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Joye Brown: Handmade quilt reunites Long Island cousins

Joye Brown

June 29, 2008

Rose Pezzanite started making her first quilt one month after her husband, Dom, died of cancer, in 2006. She's made 174 other quilts since then; she has a photo of each one, carefully numbered, in three albums.

This is the story of Quilt No. 67, which started out - as most of Rose's quilts do - as 100 separate 4 1/2-inch squares.

It took Rose, who is 75, about an hour to cut the squares. And then she placed them on her bed, rearranging the red ones and white ones, the purple, the flowered, the light and dark blue ones, until she was satisfied with the design.

Then, she numbered each small square. And, over six hours, she used a sewing machine to attach square one to square two and then on to three and four and five, working her way to 100, before adding batting, backing and a final seam.

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Rose added her name to her work and thought she was done. Little did she know that her handiwork would pull her extended family back together.

One Monday, she carried Quilt No. 67 to her quilting group - an impressively industrious group of friends who fashion quilts for hospitals, foster children, soldiers and others - at the Rainbow senior center in Lindenhurst and handed it to her instructor, Laura Lipski.

Rose knew the quilt would go to someone who needed it. "We never know who they are," she said.

Lipski, it turns out, gave the quilt to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip.

A nurse in the hospital's palliative care unit gave it to a patient, Angie Partenza, who was being treated for cancer.

"I remember walking into the room and seeing the quilt and thinking, 'That's beautiful,'" said Angie's daughter, Josephine Benedetto.

One night, as Josephine and her husband were visiting, their daughters, Jessica and Gina, crawled under the quilt to be close to their 89-year-old grandmother.

Angie died a few hours later.

"They were so kind in the hospital," Josephine said. "They folded up the quilt and gave it to me. I took it home and put it over her chair in my front room.

"It was special," Josephine said, "and I didn't let anybody touch it."

Seven months passed.

One day in April, Josephine was home in Great River when she walked over to the quilt and - for reasons she can't explain to this day - felt an urge to flip over one edge.

"I recognized the handwriting, and then I looked at the name," she said.

Stunned, Josephine rushed to call two cousins, asking them, "Rosie! Could this be Rosie?"

Within a day, one of those cousins, Jacqueline D'Ambrosi, after scouring the telephone listings, put a call in to Lindenhurst:

"Rose?"