Diana Henry feels she was born to be a volunteer
Monday mornings usually find Diana Henry at Share the Warmth, a Pointe-St- Charles-based community group working to fight hunger and poverty, preparing hundreds of sandwiches for children who might otherwise not have any lunch. Her specialty is cream cheese wraps.
“I like it because I feel that I am putting love in every sandwich,” she said.
This week, Henry and four friends will prepare Christmas breakfast for the children: Count on her to be sending love through the pancakes, the eggs and the fruit in those hundreds of meals.
Since stepping away from the labour force after many years, Henry, 59, has immersed herself in volunteer work. “I feel almost like this is what I was put in this world to do,” she said. “I feel like I am pouring love back into it.”
Once a week she and Grace, her gentle golden retriever, visit patients at the McGill University Health Centre’s palliative- care unit at the Montreal General Hospital.
On Friday, Henry spent the day on the unit as part of a program in which the patients, who are too ill to shop for themselves, choose Christmas gifts for loved ones — free of charge, and as many as they like. Volunteers then wrap the gifts, which the patients choose from a cart wheeled around the unit’s 15 rooms, and prepare cards to go with them.
The program was established in 1987 by Dolores Nickerson, who worked on the unit as a nurse and a volunteer: As a nurse, she saw the need, she said — and, as a volunteer, she had the time to put the program into place.
A couple of years ago, Henry took over responsibility for gathering the gifts, approaching retailers, manufacturers and others. In late November, she hosted an all- girls cocktail party for friends and asked them to bring gifts for what she called the “last gifts” program in her invitation. “I want people to understand that this is serious,” she said, “and I wanted them to bring meaningful gifts.”
This month, she co- hosted a tea party with her friend Rosemary Niro at Niro’s home to collect shoeboxes, which guests had filled with such items as mitts, soaps and gift cards for women in shelters ( www.shoeboxproject.com). The more than 35 shoeboxes they brought, brightly wrapped, were set temporarily under the Christmas tree.
In October of 2013, Henry spent two weeks in Kerala, India, with Habitat for Humanity, building the foundation for a house. It was the most physically gruelling thing she had ever done, she said, but also the most profoundly rewarding.
Henry was employed for most of her adult life, which included several years as a divorced parent. She did many things, from running the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts boutique to designing kitchen products and working as a designer and buyer of tableware, housewares and giftware — jobs that took her on buying trips to India and the Far East.
Her late mother had been an active volunteer, with the Montreal General and with Camp Amy Molson, so she’d been exposed to it. As a teenager, she was a hospital ‘ candy striper.’ Early in her working life, she shopped for groceries during her lunch hour each week for an older woman living alone and helped her with housework.
Henry married again some years ago and, for several years, she and her husband hosted a holiday party to which guests were asked to bring something for others. One year it was winter coats for Share the Warmth, another it was toothbrushes and toothpaste for young people at Dans la Rue, and another it was items for the palliative- care unit gift carts.
But she knew that it was only once she was no longer working that she’d have the time to devote herself more fully to volunteer work. “Always, in the back of my mind, I wanted to feel like what I was doing was making a difference,” she said.
Danièle Leduc volunteers on the palliative- care unit every Thursday. “It’s unbelievable what it does for the patients,” she said of the Christmas gifts program. “For the moment, they forget about where they are and why they are here. It’s just the moment.”
For her part, Henry said she was overwhelmed by the generosity of her guests and by their eagerness to contribute. Even women who were unable to attend the party dropped off gifts — and several thanked her for having asked them to participate.
“I think it’s part of a collective realization that we need nothing more ourselves this holiday season, and that the true joy is giving and helping,” Henry noted in a thank- you email to guests. “I haven’t felt this good in ages.”
She described the gift day at the hospital on Friday as “awesome. You feel a beautiful little power to make things happen for people. It’s hard to explain.
“But I feel like everyone whose room I have gone into has created a little shift in my life,” she said, “and I have made a little shift in theirs.”