Knitting: Joan’s Sweater
I just finished making a sweater, but it is not my project; it’s Joan’s. I met Joan some months back, coming to her home once a week to do some housecleaning for her. We chatted while I cleaned, which was really why I was there; I am a hospice volunteer. I admired the beautiful quilts she had hanging on her walls that she had made, conversation turned to crafts, and it turned out she was also a knitter, as am I. She asked me to take an almost-finished sweater to complete. Joan knew this was a project she wasn’t going to finish.
I have been a hospice volunteer for several years and have found it to be one of the most richly rewarding parts of my life. I share this not to be self-aggrandizing; in fact, I have ambivalent feelings about writing about this here. The impulse is not for any external recognition but because I feel a deep personal motivation to do it. You will hear people who volunteer say that they get so much more out of it than they give, and that feels completely true for me. It often feels even selfish to volunteer, the return to me is so great.
The tangible individual benefits for volunteering have been well documented—connecting you to others, increasing feelings of empathy and kindness, providing an increased sense of purpose in life, reducing feelings of stress, anger, and anxiety—the list goes on and on. Researchers at the London School of Economics examining the relationship between volunteering and measures of happiness in a large group of American adults found the more people volunteered, the happier they were, according to a study in Social Science and Medicine. Compared with people who never volunteered, those who felt they were “very happy” rose 7% among those who volunteer monthly and 12% for people who volunteer every two to four weeks. Among weekly volunteers, 16% felt very happy—a hike in happiness comparable to having an income of $75,000–$100,000 versus $20,000, the research says.
Having the opportunity to cross paths with new people, often with significantly different life experiences from you, can only strengthen feelings of community and connectedness, and making it easier to relate to rather than reject others who may be quite different from you. It is true that I have found many more things in common with the people I have visited than differences, and we will all go down that road they are traveling now. I have heard time again that they can’t quite believe that a stranger would volunteer to help them; I am amazed and humbled that people welcome a stranger into their lives when they are vulnerable and frightened. It reminds us of our common humanity, that there are many people who will help, who are kind; we need a little more of that in this world, and it costs us nothing to be kind.
As a hospice volunteer, we sometimes respond to very specific requests and Joan’s was for some help with housecleaning. Her husband was busy with caregiving and his own business concerns, and cleaning fell to the bottom of the list and it bothered her; as someone who feels my mental space out of joint when my physical space is, I could completely understand why this felt important to her. Joan and I chatted as I cleaned, giving her an opportunity to talk to someone who was there to support her but didn’t have emotional skin in the game like her family. She was trying to tie up loose ends and it upset them when she talked about her need to do that. That’s how the sweater was handed over to me.
The next week, Joan fell and was in the hospital the day I was to come again. She died a few days later.
Joan had completed all but the final sleeve of the sweater and had included the buttons and her personalized label in the project bag. It took a little knitting forensics to figure out where she had stopped knitting and what size the sweater was. As I knit and sewed up the sweater, Joan was part of my day, and I thought this is what our own hope would be; that we are remembered after we’re gone.
And so, Joan’s sweater is finished, my work added to hers as her collaborator, bringing this final project of hers to completion. I hope that her husband will find it a home with someone who will treasure having Joan’s handwork wrapped around them and bring her once again into their thoughts as she was in mine with every stitch.
