Tale of an Epidemic

Sections of quilt arrive every day, each grave-sized piece representing a life lost to AIDS.

They arrive by mail or under someone’s arm, in lovingly wrapped packages, some with heart-wrenching notes from spouses, lovers or friends. All are destined for perhaps the most powerful, poignant and fluid memorial of our time -- the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

“In a sense, the quilt is passive, but it’s very powerful. It’s very subtly doing what it needs to do,” said Scott Williams of San Francisco’s NAMES Project Foundation, which oversees the quilt along with 39 affiliated U.S. chapters and 33 international chapters. “It opens closed minds and softens hard hearts.”

The quilt, which now spans more than 22 football fields, will be on display today in Washington. It may be the last time the entire quilt is shown to the public.

Sometimes the sections take a while to arrive. Volunteers remember the woman who carried her son’s panel in the trunk of her car for two years, until she found the strength to give it up.

Sometimes it’s a question, rather than a quilt, that brings tears to the eyes. Earlier this month, there was the neatly typed fax volunteers received at the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the AIDS Memorial Quilt project.

“I’m about to die in a week or so and want to make a quilt. How do I do this?” wrote an AIDS patient from New York City, one more person trying to sum up a lifetime on a block of cloth.

It’s an impossible task. Yet taken together, the 45,000 panels of the quilt manage to sum up an epidemic in a strikingly personal and compelling way that helps make converts wherever it goes.

Consider Pauline Snyder, 60, a volunteer with the San Francisco Bay area chapter.

Three years ago, Snyder said, “I knew nothing about AIDS.”

But after her son contracted the disease, Snyder moved from Ithaca, N.Y., to be with him. Soon, she found herself nursing two of his friends, also stricken with AIDS.

“That’s when I walked down here one day, and found fabric piled high to the ceiling,” Snyder said. “I knew then that this was something I could do.”

The year she began volunteering, her son’s best friend, Ron Collins, died of AIDS. Snyder began making a panel for him, collecting swatches from his kitchen curtains, fabric patterned with flowers for his garden, some cloth to represent his “awful, ticky-tacky collection of salt and pepper shakers.”

Snyder soon found that the process of making the panel helped her grieve by allowing her to keep Collins alive in her thoughts.

“The hardest part ended up being giving that panel up,” Snyder said. “His panel hung here for a while, and then one day I came in and it was gone, replaced by another panel.”

Finally, Snyder said, she broke down and cried.

Helping people grieve and giving victims a permanent memorial has been the mission of the AIDS Memorial Quilt since 1985, when San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones came up with the idea during a protest march.

Jones, who had written the names of 1,000 AIDS victims on cardboard placards, hung them from City Hall during an annual candlelight march. Stepping back to survey his handiwork, Jones realized the squares of cardboard looked like a quilt.

By 1987, Jones and a corps of volunteers had organized the first AIDS Memorial Quilt display, in Washington. The quilt had 2,000 panels, mostly from San Francisco. Each measured 3 feet by 6 feet -- the size of a grave.

The following year, when the quilt was displayed again, it had quadrupled to 8,288 panels. By 1992, at the quilt’s fourth Washington display, there were 22,000 panels.

“In 1992, we said it was the last time we’d do the display, because it was too expensive and too much work,” said Dennis Chase, a volunteer at the Bay Area chapter. “But AIDS went on and the need for people to be educated went on.”

So, earlier this summer, volunteers gathered at the quilt’s San Francisco warehouse headquarters to repair, catalog and pack more than 45,000 panels into ten freight cars for the cross-country journey.

When the display is over, the panels will return to their San Francisco headquarters, where maps and charts and ringing phones almost mask the enormous tragedy behind the foundation.

But there are always reminders. Take the list of names of the dead that will be handed out to visitors. Printed and bound by Pacific Bell, it is the size of a telephone book.

Staff and volunteers deal with that day-to-day tragedy in different ways. For Snyder, that sometimes means a week off from the work.

“I really like being here, but a lot of young people have died,” Snyder said. “It’s hard, and it bothers me a lot. Being a mother -- I mean, these are wonderful kids.”

Paul Margolies, a photographer documenting the individual panels for an on-line project, said he had to stop reading each one.

“You really have to stop focusing on what each panel says. If you read them all, it becomes overwhelming . . . you’d just go crazy,” Margolies said.

At the San Francisco Bay area chapter, administrator Tom Duffy said he is heartened when he sees families, lovers or friends who were once estranged come together to make a panel.

“There is a lot of hope here,” said Duffy, looking at walls filled with puffy, colorful panels. “It’s a horrible thing when someone passes away, but this is something good that’s come out of it.”