Life with Gracie: Chaplain providing hope one stitch at a time

Away from the antiseptic environment of intravenous tubes, monitors and medication that make a hospital a place of healing, Julie Hliboki peeled through a pile of colorful quilts in the middle of her kitchen table.

“At first I thought I would just make quilts and bring them to CHOA for the children, then I realized something bigger was happening,” Hliboki said.

When she finally comes to a bright blue square with trains and bumblebees, the 55-year-old Atlanta chaplain lets go the tale that has been fueling both the quilts and her work providing a ministry of presence and spiritual care to patients and their families confronting illness and sometimes death.

It all began, she said, in the winter of 2014 when she heard God speak to her in a dream.

“I’m calling you home to Egleston,” the voice spoke.

Since Hliboki had recently moved to Atlanta, her only reference for Egleston was a neighborhood street lined with large oak and maple trees back home in Kalamazoo.

“I thought I was being called back to Michigan,” she said.

But when she shared her dream with a friend and anesthesiologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Hliboki learned Egleston is a branch of CHOA.

That was more than two years ago. Today, Hliboki, a former Catholic turned Quaker, is in the final unit of a pediatric residency chaplaincy program at the hospital.

As so many things had happened in her life, she had a nudging in the summer of 2015 to teach herself how to quilt and headed over to Intown Quilters. How do I start, she wanted to know.

“I made a quilt for myself, and when I finished, I realized I was to do more,” Hliboki said.

The more turned out to be the quilts made in honor of the babies and families she had met and, hopefully, share them with others, perhaps even in a gallery one day.

The pile on her kitchen table, 14 in all, included one for a 5-day-old boy she liked to call Choo Choo Charlie.

Charlie, not his real name, was born with the left side of his heart underdeveloped and was awaiting surgery. As she had done many times before, Hliboki prayed for him and his family, who lived hours away from Atlanta.

“I prayed with him, over him every day,” Hliboki said.

Weeks later, Choo Choo Charlie passed away surrounded only by hospital nurses and Hliboki. Neither his mother, who was home tending to his young siblings, nor his father could be there.

The first quilt Hliboki made was in memory of Charlie, a bright blue and yellow patch of cartoon trains and bees’ wings to indicate Charlie’s flight to heaven.

Just as she had helped guide Charlie home, his memory had helped guide her hands in choosing the fabric and design of the quilt sewn to honor him.

“After the quilt was created in September 2015, a story about Choo Choo emerged and so I wrote that story,” Hliboki said.

She then realized that the medical conditions of the children she met were just the tip of the iceberg, that the quilts were also about the socio-economic conditions and challenges their families faced.

“That became the larger purpose,” Hliboki said. “To create these quilts, tell the stories and exhibit them to a larger audience for people to understand that in addition to often catastrophic illness, these families have to deal with so much, and they do it with courage and dignity. Each quilt honors hundreds of children and families facing these same conditions.”

Like so many parents, Charlie’s father had to choose between being with his son and losing his job. And his mother could either care for Charlie’s siblings or leave them home alone to be with him.

“It was a sad situation, and not uncommon,” Hliboki said.

There were other children whose stories weighed on her, too. Like Chunky Buddy, the little boy who was HIV-positive, and Tabatha, the baby born with a partial brain, and the teen who committed suicide.

Each case is heart-wrenching, some are tragic, some are utterly unfair. In each, Hliboki rediscovered her capacity to understand, to feel compassion and inspire hope.

Given a different mix of circumstances, Hliboki knows she could be any one of these parents, intimate strangers she calls them. And knowing that, she said, has made her more kind, more tolerant, more patient and more compassionate.

Increasingly, hospitals are recognizing that there are both spiritual and physical benefits to having chaplains on the health care team. They do not preach and pray as much as they listen. Occasionally, they are called to bear witness like Hliboki.

“I love this work,” she said. “It is in my bones. It is my expression of the sacred to do this work, and I do it filled with the Holy Spirit.”

And hope.