by Clare Hunter
The decision about what my mother should wear for this, her final journey, was important. It was our final honouring, our last intimate, affectionate act. Since ancient times, we have dressed, wrapped and covered our dead to speak of who they were, to mark out their value to us, to ensure that their worth is recognised in the next world; to show that they were loved. For many people, preparing a body for interment or cremation is the last time they touch the bodies of those they have loved; a final tangible connection. It is the emotional and physical point of separation of the living from the dead, a mother from a daughter, a husband from a wife, the soul from the body. In many cultures, the clothes the deceased are dressed in, or the cloths wound around them, are more than just a final gesture of care and farewell. They are passports to eternal peace, to acceptance in the next world.
In a 2,000-year-old necropolis in the Andes lie hundreds of bodies, some wound in over 250 metres of embroidered cloth, preserved by the arid air around them. The body of a girl has been wrapped and wrapped again in layers of fabric, in embroidered tunics sewn in bright colours of red, blue, yellow, pink and green. The fabric is stitched with sentinel creatures such as serpents, birds of prey and killer whales, fierce escorts to accompany her on her journey to the afterlife. In the burial chamber of the Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun, were twelve bead-shimmering tunics, twenty-four shawls; fifteen sashes; one hundred and fifty-five loin cloths and a robe decorated with 3,000 gold rosettes. They marked him out as a sovereign in this world and announced his status to the spirits of the next. When the tomb of St Cuthbert, who died in 687 AD, was opened at Durham Cathedral in 1827, they found buried with him a set of vestments made of jewelled and embroidered Byzantine silk, which had been deposited by King Aethelstan in the tenth century while the king was on pilgrimage as sewn credentials of the saint’s spiritual worth.
Some embroidered textiles follow a person through life to death. In Slovakia, dead men were traditionally buried in the shirt their bride embroidered for their wedding. In northern Russia, the red stitched towel a baby was laid down on at birth would cover its adult face at death. In the Ukraine, a new-born’s rushnyk (ritual cloth), was kept through life and taken with its owner’s body to the cemetery to be destroyed by the elements as part of the funeral rites.
For those left behind, sewing as a mark of grief can be a private way to mourn or used as a public register of loss. The death of George Washington in 1799 caused a contagion of grief. He was the United States’ first president, its first national hero, the triumphant general of the American War of Independence. His death led to widespread public mourning. Churches and homes were draped in black. People donned black clothes, black cockades, armbands, gloves and sashes. Manufacturers were quick to exploit the commercial potential of his commemoration. Ceramic plates, cameos, fans, handkerchiefs, even wallpaper featuring portraits of Washington were avidly purchased as patriotic symbols of respect and sorrow.
Samuel Folwell, an artist from Philadelphia, produced a series of designs for mourning embroideries. Others followed suit. Soon, these small sewn memorials appeared in every self-respecting home. For women, they offered a rare opportunity to participate in a national political event. The digital archive of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. has an example of what was sewn. The picture is set in a graveyard with a stitched urn centre-stage on which is inscribed the words: ‘Sacred to the Memory of the Illustrious Washington.’ Female mourners draped in white, their hair loosed free in free-flowing heartache, are keeping vigil under a weeping willow tree. An angel, descending from an embroidered sky and clasping a laurel wreath, is winging its way to release Washington’s soul, a trumpet of glory held to its lips.
The picture is typical of the mourning embroideries which grew in popularity in the aftermath of Washington’s death. They followed the conventions of the sentimental silk embroidered pictures that had been sewn by girls and women in Britain and America since the eighteenth century. These were pastoral idylls, pretty and innocuous, often with scenes of rural courtship with a shepherdess or milkmaid as their heroine. But by changing the landscape from the countryside to a graveyard, women could claim a gravitas, transform their sewing from a frivolous pastime to an honourable pursuit and portray themselves as symbols of courage and duty, as the guardians of national or family grief. Mourning embroideries became a needlework craze.
What began as pictorial graveside scenes were simplified into equally sombre but more detailed mourning samplers that functioned as inventories of family bereavement. A list of the names of the dead, alongside the date of their death, was often accompanied by sorrowful verses. Louisa Buchholtz (c.1812-1879) made three stitched epitaphs, two on the death of her mother Susannah in 1823 when Louisa was thirteen and another to mourn the death of her father who died two years later. To commemorate her mother’s death she stitched verses in black thread:
In painful sores long time she bore
physicians were in vain
Till God was pleas’d by Death to ease
And free her from her pains.
The opening grave receives her dust
All dark and cold she lies
But o his spirit with the just
Lies far above the skies.
For since she’s dead for ever gone
O god my soul prepare
To enter into heaven’s high gates
In hopes to meet her there.
In America, women made mourning quilts in dull colours with cloth patches of brown, blue, grey and black. Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell went further than most. Married at eighteen in 1817 to Shadrach Mitchell, she bore eleven children over the next twenty-four years. In their early married life, Elizabeth not only serviced her growing family, but also helped Shadrach run a small hotel. After seven years of marriage they moved west to Ohio, where they bought some land and set up a general store and another inn. These were difficult times of debt and drought, but they survived and prospered; by 1850 they owned three horses and two cows and were harvesting forty acres of corn and oats.
But there were tragedies along the way. In 1836 her infant son, John Vannatta, died. He was only two years old. Elizabeth began to make a mourning quilt. She gathered up the faded floral sprigs from her daughters’ old school dresses and the drab cottons of worn-out family workwear and began to shape them into a cloth replica of the local fenced graveyard. She appliquéd a pathway to the graveyard gate, pairing floral patterns to edge each side. She cut from fabric a small six-sided coffin and sewed it down in the graveyard. She embroidered vines around it and a weeping willow and a red rose bush by the gate. With the help of her daughter Sarah, she pieced, from tiny scraps of fabric, forty-five LeMoyne star blocks to complete the quilt and bordered it in a pieced zig zag design. In 1843 Elizabeth lost another son. Mathias, nicknamed Bub, was only nineteen when he died. She made another slightly larger cloth coffin for him and sewed it in its place in the graveyard. She added stitched inscriptions to the coffins of both of her dead children. But the quilt remained unfinished. It was never quilted or backed.
Instead, Elizabeth began work on something much more ambitious: a graveyard quilt for the whole family. She followed the same design as the first, albeit with more refined stitchery. This had the same central path, the same surround of the LeMoyne star blocks and the two coffins tucked at the back of the graveyard. But this time she embroidered the flowers along the pathway, and arched more decorative vines and flowering white and red rose bushes above the gate. Then she lined the outer pathway with eleven cloth coffins barely sewn in place so that her stitching could be easily unpicked and the coffins moved into the graveyard when death occurred. To these she attached small pieces of paper: seven penned with the names of her remaining children; the other two simply saying ‘mother’ and ‘father’. She embroidered more flowers: a red rose bush beside John and Bub’s coffin and a white rose shrub near the named coffins of her other living sons. Around her living baby son Marling’s coffin, sewn in
its temporary position, she embroidered a thick protective shield of delicate yellow roses. Then she marked within the graveyard, in stitched outline, the final resting place of each coffin. Her daughters Sarah and Lib helped, sewing the sites of their own coffins.
When Elizabeth died in 1857 the thread that anchored her fabric coffin in its temporary location was cut, and the coffin labelled ‘mother’ was moved to its place beside her two sons. Her daughter Sarah became the guardian of the quilt. As other family members died – Sarah’s husband, her baby son, her sister’s child, nieces and nephews – more coffins were added to the quilt and laid in a separate row outside the graveyard fence. When Sarah’s sister Lib died in 1867, her coffin was snipped free and moved to its allotted place in the graveyard. There would be no more changes made to the quilt. It stayed as it was, with four coffins in the graveyard and twenty-three around its border. Sarah remarried at the age of 50 but her husband died just two years later and, given the property laws at the time which allowed widows a paucity of joint possessions, it seemed that Sarah, fearful the quilt would pass to her husband’s relatives, put it into the safe-keeping of her brother Benjamin. It passed through family hands, through generations until in 1959 Nora Mitchell Biggs donated it to the Kentucky Historical Society which has been its guardian ever since.
There is no right or wrong way to grieve; each culture finds its own way to mourn. Romanians decorate graves with the clothes of corpses, while Mongolians keep the clothes of dead relatives as family treasures, the patina of wear imbuing them with an intimate value. A friend told me of a woman she knew who, having cleared out the belongings of her dead father, came across his shirts folded neatly in a drawer. These she kept, cut up and made into a patchwork quilt. It was no act of remembrance or emotional attachment. They had been estranged for many years and he had been a distant and detached figure in her life. But with the heritage of his shirts, she could change their relationship and claim a closeness she had never encountered. Now, after his death, she gave herself the licence to wrap herself in his warmth.
Using the clothing of the dead is a traditional ritual of mourning in many cultures. In South America, an effigy of the deceased, dressed in their own clothes, is laid beside the grave so that mourners can embrace and talk to them for a while longer before the burial takes place. Georgian mourners lay out their loved ones’ clothes out on the ‘dead man’s carpet’, arranged as they might have been worn. It allows for a re-animation of sorts, a way of preserving a presence. Mourners feast, sing and entertain the physical representation of their loved one until the corpse is interred. Romanians decorate graves with the clothes of the deceased to allow the last remnants of their identity to disintegrate in the wind.
Many of us find that the hardest thing to do when someone close to us has died is to dispose of their clothes. They are what most vividly express a singular personality, what retain an essence of who a person was. The deceased’s lingering presence is held in fabric that has absorbed their shape and smell. So we keep the clothes folded in drawers and hanging in wardrobes, as if our loved one’s existence is still present in the clothes they left behind.
Nowhere has the re-animation of the dead through the clothes they wore been used to more dramatic and emotive effect than in the NAMES memorial quilt project, a response to the AIDS epidemic that swept through America like a tsunami in the 1980s. It was in 1981 that medical practitioners in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco began to report a mysterious virus that was attacking healthy gay young men. By the following year it had killed 200 and infected 400 more in twenty-four states. Cases were emerging across the world. Health and scientific institutions set to work to try to identify the cause, to detect methods of transmission and provide guidelines for prevention. But their efforts were hampered by a climate of fiscal austerity in the United Sates where, with unemployment and inflation rising, the Reagan government had enforced budget constraints. Politicians prevaricated over dedicating funds to what it deemed a minority affliction. Research, preventative measures and patient care were compromised in the name of national thrift.
The public and the media seemed indifferent to what was known as the ‘gay plague’ and it was only when haemophiliacs and heterosexuals began to show signs of infection that people became concerned. Meanwhile, numbers were escalating. By 1984, over 3,050 people had died and a further 7,000 were infected. The gay community of America found itself under siege. Firefighters, police officers, medical staff, dentists and prison guards demanded the protection of face masks and rubber gloves. Morticians refused to embalm the corpses of AIDS victims. The public were warned not to share towels, cutlery or drinking vessels with gay people. Even members of the gay community were in denial, wary of limitations to their sexual freedom, protesting proposals to shut down gay bath houses and bars, claiming an infringement of civil rights should the screening of blood donors be imposed.
When Jim Curran, the epidemiologist who led a task force on HIV/AIDS at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, warned that, since the number of those infected was doubling month by month and that research had shown that the virus could lie dormant for years thereby harbouring a risk to thousands in the future, and the threat of a global catastrophe, he was accused of grossly exaggerating the problem. In fact, even he had underestimated the scale of the epidemic. By 1985 over 4,000 had died and 9,000 were infected. It was just the tip of the iceberg.
In America, the gay community was becoming bewildered. It had become used to what had seemed to be a generally liberal attitude to homosexuality. Now, in the face of tragedy, bigoted, uncaring, self-protective and at times morally triumphant attitudes were being unmasked. The death from AIDS of Rock Hudson, a popular movie star and icon of heterosexual masculinity, triggered media attention. The pace of concern quickened. More funding was allocated to publish preventative guidelines and increase the research into possible antibodies. But the sense of public and political rejection, of bigotry and betrayal, of isolation continued to be deeply felt by the gay community.
It was this community who had to organise informal rotas of care for the dying when none was available from the health services, to arrange the funerals of lovers estranged from their families, to inform parents of a son’s sexuality and his imminent death. Many were barred from sick rooms and deathbeds, not allowed to stay with their loved ones. But their emotional burden hardly registered on the nation’s conscience.
The climate of prejudice and avoidance were catalysts in the creation of the NAMES memorial quilt project. Quilts were chosen as a deliberate ploy to evoke a wholesome association with home, family and comfort. It was conceived by Cleve Jones, a gay rights activist who had helped in the campaign to elect Harvey Milk as the first gay supervisor in San Francisco and who had witnessed his assassination in 1978. In 1985, at the annual candlelit vigil in honour of Milk, Cleve Jones had asked participants to bring with them a placard bearing the name of someone who had died of AIDS and post it on the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. When the placards were grouped together it reminded him of a patchwork quilt, and this triggered the idea of a cloth memorial for the victims of Aids. The following year, when his friend, the actor Marvin Feldman, became yet another victim, Jones made a commemorative panel the size of a burial plot: three foot by six foot. From that grew the idea of creating a textile graveyard of similar panels, each bearing the name of someone who had died of Aids. In 1987 he established the NAMES Project Foundation. Its aim was simple: to invite people to make a sewn panel. Its purpose was more ambitious: to create a fabric requiem that lamented the waste of so many lives through negligence and fear, on a scale and impact that would make its message inescapable and could campaign for more resources to stem the epidemic.
On 11 October 1987, nearly 2,000 panels were laid out on the Mall of Washington D.C., transforming it into an encrusted carpet. The Mall became a tactile garden of remembrance, with the panels purposefully designed to lie on the ground so
that people had to kneel to explore each sewn biography. The panels, dedicated to both the famous and the unknown, lay side by side in material democracy. In predominantly male hands, men who were largely inexperienced stitchers, the techniques and materials were improvised. Many of the panels used the clothes of those who had died, sometimes stitched down in their entirety: T-shirts, football strips, ties and jeans. Designer labels, lapel badges, zips and buttons were used as adornments. Unaware of needlework conventions, the makers of many panels were liberated from their constraints and became experimental, finding imaginative ways to encapsulate a person’s life in fabric. Its effect was as much to do with tactility as scale, creating a textural and sensory evocation of life as much as a commemoration of death.
The NAMES Memorial Quilt Project was not merely a creative and public way to voice grief. It was a way to challenge the anonymity of the dead, their reduction to statistics. This was emphasised in future displays of the quilt when the names of those represented were read aloud, sometimes with celebrities taking part. By 1992 the roll call took 24 hours. This reading of names and the slow, respectful, ritualistic unfolding of each section at a time transformed the NAMES Memorial Quilt from an object to a performance of loss. Half a million people came to see its first installation in 1987. By the time it was finally seen in its entirety in October 1996, it covered the entire Mall and had received 14 million visitors. There are now 48,000 panels.
Not everyone, however, was convinced of the efficacy of the NAMES Memorial Quilt as a campaigning tool. There were those who saw it as a sanitisation and sentimentalisation of gay culture, who thought that the fund-raising merchandise that accompanied it – books, T-shirts, ornaments, calendars, postcards, a songbook – trivialised a tragedy and made it into a commodity, encouraging people to support a brand rather than a cause. There were satirical parodies of it, epitomised by the ‘gerbil memorial quilt’ dedicated to dead pet rodents. The theatricality of its display was criticised for turning a human disaster into a voyeuristic show of loss.