ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, June 25, 1996 TAG: 9606250032
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
Today Marty Newell is a 23-year-old Radford University graduate student.
In less than two months, she'll be a newlywed, embarking on both a career and a marriage.
But years from now, you can imagine her telling this story to her own granddaughter - a story that's custom-made for the generations to come.
Picture Marty in 2050. Her beautiful blond hair, by then, will be white. She'll snuggle up with her daughter's daughter, and they'll wrap themselves in her favorite blanket, an old quilt.
Not just any ordinary blanket, she'll say to her, but the embodiment of your great-great-grandmother, Sarah Renick. And of 16 other women who cared for her - in life and in death:
|n n| She was 76 years old when she died in November 1995. I was 23 years old and getting ready to marry your grandpa.
Like you and me, we shared a special bond. I was her only grandchild. My mom said I favored her - she said when we smiled, we were mirror images of one another.
Growing up, I lived just five minutes away from Grandma. We visited every weekend. And every August - from my first day of kindergarten to my first day of graduate school - she took me shopping for school clothes. A snazzy dresser, she believed in carrying yourself with dignity. She believed in putting your best foot forward.
If there's one thing I learned from her, it's faith. Life wasn't easy for Grandma, but she preferred work to complaining. Divorced when my father was 2, she raised him by herself, working her way up at Roanoke's old Jefferson Hospital to the head of the radiology department.
When she contracted her first round of cancer 10 years before she died, her doctor said the disease likely came from too much radiation exposure - back in the 1950s when the technology was still brand new.
She was a selfless person even then, you might say. In her waning years, between cancer episodes, she continued giving of herself. She volunteered at her church, Covenant Presbyterian. She helped put on hot dog parties for patients at the local VA medical center.
She delivered Meals on Wheels when she could have been accepting them - at age 74. And less than a year before she died, she catered to the terminally ill, volunteering for the Good Samaritan Hospice.
When I told Grandma I was getting married, she was more excited than I'd ever seen her. She knew she was getting sick again - the cancer - but she tried to keep it from us.
She also hid the fact that she was piecing together a wedding quilt, the one you're wrapped in right now. She wanted to surprise me, so she hid it in a basket every time I came to visit.
She chose a difficult pattern, called a cathedral window quilt. She liked how it took on the look of stained glass. And between visits to the doctor - and visits from hospice workers who cared for her in the home where she died - she worked on this quilt.
Eventually she got so sick, she had to put it down for good - less than halfway finished.
This troubled my grandmother. She was accustomed to finishing things, of doing things right.
She even prepared her own funeral, leaving behind instructions for the rest of us so we wouldn't be bothered. She left a poem to be read, called ``Do Not Weep or Grieve for Me.'' And she left orders to be buried first, before the service - so it would truly be a celebration of life.
This quilt was the only thing Grandma left unfinished.
Her hospice workers knew how much that troubled her. The day after her funeral, they called to ask if they could finish it themselves.
They did, 16 of them. Meeting once a week for six months. Some of the women didn't even know how to sew; some were pros. Together they hand-stitched the whole thing. It took more than 360 squares, more than 30 yards of fabric.
They talked about my grandmother while they worked, and some of them remembered their own loved ones who'd died.
They presented it to your grandfather and me two months before our wedding. The whole family was there. And as you can imagine, we all cried....
|n n| No doubt Marty's grandmother, Sarah Renick, worried a great deal about how this story would end - whether the quilt would be passed on from one generation to the next, or whether it would die a premature death, tucked away unfinished in a basket in someone's attic.
It won't.
Both the story and quilt will prosper, growing even more precious over time.
Some day decades from now, Marty Newell will hand down the family heirloom to her own granddaughter who's about to walk down the aisle and into the future.
When she does, she'll be passing down a hand-stitched oral history, a quilt full of of love, life and loss - and of hope.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (From left) Pat Freund, hospice volunteer; Sue Moore,by CNBGood Samaritan Hospice president; JoAnn Kling, hospice office
manager; Carolyn Newell, mother of the bride; Marty Newell and Jason
DeBord, who received Sarah Renick's quilt as a wedding gift; Charlie
Newell, father of the bride; Angie Lang, hospice volunteer; and Sue
Parks, hospice nurse. color. DON PETERSEN Staff