Photography courtesy Karen Stiltner
Londons Legacy delivery.
Photography courtesy Karen Stiltner
Karen Stiltner center.
Karen Stiltner and her family suffered not one, but two terrible tragedies within a year. Stiltner’s three-month-old granddaughter, London, died January 25 in 2016 from Respiratory Syncytial Virus, a rare type of viral infection.
During that hospital stay, Stiltner’s daughter, Amy, was given a blanket from the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital. By coincidence, it happened to be made by the South River field hockey team—the same program she played for in high school.
“It was kind of a unique thing,” Stilter says of the pink blanket with dots on it. “Everyone loved it and when London passed, they wrapped her in it. They told us at the hospital, ‘You will take it home, and have her smell.’ It meant a whole lot to Amy.”
That blanket inspired Stiltner and Amy to start the nonprofit, London’s Legacy. It helped them with the grieving process. They started out by making blankets and soon thereafter Stiltner came up with the idea of putting together toiletry bags for families staying at the hospitals.
They gave the items in bunches to three pediatric hospitals, including the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital in Baltimore, Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, and Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie, where families had children in the intensive care unit and wanted to stay with them for prolonged periods of time.
Tragically, just as they were getting the nonprofit started, Amy died of a heart attack on January 15, 2017—just 10 days shy of her daughter’s death. “She died of a broken heart we say,” says Stiltner, co-founder and executive director of London’s Legacy. “But she did make a few blankets before she died.”
After her daughter’s passing, Stiltner, a Pasadena resident, had all the more reason to keep the foundation going. Making the blankets was so vital to Stiltner and the memory of her daughter and granddaughter that the 64-year-old threw all her energy into the project almost immediately after the second of her two staggering loses.
“We actually did have a blanket-making party the next day,” Stiltner says, referring to the day after Amy’s funeral.
London’s Legacy has donated more than 1,000 blankets and about 600 toiletry bags since 2017. A friend and next-door neighbor, Colleen Hylton, got caught up in the spirit of the organization’s launch from the outset. She serves as a board member.
“We know what these people with babies in the hospital endure and are going through,” Hylton says. “If we can do something that can make a difference, then we are going to do it.”
Hylton calls Stiltner a role model, inspiration, and somebody who is always there to help comfort the families of sick children or anyone in need.
“Karen is just an amazing, amazing woman,” Hylton explains. “What happened on the 15th of January (Amy’s death)…she just wasn’t going to let London’s Legacy go. She lost her grandbaby and she lost her daughter and she said, ‘I will do it.’ You can call it a mission.”
Before creating London’s Legacy, Stiltner spent years doing volunteer work with several organizations, including Catholic Charites, Big Sisters, Little Sisters of The Greater Chesapeake, and a charity race to raise money for the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, among other things. It comes as no surprise then that the Maryland Banker’s Association honored Stiltner’s charity work with a Lifetime Achievement Award. She worked 45 years for M&T Bank and retired in 2020 as vice president senior relationship manager.
“I tried to do most things with kids,” Stiltner says. “I loved working with children. Out of my 45 years at the bank, I probably did it [volunteering] for 30 years.”
Learn more about the charity at londonslegacy.org.
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