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Megan Schimpf Prescriptions |
How does a life fit onto a 3-by-6-foot panel? How does 18 square feet of fabric describe all the smiles, memories and heartaches?
Simply, it can't. But for more than 26,000 families, friends and loved ones of victims of AIDS, it's a start.
The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Display brought its patchwork of hope, pain and memory to the University this weekend. Inside the Track and Tennis Building, where fans usually cheer runners on to victory, people walked in hushed respect for those who have died of a disease we are only beginning to understand.
The panels themselves are as different as the people who inspired them. The colors, messages and memorabilia woven into each represent the one person who can never see how they have been pictured.
And each one invites thousands of visitors each year to peer into the life of that person - their loves, their favorites, their places in the lives of those who cared about them. Looking at these pictures, flowers, patches of old clothes, Greek letters, diplomas, postcards and more, we know, for just a brief moment, who this person was when they were alive and breathing. In the handwritten letters, we are allowed to read their last thoughts. We share the grief of families and the heartache of lovers in the messages they have left, in word or picture.
We see "Michigan," or a block "M," and think about the victories, the strength, the cheering that usually accompanies such symbols.
And this is what we are supposed to be doing - meeting the people who died of AIDS before it was accepted, before everyone wore red ribbons. And meeting the people who continue to die, day after day. Because, for some reason, we have a need to grieve together.
It is for the same reason millions visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. In many ways, the AIDS quilt and the "wall" are almost identical - quantifying an entity so terrible, so unthinkable that we need to see, panel by panel, name by name, just how awful it was.
So we can never let our minds forget.
"Art is long, life is short," speaks one panel. Many of the victims of AIDS died too soon, but the panels circulate nationally to about 200 displays a year. They teach what the victims could not.
For each of the people who slowly wove their way around the panels this weekend, AIDS will not be a faceless disease. It will not be the "gay disease," even though a majority of the panels commemorate homosexual victims. It will not be a disease of death, either.
"To care is a cure."
The quilt's message of understanding and compassion is finally spreading almost as rapidly as the disease. As medical science begins to understand AIDS and the HIV virus, the public has begun to understand that AIDS is no longer a plague of one portion of society. New drug cocktails are making AIDS into a lifetime obstacle instead of a death sentence for many who are infected. Perhaps we have started to curb the number of panels added to the quilt each year.
Yet AIDS remains, like Vietnam and other tragedies of similar magnitude, as something to conquer together.
"Through our crisis we have found unity. Since the cost is so high, let us use it wisely."
Each of the panels has one thing in common - the name stitched, written, or sewn represents someone who died of AIDS. The panels are no less beautiful or meaningful if the person contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, drug use, or homosexual or heterosexual contact. In short, it's not important.
What is important is that we absorb the individual messages on the panels and the overwhelming message from the entire quilt. Just as we need to grieve together - sharing both the person we lost and our emotions about the loss - we need to work together to prevent and cure AIDS.
We also, though, need to celebrate together. The lives on the quilt should not be observed from a comfortable distance in unspoken reverence. Each of those people lived a life and it is that, perhaps even more than what finally killed them, for which they should be remembered.
"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death."
And as we celebrate their lives, thoughts of our own are inescapable. What color would our panel be? What objects, what symbols would best summarize what our years have meant? What shows who we were, what we fought for, what we dreamed, who we loved?
And then we realize what we have seen: A small window into who we all are.
- Megan Schimpf can be reached over e-mail at mschimpf@umich.edu