While Mom was pregnant with me, my father was a student pastor in a small church in Hammond, Indiana. In celebration of my impending birth, and as a gift to my parents, a woman of the congregation made a quilt from random fabric squares, mostly of wool and flannel backed with blue linen. It was (and still is) large enough to cover a king-sized bed. I have the quilt to this day—68 years later.
The family followed Dad throughout his career moving, as Methodist pastors did back in the day, every two to four years. Since Dad was a seminary student in Evanston, Illinois, where I was born—Evanston General Hospital. We began moving after graduation. First to Chicago, then Hecla, South Dakota, Aberdeen, South Dakota, then on to graduate school at University of Syracuse, while he simultaneously served two small churches in Euclid, New York. I was six when I began first grade in Liverpool, New York—an hour and a half school bus ride each way (or so it seemed!).
Six years old and I had already lived in five different communities in three different states. Even so Mom and Dad found time to have two additional kids.
We moved, then to Seattle, Washington. I was eight. Followed by Bellevue, Washington, then Spokane, where I graduated high school. Then college. Three different places in Pullman over the next two years, followed by a move to Los Angeles and UCLA via Sunriver, Oregon. Three places in LA, then Olympia, Washington (3 places and a marriage), back to LA, then back to Evanston, Illinois for seminary, myself. Twenty places in all. I was twenty-eight.
I had few good friends over the course of my life, none life-long. Setting down roots felt to me wasted effort, since I wouldn’t be planted long enough to watch those roots thrive into something meaningful and permanent. Defining “home” seemed always a challenge. But that Hammond quilt was always there, on my bed. Keeping me warm. Always my comforter. Yes, a thing, not a person. But a reminder of all the people I have touched and who have touched me. My constant presence that allowed any place to be “home.”
Over the next forty years, two marriages, one child, and ten more “homes,” that comforter remained with me. Not always on the bed, but always nearby.
Yesterday, in my San Francisco End-of-Life Coalition Zoom gathering, Beverly Ayling-Smith made a presentation. Dr. Smith is a fabric artist working with fabric as a vehicle to understand our sensory responses to life, grief, and death. Fabric as a means for emotional healing.
Quoting from the SFEOL promo piece for the presentation:
She often uses bedsheets as the main fabric in her work, either whole or as fragments. In her words, “Bedsheets act as silent witnesses to many natural processes in life such as birth, puberty, pleasure, disease, decay and death. They bear witness to passions spent before sleep and dreams forgotten on waking. Although we endlessly strive to clean and launder them, they remain keepers of our memories, dreams and tears.”
I thought this a bit odd. Not exactly sure how fabric could really be a means of emotional healing. Then I remembered my quilt, my comforter, and I understood. Emotional healing, yes, and emotional stability. Where my quilt is, this simple piece of fabric, I am home. When I go, I want to be placed with my comforter surrounding me. Regardless how I go, with my comforter, my Hammond Shroud, it will be a good death.