Pieces of Their Lives : Local Hands Add to AIDS Quilt

The quilt Suzi Mandell has made for her son David is covered with images of the things he loved: balloons, a kite, sea gulls, rainbows.

“It’s about flying, brightness, color, space and all the warm things,” said Mandell, of Chula Vista.

Those are the things she thinks about when she remembers David, a hemophiliac who died of AIDS in January at age 11.

“It has been a real labor of love for me,” Mandell said of the quilt. “I felt so good in the planning and execution. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. . . . I’ve never done anything in my life that came out as good as I thought it should, but this did.”

Mandell’s quilted tribute to her son is one of more than 4,000 from across the country that are being pieced together into a national memorial for Americans who have died of AIDS.

Beginning next week, the cumulative quilt, the brainchild of the San Francisco-based Names Project, will be displayed on a tour of 20 U.S. cities. It will be shown locally, at the Civic Center’s Golden Hall, April 12 and 13.

Its panels represent the lives of men and women, adults and children. Some are decorated simply with the victim’s name, while other, more elaborate panels bear collages of personal belongings such as caps, T-shirts and jeans.

Herb King, a member of the committee that is organizing the quilt exhibit here, first saw panels of the quilt during a visit to San Francisco last year.

“It was impossible for me to look at them all and not to cry,” he said. “It has the same impact as the memorial wall for the Vietnam dead” in Washington.

Mandell’s husband, David, also spoke of the quilt’s strong emotional impact.

“If anyone can walk up to these quilts and walk away without feeling some kind of caring and compassion, there’s something wrong,” he said.

Skip Godsey, himself an AIDS patient, is making panels for several dozen of the 765 San Diego County residents who have died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. For the past two months, he has been sewing night and day. He works alone and with friends, at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Hillcrest and at his home.

On Tuesday, Godsey was sewing the letters of a friend’s name on his 24th panel and cutting the letters of another friend’s name out of yellow felt for his 25th. He said that although he sees the making of the panels as a positive thing--”a celebration of life”--he has “shed a lot of tears” in the process.

“It’s a way of grieving; it’s a way of dealing with the loss of my friends,” he said.

Each of Godsey’s quilts features something that was special to the person it honors. One, for a friend who loved flowers and often gave them as gifts, has red, yellow and blue tulips. Another is for a friend who loved nature and depicts the man’s face surrounded by a rainbow.

“One of the major things that’s important to us as patients is being remembered,” Godsey said. “Each individual panel is a life.”

An exhibit of 18 panels now on display at the Neiman-Marcus department store in Fashion Valley shows the variety of lives that have been touched by AIDS. One is dedicated to Bill Rymer, a 61-year-old husband and father who was awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded in France during World War II. Another honors a 25-year-old waiter named Gary Cox, whom friends described as “a soft-spoken guy who enjoyed dressing in drag and giving performances.”

Suzi Mandell said she spent more than two weeks on David’s panel and wants to add a few more things before it is sewn into the national quilt, which is about the size of three football fields and growing.