My days are filed with sewing what I've started calling Memory Quilts.  It has become a job that I equate with being a bartender.  People come to me to provide a service and they sit and tell me their stories.  I am on my fourth Memory Quilt and the stories are accumulating inside me, and showing me that, though I am alone in my own unique grief, I am not alone with this kind of pain.

There are widows and widowers all around, walking, working, smiling, existing incognito.  No black crepe or satin adorn these souls who live with a hole in their lives.  But when they are ready to come to me, they are also ready to tell their stories.  I think it is a prerequisite for them, that formal entering into the contract because they will leave me with the clothing of the one whom they loved so dearly.  And they know that I will be cutting them up.  By definition I will be destroying these clothes, the largest by volume of what remains of their dead spouse, son, or daughter.  I will take each garment and cut it to pieces but I assure them that I will treat those pieces, each garment with love and gentle respect.  I think before I cut.  I plan.  I get inspired by the stories they tell as they show me each shirt, each jacket, each pair of jeans, handle each pair of dress pants.

"This was what he wore a few days before he died.  Here, I brought you the picture I took of him in it.  See?  He's wearing this shirt.  He wore it all the time.  I'm not sure what part you can use but, well, it's the last photo I have of him with our son and he was wearing this shirt.

So the gray Henley shirt is one that I left intact.  It wasn't a conscious decision until I saw it on the quilt wall I have up in my place.  It's the place where deep meditation takes place.  I cut and I pin.  I don't cut and I pin.  What should go together?  How would I want it if he had been mine?  What would he like to see his family have?  This quilt is for his son, the one in that last photograph.  I was having a hard time deciding how and where to cut the shirt and then I had an epiphany.  Don't cut.  I am leaving the shirt in one piece and making it the central part of the quilt.  I am also hand stitching it so that the little boy can slip up inside the shirt and wear it, wear the quilt as it were.  It is also something he can measure his growth against.  Will he grow as tall, as big as the father he lost so young?

I didn't hear a sigh, no bright light shine down warmly on my decision to do this.  It just felt right.  I can't explain it.  And I won't see how the little boy feels about it.  I'm never there when my quilts are given to the receiver.  Knowing what I know about them, comforting the bereaved as they tell the stories of each garment, I don't think I could handle seeing the face of the one who gets the quilt.  I think I will always be womanNshadows.

"I had this woman make it for you.  She's a widow.  I knew she'd understand."

I finished another quilt that was picked up by a widow last Friday.  I saw her drive up and then sit in her car.  She finally got out and walked so slowly up the stairs to my apartment.  I heard her outside my door.  I put my two Scotties on the balcony so they their happiness at a visitor wouldn't interfere with our meeting.  With this particular meeting.

It's always the same.  When they come to drop off the clothes, they are quick to my door.  They stay a long time and we talk.  We cry.  I listen.  I ask questions and get more out of them.  I want to know the person who's clothes I will work with from the point of view of the person who will own the quilt.  They leave reluctantly, as if leaving the clothes behind is like walking away again from the funeral.  So slowly.  Maybe if I walk slow enough I'll wake up and this ha been a bad dream.  But they know what they are doing.  And they know what they want.  A quilt.  The decision has been made.  I make sure of it.  Even then I always wait a week before I start to cut.  Just to make sure.

But the coming to pick the finished quilt.  They come slowly.  They don't know what to expect.  What have I done with it?  Will it be what they expected?  What they wanted?  Will they cry?

The widow last Friday stood for a long time outside my door before knocking.  But she finally did, faintly.  I opened the door and smiled quietly.

"Hi, come on in."

"Hi.  I, ah, I'm not sure I'm ready for this."

She and her husband were the same age when he was killed in a motorcycle accident.  He was twenty-nine.  He died six months after her miscarriage.  Gut wrenching story.  Too tough to go through for the casual audience.

She came inside and I closed the door and she saw it.  I had it laid out on my work table.  Her gasp tore my heart.  Her tears were expected.  They always cry.  I cry as I work on my own Husband Quilt, will finish it one day.  I want it for Christmas.  I have so many lined up for that date but I will work however long night after night to get my own done.  Christmas Eve I will sleep under my own Husband Quilt.

She stood there for one second and then she raced to her quilt.  She fell to her knees and grasped it to her face.  She smelled it.

"It still smells like him!"

"Everything was clean.  I don't wash the clothes unless you specifically ask me to.  Remember?"

"Yeah.  I just thought that after you cut it all up, well, I'd lose that smell.  I know it's all in my head but, it feels the same.  It's in the quilt.  It's all cut up, but it looks and feels the same.  It's like his closet exploded and it's all here in this quilt."

I show her that he can unbutton his Wal-Mart vest back from when he'd worked there in high school, back from the time when they'd first fallen in love, and she can reach her hand inside and feel one of his t-shirts.  The snaps on his workout pants can still unsnap.  From the shirts I did cut up, I saved the buttons and sewed them on so she could run her fingers over them all and remember his fingers buttoning and unbuttoning.

She smiled at each thing I showed her.  Each pocket I left intact.

And then I ask the one question that haunts me all through the process.  I hear it in my head when I plan the quilts, with that first cut, the first stitch, pinning it and basting it to put in the quilt frame.  It echoes inside me when I finish quilting and sew the binding on.  So now, with this very young, girl really; she's only, now, five years older than my own daughter, I asked her the one question that weighs so heavy on me during the making of these Memory Quilts.

"Is it all that you hoped for?"

She looked up at me from sitting on my floor, the quilt pulled down all around her, pooled on the floor, pulled around her shoulders and being stroked while in her lap, being caressed against her cheek and getting damp from tears.  She smiled a smile I have never seen from her, or inside her.

"It's everything and more."

I bowed my head and let out a sigh of relief.  It's all I wanted to heart.  This, I think I what I'm meant to do.  It's all I have now that my Dragon has died.  I can take care of these shattered souls since I know the loss they feel.

"It's everything and more."  If I can't have my Dragon then I don't need anymore than that.  He and I will be remembered for these quilts because everyone has my love for him, my understanding of this kind of death, in all my stitches.