“What are you working on?” I asked, trying to break the ice with my new patient. She was sitting quietly in the clinic’s tiny office, her hands, never still, knitting something. Baby clothes, it looked like. A new grandchild?
“I do this for Mount Sinai maternity’s department, you know, for stillborns. No one thinks of them, poor things. So I knit for them — hats, booties, a little jacket,” sadness in her voice. She knew the pain of lost children.
Her words stirred a deep memory in me and my eyes filled. For a moment there was no difference between the doctor and the patient; we were united in our sadness and humanity. Mrs. S. could have been doing a hundred other things. Instead she was knitting, donating her time and energy. Her wool. Donating herself, in itself a great gift. The clothes were blue.
“For a boy,” she said needlessly, working away (and not just knitting I learned, but in other ways, a Catholic homeless shelter, for example.) The gift of a volunteer.
She wasn’t alone. Volunteer Canada says that 12 or more millions of Canadians donate their time and talents each year; and that over half of all Canadians 15 and over have volunteered at some point in their lives — nearly six out of 10 Canadians. If Canadians volunteer an average of 154 hours per year, that’s 2 billion hours in total. Even if my math is shaky, that’s a lot of hours. It’s also an underestimate.
Rather like Marley’s ghost-figure in “A Christmas Carol,” let me take you to a different scene, 20 years later, this time in the middle of winter, outside Welcome Inn in Hamilton. It’s Thursday morning, a half dozen people are lined up for food parcels, socially distanced and masked, while inside an equal number of people attend to their needs — sorting food, making up hampers, taking inquires, organizing call schedules. Welcome Inn’s director of volunteers says it’s this donated effort — the unpaid work of volunteerism (at least unpaid in the usual sense), part of those 2 billion hours — that makes it all happen. And they’re not alone, those volunteers and staff members: all across Hamilton those scenes are repeated every day — at Mission Services, at Salvation Army Centers, in Good Shepherd settings — and across Canada, across the world.
They say we’re at war, and when you look at the nightly news you’d swear that was the case — hundreds of souls lost every night; pronouncements from leaders almost daily; strange restrictions and shortages; pleas to stay the course; statements like, “this will be over soon.” Except that this war is fought not in some strange place with an exotic name, not fought just by young men.
No, this war is fought here, a war in which the virus is the enemy, in which our traditional allies and our enemies suffer as we do. This war has its armies, too: the most visible, the incredible health-care workforce, as brave as the first responders at 9/11, entering the field daily, putting themselves at risk. The front-line grocery and other workers. The teachers.
Some might ask, “Where are the battlefields?”
I’ll answer the question with another visit: come with me to a different kind of battlefield — hospital emergency departments and ICUs, nursing homes. There, COVID-deaths in Canada, though horrible and in the thousands, pale in comparison to those in the United States, where the losses, just south of 300,000, promise to escalate dramatically over the coming weeks as the holidays hit, and before the vaccinations are widespread. That number, some experts claim, will double. Ironically, tragically, that’s roughly the same as those who died in the American Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, the war whose effects ripple in America even today. A war in which the brave Army of the Potomac — one of many armies, North and South — protected northern Virginia and Washington.We have our own army today, the Army of the Pandemic — our neighbours and friends, sons and daughters, fathers, wives. Emergency room and ICU staff, nurses, respiratory techs, doctors; together, the bravest of the brave (if you’re looking for heroes, look no farther). Plus of course the front-line workers, many others. Buried inside those numbers, often forgotten, is the volunteer, on whose work, like trust in a marriage, we depend.
There is another lesson here. My Welcome Inn colleague said, “Many of our volunteers are also our program participants; we’re a community; we’re all in this together.” The words “community” and “together” seem just right.
Ironically, they were also the lessons of Mrs. S., knitting for stillborns and stirring my memory many years before: our shared humanity and fate. They are the lessons of a pandemic. The lessons of a volunteer.