Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412050063
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N. C. LENGTH: Medium
Kathy Blankenship came here Saturday to honor a son. Her only son. Her firstborn.
Johnny.
He was an affectionate boy who loved animals and grew up in Roanoke's tough Lansdowne housing project, protective of his mother and younger sister. The little man of the house.
As an adult, he collected hats, loved pizza with everything on it and vanilla milkshakes and Dr Pepper. His favorite color was purple. His favorite song was Prince's "Diamonds and Pearls," which he asked to have played at his funeral.
Kathy Blankenship, 46, expected to be emotional. "There are times when I can talk about him and I'm OK, and there are times when I can't," she said. "You just never know."
As she walked into the room, she stopped. Tears welled up behind her glasses. "I'm going to have to take a minute," she told her sister, Elaine Thompson, who had driven with her from Roanoke.
Around them, spread across the floors and hanging on the walls of the expansive room at the Greensboro Coliseum, lay a colorful patchwork of cloth and quilting and memories. The room was ghostly silent, except for the slow and deliberate reading of names over the public address system.
Placed here and there between the quilt sections were boxes of Kleenex.
Johnny died two years ago at the age of 25, living out the final days of his life in a hospital, too weak to talk or eat or get out of bed, his hearing gone, his bodily functions not working, and in so much pain he received a morphine dose every 15 minutes. He weighed less than 75 pounds.
One of the patches was Johnny's.
It was purple and on it were copied lyrics to "Diamonds and Pearls."
This will be the day that u will hear me say
That I will never run away
I am here 4 u
Blankenship had made the quilt patch for her son after his death. She traveled to Greensboro on Saturday to see it displayed for the first time as part of The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Display, an exhibit that tours the country to raise awareness about AIDS.
"I knew it was going to be emotional, because ever since I had shipped it off I had wondered about it. Was it being taken care of?'' she said. "I've wanted to see it."
As she crossed the room to her son's purple panel, she sobbed. She knelt to smooth the quilt where it wasn't lying flat on the floor, much like a mother straightening a child's shirt. On the quilt in diamond- and pearl-colored lettering read two messages.
One said: "Someday we'll be together."
The other said: "Beloved son, always loved, always missed, always on my mind." It was signed "Mama."
Under the messages were two pictures; one showing Johnny sipping a Dr Pepper, the other showing him holding his mother's Persian cat, Princess, when Princess was just a kitten. In the picture, Johnny is skeleton-thin, but smiling brightly. It was taken about four months before he died.
"A lot of people prefer to remember them in their prime," his mother said. "I just want to remember him through everything."
Blankenship hugged her sister tightly. She helped herself to the complimentary tissues and solemnly snapped photographs.
Johnny had attended William Fleming High School, then worked mostly restaurant jobs. He got sick and died before he ever decided what he wanted to do with his life. He contracted the HIV virus by having unprotected sex and was diagnosed with AIDS in 1989.
He never complained about his illness.
He never talked about dying.
Blankenship said any differences she and her son might have had evaporated when he told her the news. "All that went out the window," she said. And she said she can't understand parents who abandon their children when faced with similar news, just when their children need them the most.
The quilt display makes a powerful impact, Blankenship said. The Greensboro display included 1,872 panels like Johnny's, each measuring 3 by 6 feet. That was only a portion of the entire quilt, however, which consists of 26,000 panels.
Since 1987, more than 3 million people have visited the quilt.
"People should wake up," Blankenship said. "People who think that they'll never be touched by this are totally wrong. It could happen to anybody."
She had trouble finding more to say. Some days are easier than others.
So her sister spoke up for her: "To realize it's just a microcosm ... to think about that pain and suffering multiplied thousands of times is just amazing," she said with a pause. "Millions of times, I guess."
by CNB