This is not going to be a happy blog post about quilts.
This is a blog post about sadness, and grief, and children dying. I apologize in advance and understand those who don’t want to read it.
In the past month, two members of the QN team have dealt with the sudden deaths of young people. One was a young man just starting his independent life, the other was a baby who’d just celebrated her first birthday. Although the QN team members didn’t lose their own children, in both instances they are incredibly close to the mothers who did. No matter the age of a child lost, it’s a heart-obliterating, universe-upending, completely unjust and unreal experience for the parents.
I am the editor who currently writes the content for our regular Design Wall page, including the historical Backtrack items, something I really enjoy and find interesting. In the current October/November issue, I included a paragraph about Elizabeth Mitchell’s Graveyard Quilt:
1836 October 13, Elizabeth Mitchell’s two-year-old son John Vannatta died in Ohio. While in mourning Mitchell started making the first version of her Graveyard Quilt, which features an embroidered center medallion representing a cemetery surrounded by LeMoyne star blocks. The graveyard medallion of this first version, which was never quilted, includes coffin appliques representing John Vannatta and another son, Mathias, who died at 19 in 1843, by which time Mitchell was living in Kentucky. After Mathias’ death, Mitchell and her two daughters created a second, larger Graveyard Quilt that includes a border containing appliqued coffins embroidered with the names of family members, ready to be moved to the graveyard medallion after their deaths. It is now in the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, Kentucky. www.history.ky.gov
Quilts can be fun and beautiful. But they’re also a historical product of women’s work and a document of women’s lives, which are not always fun and beautiful. Sometimes quilts represent the difficult and tragic parts of our lives. I’ve been touched by the Graveyard Quilt since I first read about it. Maybe I tend to be detached and blasé and think that for women who lived in an era of higher infant mortality and who had quite a few children, losing one wouldn’t affect them as deeply as it affects mothers today. Clearly that viewpoint is selfish and myopic. Mothers have always – always – mourned the loss of their children. History doesn’t tell us how Elizabeth Mitchell’s sons died. John Vannatta, to be specific, was two years and eight months old, well past infancy and probably as rambunctious and inquisitive as any toddler.
But it doesn’t matter how they died. What matters is that they lived, and they mattered to their mother. In an era when states didn’t maintain death records, and when moving from Ohio to Kentucky meant that you’d probably never have a chance to travel back to visit your little boy’s gravesite again, Elizabeth Mitchell found a way, in what must have been her immense grief, to tell us all that they lived and they mattered. Because she did so, we have a link to the past beyond dates and events. We have a link back to her heart.
If you’ve read this knowing too well the grief of losing a child, please accept my deepest, deepest condolences.
Thank you.
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Extra Credit: To read more about the Graveyard Quilt, read Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell’s Graveyard Quilt: An American Pioneer Saga by Linda Otto Lipsett (Halstead & Meadows Publishing, 1995).
Very moving and touching post.
Thank you for this gentle reminder of the power of quilts to be a snapshot in time – and a source of comfort in so many ways – to maker as well as to recipient. Will give my little one extra hugs tonight thinking of others who need those hugs.
A beautiful and insightful essay. Thank you for touching our humanness.
This story shows that there is more to life and death than cell phones, i-pads, i-pods, etc, etc, etc.
Thank you for mentioning this story with the quilt. The quilt itself tells a somber story
about our life and death. It really pulled my heart strings. I’m sure it took painful effort to make a quilt such as the Graveyard Quilt.
I havent had the misfortune to have to grieve in that way. My heart goes out to those mothers. Are the staff making a quilt for them?
Mary Kate, please let your two team members know that there are many of us who are keeping them in our hearts and prayers. Our family has known such losses, we cherish thoughts of their short lives. Thank you for what you have written, I am sure that it has helped, just a little, those who are suffering. God bless you for writing it and God bless those families who have suffering these losses.
I just can’t imagine the grief and heartache of losing a child. Just reading the post has brought on tears. I have three children, two of which serve in the military, and I pray EVERY day that I never lose any of them. God bless those families who have suffered this terrible tragedy.
Reading your post, I’m sure to others as well, brings the memories of grieving for a loved one not just for children. When we grieve, and we quilt, our very souls go into that quilt, all our prayers, all the heartaches, all the wishes that can’t come true for that someone, is all interwoven into those pieces of fabric, so delicately touched and stitched by hands that remember who that someone was. As quilters, we put so much of ourselves into that unique one of a kind quilt, just for that loved one. It’s sad, that we won’t ever know the all the history and saddness that went into the quilts for loved ones. My prayers go out to each and every one of you.
Madeline — As far as I know there are no plans to make memorial quilts in honor of the children who died or for their parents, but that could change. I do know that both of the children (and their parents) received quilts before the tragic events of the past month, so they got to use and love on their special quilts while they were alive.
I am in the process of making a quilt for my loved one, and all the heartache and tears that is going in to this quilt is a memory of lots of hugs and kisses and hopes and dreams as I sat by my loves bedside during his fight with cancer. A quilt is a refuge and a comfort every time I pick it up to do some more. It is all being done by hand and every stitch brings different memories, some sad, some glad, but all welcome as to what has been and what is.
This post reminds me of the Sacred Threads quilt exhibit. Moving on so many levels. It may be of interest to you.
My prayers & heartfelt sympathy to these parents and families and their friends. I’m feeling the pain again, of losing our son 12 years ago. It does become easier, but it never goes away.
Prayers to all God Bless,