Paulette understands that those are exactly the moments when people cannot find the words to ask. So she doesn’t wait to be called. She shows up at the door with food, or flowers, or both, with a hug already on the way, and she gets to work. She cleans, she does the dishes, she tidies up. She fixes you something to eat and she sits down with you while you eat it. She drives you to doctor’s appointments and brings a little care package surprise for the waiting room. She sits beside you when the news comes. She takes careful notes when it all starts getting blurry, so that later, when the shock has settled, you will know what you were told. And if you lose a person, Paulette comes to you. When the worst befalls you, she goes toward you, not away. And when your life shattering news is no longer fresh and others have gone back to their lives, Paulette hasn’t stopped. She is there making sure your hand is held, your belly is fed, and your home is a little brighter because of her visit. It is how she loves. This gift, the ability to sit with grief without flinching, to be useful rather than overwhelmed, has been her calling and her profession. For years, Paulette served as a volunteer in her church’s grief ministry, showing up for families with such warmth and grace that a mortuary’s astute team recruited her. And she has now served families with care and compassion for eighteen years with O’Connor Mortuary, first as a Service Director and now as a member of their Community Outreach team. Her life has service at its center, and it always has. For more than thirty years, she has quietly served community organizations such as Beta Sigma Phi, a national philanthropic sorority, the Food Pantry, Mended Hearts, and Children’s Home Society, supporting people in her community in their most vulnerable seasons. And then there are the dogs…For over twenty years, Paulette and her husband Kent have been Puppy Raisers for Guide Dogs for the Blind, welcoming each one into their home as a small, bumbling, irresistible fur ball, pouring 15 months of patient love into them before sending them off to guide dog school. Kent and Paulette are currently raising their twelfth guide dog. This couple has done the beautiful, bittersweet work of loving a puppy so completely and then 12 times releasing it, with open hands and full hearts, so that it might go on to change someone else’s life. One of those dogs, Gatsby, who was career-changed when he didn’t quite pass the program’s final assessments, was adopted by Kent and Paulette who had been his puppy raisers. Maybe coming home to them was Gatsby’s plan all along. At home in Mission Viejo, Paulette is the warm and generous center of a family who counts themselves lucky for her care. Her husband, her children, her grandchildren, all of them recipients of the overflowing love she gives to everyone. With dogs always at her feet, and almost always on her feet, she is most often found in kitchen, where she is steadfastly cooking and baking something for someone while doing her agile best not to trip on a dog’s chew toy, which is repeatedly and oh so conveniently dropped at her feet. People who live the way Paulette lives rarely think of themselves as remarkable. She says she is simply doing what anyone would do. But what Paulette Greenwald has done, quietly and consistently, across decades and zip codes and seasons of life, is rare. It is the kind of love that people together without ever asking to be noticed. Dorothy noticed. Paulette is Dorothy’s Gift’s first-ever Quiet Champion, and she is a most deserving honoree.