This past week, I had an opportunity to volunteer at our company's display of sections from the Names Project AIDS Quilt It was part of our LGBT Pride month celebration. The Quilt project was originally started in 1987 as a protest against the way in which people with AIDS were treated and many left to die without support by the healthcare industry.
A quilt panel is 3 feet by 6 feet and represents the size of a human grave. To date there are over fifty thousand quilt panels. It is so large that it can no longer be displayed in its entirety. Each one representing at least one human being. Think about that. The quilt only represents only about 17 percent of all the people just in the US of all the people who have died as a result of AIDS. Worldwide, these numbers are in the *millions*.
I am one that cannot comprehend the magnitude of such terrible numbers. But staring at a single quilt panel constructed to be the same size and shape as a human grave and then imagining a person lying on that spot. Then realizing that in some cases this panel is all that is left to remember the passing of that person...
A panel can be made up of any fabric, though they recommend long wearing cotton. They are decorated with pictures, buttons, or paraphernalia from the life of the person.
While I have lost a friend to AIDS, I contemplated making a panel for him, but I never did. Regardless, when I saw all those panels, and we only had a few hundred, I was moved to tears. The room took on the feeling of a wake. A somber place where lost friends can be remembered.
What devastated me were the panels for infants and children. Some less than a year old. I could not look at those panels without weeping.
To date there is no cure or vaccine for AIDS. All that is available is suppression therapy which involves a complicated regimented cocktail of expensive medications which can reduce the presence of the AIDS virus to virtual indictability. This adds years to the lives of those infected. But just because it is undetectable, it is still present and continues to wear away the immunity defenses of the human body.
An amazing coincidence occurred as well. One of our co-workers came to view the panel. He had lost two partners to the ravages of AIDS. He had made panels for each of them. And amazingly BOTH panels were on display. What made it even more miraculous was the each of the panels were part of different panel blocks (six panels to a block) so the chances of those two blocks being given to us to display is truly miraculous.
Please pray to all that is holy that the scourge of this disease is controlled soon. We have lost too, too many.
-Sandy
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