St. Elizabeth's: the needlepoint doily

The theme's material emblem, handmade at real cost. Charlotte Treat — her T-cell count falling, half-blind from a Virus-related eye infection — is needlepointing Gately an AA-platitude, and she even scruples the platitude with a qualifier, "ASSUMING THAT'S GOD'S WILL," that makes it more earnest rather than less. The doily is a trite phrase rendered as an object of labor and love: the maximally eye-roll-inviting register (recovery-cliché cross-stitch) chosen as the vehicle for genuine care, its very banality the proof of sincerity rather than its defeat. Like Gately's unsayable version of the same cliché, and like 164's thrown-away cake, it is an act of love conducted in the plainest, most mockable idiom available — and meant, all the way down.