Woman's angel pins healing hearts

By Greg Barrett
Gannett News Service

RICHBORO, Pa. — A contrite killer who admitted to eight rapes and murders and resides in an unpainted concrete cell requested a photocopy of one. Rules on death row wouldn't allow him the real thing.

Patricia Gallagher of Pennsylvania wrote this “Team of Angels” poem about parenting to accompany the angels pin she is marketing.*Patricia Gallagher and her 10-year-old son Ryan read a letter requesting one of her angel pins. Many customers or those asking for a free pin include stories about their lives when they write to her. Gannett News Service

A mother who wrote that her son was very ill and "one day soon will die" got a lump in her throat when she received hers.

Patricia Gallagher never anticipated this kind of response to her gold-plated creation, a trio of inch-tall angels welded into costume jewelry and pinned to her original poems. Of the 50,000 "A Team of Angels" lapel pins and poems made and mailed during the last two years at a personal cost of more than $100,000, Gallagher has given away nearly half.

Never mind that she is a mother of four who is so deep in debt she has packed her suburban Philadelphia home in anticipation of moving to a smaller house.

When you pray every morning at a monastery and sprinkle holy water on poetry that you believe is divinely authored, you give with a joyful heart to people in need. You throw line after line after line to people drowning. You ignore a $48,000 debt and send a pin and poem for free to the woman from Jefferson City, Tenn., who writes,

"Dear Patricia, I truly need that team of angels in a hurry! My husband has Alzheimer's and my patience is about at the end. . . ."

How can you not? Gallagher asks.

But who gives joyfully when Gallagher is in need? These days she is a study in contrasts: overjoyed by her growing attachment to God; overwhelmed by a surge of humanity, and debt.

In her basement are three binder notebooks thick with handwritten letters bearing unfamiliar postmarks and tales of anguish. Meanwhile, Gallagher endures her own personal anguish, even by comparison. And her professional life, well, that wasn't supposed to be a profession.

"This was never intended to be a business," she says, and forces a smile.

Martin Luther, a 16th-century founder of Protestantism, once wrote, "It is not known precisely where angels dwell — whether in the air, the void or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode."

Gallagher, 49, doesn't claim to know, either. She does not believe angels have taken up residence in her popular costume jewelry, although others seem to think so.

But sitting on a radiator in the back of an empty chapel — a place so quiet a whisper resonates like a shout — Gallagher feels a heavenly connection, to angels, to the Virgin Mary, to God, to someone. Even parked outside of the Monastery of Saint Clare in her Ford van, she senses the warmth of something outside herself.

Here she prays daily to her deceased grandmother, grandfather, to her mother-in-law whom she never knew. She prays to Jesus Christ and to the Virgin Mary. Then she writes her poems, still sitting in the van or on the radiator, scribbling on scrap paper, 170 poems and counting.

Her first poem, by far the most popular, is titled "A Team of Angels for the Overwhelmed." At the time she penned it, she was referring to herself:

"I need a team of angels, Lord/

I don't think one will do/

Please send me all the help from High/

For what I am going through . . ."

When a bad fall two years ago crushed the hip and legs and spirit of Gallagher's husband, John, Patricia Gallagher thought things in her life were pretty bad.

Then the mortgage went unpaid and the heat, electricity and groceries were crowded onto the Visa, and she knew things were very bad. John, a financial analyst, had been told by his company that he would be a victim of downsizing. His long-term disability delayed the inevitable, but it didn't cover his full salary or pay all the medical bills.

As the bills mounted, she was at a loss. So she did what any good Catholic would, she says. She prayed and prayed and was eventually inspired to write that first poem. It was part cathartic, part desperate.

"I need a team of angels, Lord/

. . . Guardians to watch over me/

And help my soul to cope/

I'll do the best I can to pray/

And cherish gifts of faith and hope."

Unlikely poet

Gallagher had written books on child-care and home daycare. She had edited a book on self-publishing. She had never attempted poetry. But for reasons she still cannot fathom, she decided to plunge her family thousands of dollars deeper into debt and placed an order for the first 10,000 angel pins and poems.

Patricia Gallagher and her 10-year-old son Ryan read a letter requesting one of her angel pins. Many customers or those asking for a free pin include stories about their lives when they write to her. Gannett News Service

She set them out in a wicker basket on her porch, like candy at Halloween, and invited people to take them by the fistful.

She mailed 5,000 to members of the U.S. military deployed to Kosovo and other places abroad. A simple request accompanied each: "Please keep this pin until you meet someone who needs it more than you do, and then pass it along."

Nowadays, Gallagher asks $4 for each pin-poem combination, which more than covers the cost of the pin ($1.40), the envelope (25 cents), postage (55 cents) and printing (20 cents). But it doesn't include the labor by her and John and their four children, ages 18, 16, 13 and 10.

And she still gives one pin away for about every three sold. You'd never know she has a master's degree in business from Philadelphia's St. Joseph's University.

"Her heart is bigger than her business sense," says Gallagher's mother, Claire Mohan, who, along with Gallagher's father, Bob, has handwritten about 1,500 responses to the letters that pour in.

Charity takes a village

Today, Gallagher's family enterprise has spilled over to her parents' townhouse 30 minutes away in Chalfont, Pa. In the basement, about 100 neatly labeled white trash bags hang from the sewer pipes in a sort of assembly line of pins and poetry.

"It looks like walking ghosts down there," says Claire Mohan, who knows a great deal about personal anguish. Gallagher's younger brother died of leukemia a decade ago, and her father, Claire's husband of 53 years, is battling throat cancer.

Each plastic bag holds hundreds of copies of different poems penned by Gallagher in the van or on the radiator:

"A Team of Angels for Stress." "A Team of Angels for Strength for Caregivers." "A Team of Angels for Single Parents." "A Team of Angels for Hope."

"When I get through writing each one," Gallagher says, "I look at it and say, 'Who wrote this? These aren't my words.' "

Claire Mohan laughs nervously when asked if her daughter should stop giving away so much. "Oh, God, yes," she says. "But that's just who she is."

Charity requires a big-hearted person. A joyful person who can't say no.

To the woman in San Antonio who writes, "My son just died and I'm having a hard time. Please send me a pin."

Of course, she does. How can you not?