Quilt

By Lexington Rivera

While doing research for a class, I found the National AIDS Memorial website. Along with it, an interactive image of the memorial quilt for people who died from AIDS. Each piece, representing a person in a six foot by three foot rectangle, roughly the size of a human grave. It stands as the oldest, and biggest ongoing art project in the world, as it is still being added to. There are over 100,000 names sewn in. Some individual people, some families, some entire towns or groups. No panel is the same. I spent almost two hours in horrified silence, sifting through thousands of names overcome with a feeling of great grief and also great wonder. Human beings are a special kind of animal. Their deaths, remembered by each stitch into the quilt, will have lived longer since its creation than some of the people it memorializes. I think this is the key to becoming friends with death. Understanding that when you are gone, whatever you leave behind will live longer than you ever will. The people you love, the things you say, the writings on the wall, are all extensions of you. What a wonderful way to say, I loved this person. I don’t have many words to explain how I feel so instead I will just show some panels from the quilt. If you’ve never seen it, I urge you to use the link at the end of this post. We must never forget the names stitched into this quilt, it’s our burden and gift as those who live on to remember the past.

Here are a few of the panels that I found.