Be a donor

Quilter Bill Stearman offers discount to would-be donors

Bill Stearman has been given the gift of life. In January 2021 he was diagnosed with liver cancer and was told because of his age he would not get on a transplant waiting list. He was given two, possibly as many as five, years to live. His doctor, however, said he was in otherwise excellent health and determined he met the criteria for a liver transplant. For five weeks Bill thought he had just a short time left to live, and now there was a ray of hope. That ray soon turned into a bright light. Unknown to Bill, his daughter filled in an application to be a donor, and it turned out they were a perfect match. At first Bill hesitated, thinking that as a parent he wouldn’t want to place his daughter’s life in jeopardy with the major surgery that would be required. But in July of 2021, he received two-thirds of his daughter’s liver during surgery that lasted over 10 hours. A few months later, his daughter’s liver had regrown to full size and she has now returned to running half-marathons. Bill ruefully says that he himself hasn’t run any halfmarathons— not that he had done any before the transplant, he adds. He loves to tell the story of his transplant. “My story is pretty cool. There aren’t too many dads walking around saying ‘I’m alive because I have a hunk of my daughter inside me.’ That’s pretty amazing. And to go from a life expectancy of two years to a life expectancy of 20 years is amazing. You don’t get a gift like that without some responsibility. I’ve got these years and I can’t waste them. I have to accomplish something. There’s something great I haven’t done yet, and it would be a waste if I just sat around and did nothing. I’m not sure what it is great that I’m going to accomplish yet, but look out, because I will.”

It does seem that hospital beds have been major turning points in Bill’s life in the past decade. Eight years ago he discovered that focusing on quilting— something he had not done before—eased the pain following an operation. Since then he has made close to three hundred quilts and has won several awards for his pieces. These are not just ordinary quilts. “It’s a way to tell my story. The joy for me of quilting is I can say things. I can talk about things the people don’t normally get to talk about, but people accept it in a quilt, because it’s soft and it’s gentle.” Last year, for Canada Day he could not in good conscience display a Canadian flag, following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a Kamloops residential school. Instead he made a quilt incorporating 215 pieces of orange fabric and including part of the text from the United Nations definition of genocide. “If I stood up and started talking about racism, I wouldn’t get away with it. But when I do it with a quilt, I can.” Recently, he has been making gender-neutral baby quilts. He was prompted to do this after seeing innumerable videos of gender reveal parties. “It drives me crazy. They have a party because a picture tells them what the bits are on a baby, and gender is so much more than bits. I have many, many friends who identify themselves as alternate genders than the one they were assigned at birth,” he says. “I grew up with expectations placed on me and stereotypes I was supposed to meet, just because I was a boy—I was born with boy bits. And I didn’t meet those [expectations] and I had to have therapy. And I thought if we can have a generation of kids that don’t need therapy, by just not placing the expectations on them. Just because you’re a boy doesn’t mean you like trucks, and just because you’re a girl doesn’t mean you like princesses and ponies.”

Bill has a stand at the Wellington Farmers’ Market where he has his gender-neutral quilts for sale. His main purpose, though, is not so much to sell his quilts as to engage in a conversation with marketgoers, something that he finds very satisfying. For the month of June, he decided to link his story of quilting to his transplant story by offering a $50 discount to anyone who has signed their organ donor card. “It’s my birthday month and it’s Pride Month—and I get a whole month for my birthday because at my age it takes that long to celebrate appropriately— so I decided I would like to offer a discount on my quilts for the month.” He says it is mainly for awareness to get people to sign their donor cards. “Only 35 per cent of Ontarians are organ donors, so I thought some awareness is a good thing.” Bill’s $50 discount applies to the genderneutral baby quilts he has at the market, but he will also offer the same discount to the quilts in his studio. To see Bill’s work, please visit billstearman.com or on Instagram at bill_stearman.