THE AIDS MEMORIAL Quilt was conceived of and started by the activist Cleve Jones. In 1985, Jones organized a march in San Francisco. He and his fellow protestors taped signs with the names of AIDS victims all over the San Francisco Federal Building. Jones thought it looked like a quilt and was inspired to start a movement where families and loved ones could make panels to honor the names of the dead. The panels were the dimensions of graves. Soon enough, panel by panel, it would amass into a Technicolor memorial quilt, big enough to cover the whole country—or at least the National Mall in Washington, D.C. At that time, because of fear, shame, and ignorance, the people who died of AIDS-related causes often didn’t receive funerals or burials.
To me and my teenage friends growing up in New York City, there was nothing more terrifying than the AIDS epidemic. It was mysterious, dangerous, shrouded in secrecy, terrifically sad, and connected to the two things we all hoped for: intimacy and love. There isn’t anything cozy about AIDS, but this audacious and powerful quilt that was growing and being displayed all over the world was comforting. People came together around that quilt. The squares that hundreds of husbands, mothers, sisters, lovers, and friends sewed, patchworked, appliquéd, collaged, and wove together are love letters and badges of courage. The quilt now weighs fifty-four tons and is the largest piece of folk art in America.
My friend Sarah is a quilter. When we were at RISD together, Sarah, with her short raven hair, was sort of like a punk-rock Betty Friedan. She spoke frankly, had a boyfriend with his own car (where I first heard Guns N’ Roses), wore dark cherry-red lipstick that highlighted her big smile, and was the first graphic designer I ever met. I didn’t know she could quilt. We might have been too young. Years later, there was evidence on her Instagram that quilts are a big part of her life. I went to Brooklyn to find out more.
“Quilts are sandwiches, basically.” See, sandwiches—right off the bat we’re deep in cozy talk. “What you are doing is sewing three layers together.” She pulled at an unfinished quilt, showing me the batting and the supple cotton that was on either side of it. There was no narrative I knew of about that quilt, so the coziness was coming only from the touch of the soft fabrics, the organization of pattern, and the thread and needles. Sarah wanted to show me how the three pieces are sewn together because that’s what makes a quilt a quilt, and why they have such a satisfying weight to them. She opened the door to her sewing closet and pulled out another quilt in progress. This closet, you have never—Betsy Ross herself would want to jump into it and roll around. On the back of the door must have been four hundred spools of thread on rows of pegs—a rainbow. Sarah’s twelve-year-old twins, Kate and Abby, artists and sewers in their own right, sensed my awe of their closet and looked at me like, Right?
Sarah led me into her bedroom with the twins following behind like ducklings. In the corner of the sunlit room is a chair where the quilts live. They are folded and in a pile that reminded me of crepes.
“I started quilting when my father was dying,” Sarah said, eyeing the heap as one looks for a favorite novel on a shelf, and pulled out a blanket. “He was in Massachusetts. I spent a lot of time in that house during that fall. One day, I picked up a book that was written in the eighteen hundreds about quilting, and read it. He was getting chemo, and I was sitting with him feeling . . . utzy . . . and needed something to do, so I started sewing. Over the next six months, I made a quilt and gave it to my father. He slept with it, and then he died with it.”
She unfolded the soft, historic quilt over the one that she and her husband had slept under the night before, and smoothed her hand across it. “I never understood why people put quilts on walls. I’ve made something to provide warmth—why not use it for what it’s made for?” After we admired it, Sarah pulled the quilt to her chest, held it there for a moment, and then started to fold it back up.
“After he died, I took a sabbatical to quilt.” She flopped the final fold of her father’s quilt so it looked like a square, put it on the top of the pile, then selected and pulled another quilt from the stack. (I gotta tell you, the ritual of folding and unfolding feels ceremonial.) “I sewed everything by hand at first—for a while, actually—before I started using a machine.” She unfolds the quilt in her hand, lifts it with the help of her girls, and thumps it on her bed. I imagine, for Sarah’s girls, the sound of quilt hitting quilt will always remind them of their mother.
“This was the next one I made. This was part of my grieving process.” The quilt looks like the sea when there are clouds overhead. So many different colors of blues, bluey grays, patterns, textures, and underneath it all, invisible, but as obvious as the stitching, the tremendous story of father and daughter.
“The patches are all of my dad’s suits and shirts.” She looked at the quilt as if she were looking at him, and her girls looked at her, quietly knowing their mother was with her dad. She sighed, turned around, and went back to the pile cheerfully. “Each one of these has an important story—that’s the thing with quilts.” She looks for another example. “See—this is my pregnant quilt; this is the Sunday quilt.” She pauses with her finger on top of the Sunday quilt. “Part of what is cozy about quilts is that you can take something you love, like a pair of blue jeans, and give it a new life. And here’s the thing: in two hundred years, these might be all that’s left of me.” She yanks one of the corners and lifts it. “I sign each one.” She smiles and tugs out another and is about to say something. “There are some . . .” But then she interrupts her reflections. “Oh, I wish everyone had a hobby that feels this cozy.”