92-year-old volunteer’s love wraps around 500 breast cancer patients – and counting

Janet Miller surrounded by her lap robes for cancer patients.

The handmade prayer shawl arrives at just the right moment, when fear feels overwhelming and comfort seems far away. For more than 500 breast cancer patients, that comfort has come from the loving hands of 92-year-old Janet Miller.

Janet learned about this calling while attending an Indiana bluegrass festival, where a chance conversation changed the course of her volunteer work. She regularly crocheted lap robes for U.S. military veterans in local nursing homes and was working on a robe as she listened to the live music that year.

“I saw another lady there crocheting, and we got to talking,” Janet recalls. The woman was making shawls for breast cancer patients, something Janet hadn’t heard about. “She said Memorial Hospital had started a pilot program to see if it was of use for their patients.”

When she got home after the festival, Janet reached out to hospital staff, then promptly got to work making shawls herself. Both her mother and her best friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer, so she understood what the patients were going through.

“I thought that was a little something I could do to help them along the way,” she explains. More than 15 years later, she’s still going strong. “I just kept chugging along.”

Lynn Sobecki, who worked as a nurse for more than 45 years and helped distribute the shawls before retiring from Beacon, stays in touch with Janet and brings her yarn.

“Janet was one of the first volunteers. She kept a three-ring notebook, and every time she made a shawl she’d put in the color and a piece of the yarn,” Lynn says.

Now that she’s completed more than 500 shawls, Janet admits her notebook “is getting pretty big.”

At 92, she might slow down a bit but has no plans to stop.

“My eyesight’s not as good as it was, and my hands get tired,” she says. But notes of thanks from patients have meant the world to her. “They were so from the heart. You can just feel their emotions. Those cards mean so much to me.”

Janet brings a sense of artistry to her work, but the ultimate goal is comfort – both physical and emotional. “I want something cuddly myself, because when you’re feeling so rotten, you need a little love and comfort,” she shares. “It’s my way of giving them a hug.”