Covered With Love Aids Quilt Helps The Living Work Through Their Grief And Memorialize Loved Ones

The toughest part, says Darlene List, was sewing the name and dates. “Alec Justin Cunningham … 10/03/1961 … 08/20/1994.” “It’s hard to lose anyone. But it’s especially hard when you’ve lost your own child and then write down when they died.”

List began her memorial to Alec less than a month after he succumbed to AIDS, and she signed the completed fabric collage almost a year and a half later.

“I was determined not to rush it,” recalls the southeast Spokane resident. “I didn’t want to get through and then realize I’d left something out. But I’m perfectly happy with it. I wouldn’t change a thing.” Having already said good-bye to the youngest of her four children, List will experience another rite of passage Sunday at 3 p.m., when Alec’s panel, along with several others, is dedicated and added to the rapidly growing Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Since June of 1987, when gay rights activist Cleve Jones spray-painted a friend’s name on a piece of cloth measuring 3 by 6 feet - the size of a grave - the AIDS Memorial Quilt has grown large enough to cover 19 football fields, representing victims from all 50 states and 39 countries.

Thursday through Sunday, 960 of the more than 32,000 individual panels will be displayed at the Spokane Convention Center. The quilt will be ceremoniously unfolded at 7 p.m. Thursday as volunteers read the names of those killed by acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

When Darlene List first heard of the AIDS quilt years ago, she suspected someday her son might be memorialized with a panel.

“I had known Alec was gay since 1985,” she says. “As soon as he told me, I started sending him everything - gay men’s health books that I wasn’t brave enough to read all the way through myself.”

Unbeknownst to her, it was too late. Alec already had been diagnosed HIV positive, but he hid the truth from his family for nine years.

“It must have been very hard for him to know he was infected and here I am telling him all the time to be careful,” says List.

“The second shoe dropped,” as List puts it, when her daughter called on Aug. 17, 1994, to say Alec was in a San Francisco hospital, dying of pneumocystis pneumonia.

When she arrived the next day, List found her once-vibrant son attached to a respirator.

“‘Mama, I’m so happy you’re here,’ he told me. And like any mother would, I told him I would never leave him, under any circumstance, no matter what it took. I would be there to help him leave.”

Two days later, Alec was dead.

At her son’s memorial service, List read a tribute she composed to “a man with the heart of a lion and the soul of a dove.”

It was those virtues she set out to capture when she began work on Alec’s quilt panel the following month.

Images of special significance to Alec were transferred onto fabric - a high-school graduation photo, his Montana teaching certificate, family snapshots and two pigs, playful reminders of the nickname bestowed on Alec because his surname, Cunningham, ended in “ham.”

These and other mementoes List carefully framed in swatches of fabric chosen for their colors and patterns - red to represent life, blue for sky, along with butterflies, feathers and the French fleur-de-lis symbolizing honor and success.

“To squeeze a whole life onto something so small, everything I did on the quilt had to have a specific meaning,” List explains. “Some of the significance will be obvious, some of it more subtle. But I hope people think all the images and colors go together.”

When List first completed the quilt panel, she was so sensitive she wouldn’t let anyone outside the family see it. Since then, she says, “I have made my peace with the fact that it’s going out into the world to do what it’s supposed to do - to represent that person - and that I will never get it back.

“I can give it up now. If I can let go of Alec, I can certainly let go of the quilt.”

List plans to use the border fabrics to make smaller memorial panels as keepsakes for family members. The centerpiece will be an alto saxophone, her musician son’s favorite instrument.

List gets goose bumps thinking about the moment, perhaps years from now, when she will visit a display of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and happen upon Alec’s panel.

“It’s going to be thrilling and heart-rending at the same time,” she predicts. “It’s important to me never to deny that he has died and what he died of. I don’t want that shrouded or whispered.

“I’m proud to add this panel to the quilt project. It will commemorate Alec forever. I’m saying, ‘This is my boy.”’

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: These 2 sidebars appeared with the story:

1. SEE THE QUILT Some 960 panels of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display. Where: The Spokane Convention Center. When: Thursday through Sunday. Hours are 7-10 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday. Several new panels will be dedicated Sunday at 3 p.m. Admission: Free. Donations will be shared equally by four local nonprofit groups: Spokane AIDS Network, Inland Northwest AIDS Coalition, AIDS Emergency Project and Blue Mountain Heart to Heart. Volunteering: For information about volunteering during the exhibition, contact Kevin Ketchie at Spokane AIDS Network, 326-6070.

2. AIDS STATISTICS AIDS is the world’s fastest-spreading epidemic and the leading cause of death for American men and women ages 25 to 44. 1 in 92 American men ages 25-39 is HIV-infected. 1 in 250 Americans is infected with HIV. More than 300,000 Americans and 3 million worldwide have died of AIDS. The World Health Organization estimates that by the year 2000, more than 40 million men, women and children will have been infected by HIV.