As featured in
Stitches of Kindness & Comfort
by Flo Johnston | Photography by Katherine Clark
M
oving and changing one’s lifestyle can be a recipe for extreme stress. Such was the situation for Cathy Goodman last summer when she and her husband, Ralph, moved from Richmond, Virginia, to Scotia Village, a retirement community in Laurinburg.
However, it took only a short time for this plucky lady to find a solution to her flagging spirits-a new niche for herself as a volunteer at Scotland Memorial Hospital. “Volunteering has helped me make a connection to my new community,” she says. Goodman knits tiny clothing for infants that is given to mothers who lose babies long before full-term. This kind of death in the medical world is called “fetal demise,” but Goodman contends these words are too cold and abstract for the death of tiny human beings. “These are babies,” she says with the passion that fuels her volunteer work. A retired elementary teacher, Goodman, for six years, belonged to “From the Heart,” a group of women in Richmond who knit and crochet for charity. “We had about 1,200 volunteers all over Virginia, some as individuals and some in groups of 25 to 30 in cities like Williamsburg, Lynchburg, Roanoke and Richmond, and now we have one in North Carolina,” she says, smiling. CONTINUED PAGE 34
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OutreachNC.com | APRIL 2017