When Skip’s wife Marie passed away in their 50th year of marriage, he lost someone he thought the world of. Now, he volunteers in her memory at the same place she volunteered, the Wishing Well Gift Shop in the Kettering Health Hamilton on Eaton Avenue.
Marie used to come home and tell Skip about all the people she met and what they talked about, but now Skip is in her shoes. If you ask him what she would say about it, he would put it simply.
“‘It’s about time,’” Skip said.
Skip said he sees people on “the best day of their lives and the worst,” but he said the interactions go both ways.
“This has been one of the joys of my life,” Skip said. “I have met some wonderful people. I helped people and people come in and help me.”
When he gets ready to clock in, he makes sure to keep a piece of Marie with him. As part of his name tag, Skip uses a holder from Marie’s badge.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
Her whole name badge is sitting unchanged on the dresser at their home, like many other things of hers.
“If it’s hers, I don’t get rid of it,” Skip said.
Skip’s time at the gift shop is spent surrounded by bears and cards that say “Enjoy the little things” and emphasize loving family, but the thing that reminds him of Marie the most is the way the gift shop is laid out.
Nancy, another volunteer at the gift shop, meticulously places gifts and cards around the shop in a way only she can explain. When Skip sees this, he can only think of how Marie used to decorate their house. A house that Skip said was nothing short of a home for them to enjoy their lives in.
Even though Skip loves the home Marie crafted for the two of them, he doesn’t miss work for anything short of a life-changing surgery.
When Skip had heart surgery, he missed seven weeks at the gift shop. Those are the only weeks he’s missed in his whole time volunteering.
Skip said what brings him back is not just the people but the impact volunteering has.
“The profits we make go toward buying life-saving equipment for the hospital,” he said. “How’s that? I mean, that’s as good as it’s gonna get.”
Skip said his next goal is to volunteer enough hours to display on his name badge. The threshold is 4,000 hours.
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