A TRIBUTE TO MY CUSTOMER JEAN ANGELL

I first noticed Jean’s name popping up on shawl orders to her Central Park West address a decade ago — she ordered shawls from every collection, frequently emailing me personal notes along the way. Her friend Peg, who lived across the park, also ordered shawls regularly. They bought my shawls as gifts for each other!

After several email exchanges, I found out Jean had ALS. She bought my shawls to cover up her tubes. She was on a ventilator by then, a quadriplegic, able to communicate using a few facial muscles. She spoke through a computer. She had always loved the opera, the ballet, museums, concerts, and her family and friends incredibly kept up these outings despite her illness.

But the illness was devastating for her and her family. ALS is all about loss, and there is no cure. “I would have loved to still be able to walk and laugh and hug my family, but I could not,” she wrote in 2009. “What could I do? I could still protect and make a life for my husband. I could nurture and support my children; I could lavish attention on my friends; I could read and go to movies, theater, concerts, and museums.”

Jean beside her Westie and 6 grandchildren.

Jean had been a lawyer prior to her disease, and was one of a handful of women to graduate from Harvard Law School at that time. She was also a busy mother of three, and was in the prime of her life when she received her diagnosis at age 53. She was told she only had a few years left — the typical prognosis is two to five years — but she lived over twenty more years, accepting each phase and trying not to dwell on each loss.

“The loss of physical independence is very hard to get used to - never having any privacy and having to ask for everything isn’t very nice. You resist each stage of physical loss, and there is a terrible sadness when you inevitably lose. Some stages were harder than others. I hated losing the ability to speak, to eat and drink, to hold a book and turn the pages, to go out alone. But that is a long time ago now. There aren’t any benchmarks now, and life is very much the same.”

Jean eventually moved full-time to her home by the ocean in Maine, where she passed away in 2021 at age 76.

Soon after Jean died, her daughter Elizabeth told me about a book that photographer Ellen Warner had made called The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty. Jean is featured in the book in her own words (the excerpts above are from this book). I found out much more about her after her death and wish I had known her in life. Her story and life have been very inspirational to me, and I have been very moved how much support and love she received from her husband, children, grandchildren, and devoted friends.

I wanted to honour Jean in some way, and decided to design a shawl in her honour. Central Park was a big part of her life — that seemed the most natural thing to paint, including her favourite landmarks, her favourite flowers, her dog, and her grandchildren. I think she would have enjoyed that, and I hope it expresses the honour I feel that she chose to wear my pieces as she lived her extraordinary life.

Jean Angell