A Loving Wife, a Closet Filled with Fabric, a Gift from Heaven

The Latest from Marquette, MI by Brian Cabell

SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-old Al Hendra met his future wife, Marge, decades ago when they were kids in Ishpeming. They actually became a couple in junior high school.

“Number one, she was beautiful,” he explains. “She had an outgoing personality. She was just captivating.”

It didn’t take long for them to tie the knot. Their marriage lasted 55 years as he carved out a career for himself in hospital administration and she worked as a substitute teacher while raising their two children and also indulging her passion for sewing and quilting.

“She was my support,” Al says. “She was always there when I needed her.”

In the early days, when money was especially tight for the Hendras, she baked cakes for sale to help them get by. But even when life was a struggle, she was never at a loss for a smile, for kind words, for an upbeat, positive attitude. Everybody loved her, Al tells you.

But then, more than a decade ago, Alzheimers launched its cruel siege on Marge—slowly, month-by-month, stealing fragments of her sharp mind and her engaging personality. After a while, it became too much for Al; Marge needed daily professional care. She moved to a nursing home where, despite her decline, she wore a smile most of the time, and loved to hum and sing. Her personality shone brightly even as death, inexorably, approached.

That came three-and-a-half years ago just after the start of the Covid pandemic, when Al was able to visit her only when he was fully outfitted and masked in protective gear. It wasn’t the way he wanted to see his bride of 55 years but he had no choice.

Marge died on May 20th, 2020.

“You’re never prepared for it,” Al says. “I was lost for a long time.”

But slowly, steadily, he managed to forge his way ahead without his mate. He devoted his life to service with the YMCA, Lake Superior Hospice, Child and Family Services, and Veterans Affairs.

The Hendras had moved from Ishpeming to Marquette several years before, and now, after Marge’s death, he was left with the task of clearing some of her possessions from their house. Many of them, he knew, could be useful to other people.

“We had a room in our house where I wasn’t allowed to enter,” he says. “It was her sewing and quilting room, and there was a closet in there that was filled, floor-to-ceiling, with fabric and quilting projects she was never able to complete.” He didn’t know what to do with the materials, and frankly, he had never really looked at them. Quilting was Marge’s thing, not his.

Six months after Marge’s passing, Al mentioned the bounty of fabrics and uncompleted quilts to a couple of women at the YMCA who said they’d love to look at the materials and possibly give them to a quilting group in Negaunee. And subsequently, the women took most of them, and thanked Al for his donation.

“We both had piles of fabric,” Mary Jo Thompson, one of the women, explains. “We wanted to pay him for it, but he said, absolutely not. We were thrilled.”

Al, in return, was gratified that his wife’s fabrics and partly completed quilts were finally out of the dusty closet and being put to good use.

Three years passed. He never heard about the materials again. He nearly forgot about them.

As it turned out, with the Covid shutdown and the widespread anxiety over gathering in groups, the women never got the materials to the quilting group. Mary Jo, who also experienced her own personal losses at this time, simply left the fabrics, unused, in her sewing room.

Finally, though, she decided to take a look at the random pile of materials and uncompleted quilts. A few pieces immediately caught her eye. “They looked like they fitted together,” she says. “There was pattern there that Marge had almost completed. It was just a matter of knitting all the pieces together. I knew I had to finish it up and get it back to Al.”

She went to work. “It’s strange,” she says, “but every time I worked on it, I felt so calm.”

Last Wednesday, her job completed, Mary Jo telephoned Al. “I have something I think you’d like to have,” she told him. “It’s a quilt.”

Al’s response, after three years— “I didn’t know what she was talking about or why I’d want it, but I went over to her house to take a look.”

When he got there, Mary Jo showed him a quilt that she said had been 90% finished by Marge, and now it had finally been completed. He didn’t take a full look at it but he could see that it was a Christmas quilt. It was perfect for the season, a nice remembrance of his wife. He thanked Mary Jo for her kind gesture, and he headed home with the quilt.

When he arrived, he unrolled the quilt and began to take a good long look at this piece of art that his wife had started several years ago but never quite completed. It was beautiful.

But his eyes were drawn to two distinct blocks of embroidery in the center of the quilt.

In one of them were written the words: Al, you are my number one Christmas gift. I love you lots Marge

And in the other were the words: All day, all night, may the angels guard you, my love

“I broke down,” Al tells you with a quiver in his voice. “Even now, when I look at the words, I get tears in my eyes…”

He composes himself for his final thought, as warm memories of his departed wife wash over him.

“It was my Christmas gift from heaven.”

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