
At first, she rejected the idea, saying we couldn’t afford to buy quilts for hundreds of people.
“No, no,” I told her. “Quilters will make and donate them. It won’t cost us anything.”
She looked at me like I was mad. “Why would a person donate a handmade quilt?”
“Because we quilters run out of people. After a while, our families and friends have all the quilts they need. We want to keep making quilts, so we make them for charity,” I explained.
With that she said I could begin the project if our director agreed. He also questioned why a person would make a quilt for a stranger. “What kind of person would do that?” he asked.
“A kind one,” I answered.
Ultimately, he approved the pilot project, though he had little faith it would succeed. I caught him rolling his eyes as I got out of my chair to leave his office.
I reached out to a couple of quilter friends. They agreed to send e-mails to 17,000 quilters telling them about my new project to give quilts to Alzheimer’s research participants. No sooner had the e-mails gone out than offers began coming in from quilters wanting to help. I notified all of our research clinics and let them know that soon we would have quilts for them to give the study participants.
When the first box arrived, I opened it as though it were my birthday. I cooed over the sweet quilts, each handmade, each a testament of the heart.
I began shipping them to our research clinics. One of the first clinics to receive quilts was in Alabama. The study coordinator called me a few days later and told me about an elderly patient who came in to undergo a scan. She put the woman on the metal table, which was cold and hard. She began shivering before the scan started. Denise Ledlow, the study coordinator, ran back to her office and returned with a quilt that we’d sent her. She covered the woman, who stayed warm and comfortable throughout the imaging. Afterward, the woman’s daughters came into the room and helped their mother sit up. All three of them fingered the colorful quilt and asked the study coordinator who it belonged to.
“It belongs to you,” Denise told the elderly mother.
The woman and her daughters didn’t understand. Denise turned over the quilt and showed them a label on the back that dedicated the quilt to the Alzheimer’s patient who received it. The quilter thanked the patient for volunteering for research, for helping to put an end to the disease. Denise told me that the women were stunned and weepy-eyed at the unexpected generosity from someone they would never meet.
After a while, the quilts stopped coming, and I knew I had to find another source. Through a friend, we reached out to AARP, hoping for coverage in one of their publications. When an editor called, we talked about the project, and she advised me to set up a dedicated e-mail address and phone line because we would be inundated with inquiries when the story ran. The short article appeared in one of their publications that went to twenty-five million homes.
E-mails and voicemails began pouring in. We sent out instructions on where to send the quilts. It took a month for three of us to respond to all the inquiries before they began to slow down. By then, dozens of boxes of quilts began arriving at our office, where I stored them on my office shelves. It looked like a quilt shop.
As a quilter, I couldn’t wait to open each box, but it wasn’t just the quilts that intrigued me. In every box, we found a handwritten note or a letter thanking us for giving the quilter an opportunity to make a difference for someone with Alzheimer’s. Many told stories of a loved one lost to the mind-robbing disease; others described how helpless they felt at losing a friend or family member, and how making a quilt for a research participant gave them a chance to give back. It was cathartic.
One woman wrote me a four-page letter filled with anguish and heartache. It took days to read it because of the emotion it brought out every time I opened the envelope. Another letter came from a group of seniors who made the quilt together. They asked us to hurry up and find a treatment as they felt sure they were going to develop the disease next. Reading all the heartfelt letters and cards, I thought that the least I could do was send each one a thank-you note. I began writing back to every quilter. No matter how many quilts a person sent, I sent a handwritten note each time I received a box.
I grew in awe of these quilters, these strangers who gave so generously of themselves. I knew quilters to be good people, but this level of kindness for people they would never know? It was a special sort of kindness, truly one as American as our soil. It defines us as Americans. It’s what we do.
I kept a file of every note and letter I received from these astonishing people. When a new employee began working with me the following year, I handed her the bulging file and suggested she read some of the letters to get a feel for the people who were making the project possible. A short time later, she returned it. Wiping her eyes, she said she couldn’t read any more letters. She dubbed it the “crying file.” And it was a crying file, full of emotion and sorrow, but also hope for a better future.
In mid-2016, I left the university. It was tough to leave my beloved quilt project. On my last day, I checked how many quilts had come in since the project began six years earlier. The number blinked back at me on the screen. I smiled because 3,808 people suffering from a disease that could not be cured were comforted by a simple act of kindness, one stitch at a time.
~Jeffree Wyn Itrich
