ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 13, 1996 TAG: 9610140105
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
THE AIDS QUILT grows ever larger, frustrating hopes for a cure but still providing comfort to the bereaved.
When Mireille Key and her husband, Bob, first saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington nine years ago, it had 1,920 panels, and she thought it too terrible to grow any larger.
When she saw it a year later, it had 8,000 panels, and her husband was too weak with AIDS to walk among the colorful patches.
When she saw it in 1989, he was dead. She added a panel for him to the 11,000 others. Saturday, she looked out over a quilt of more than 40,000 coffin-size panels that stretched from the Capitol to the Washington Monument.
``The first time, I thought - everybody wanted to believe - that this would soon end. There had to be a treatment, a cure,'' she said.
The deaths have not ended, and the quilt gets bigger still. It is laid out in full on the Mall this weekend, perhaps the last time any one site will be able to accommodate the ever-growing memorial. More than 2,000 panels have been added since Friday.
``It's essential to put a human face on this epidemic,'' Anthony Turney, director of the project, said over the funereal cadence of the names of the dead, a list read aloud over three days. ``We can talk about statistics or money, but this quilt is about people, person by person, panel by panel.''
Tory Odum Reed's name is on one of the new panels, added this weekend by her husband.
They had been married just nine months when she learned she had AIDS. Even as she withered, she denied it was true. In the end, she could not move or speak, a former dancer staring sullenly at the ceiling.
``Yes, I'm really angry. A lot's been taken from me ... a future, a family,'' said Michael Reed, a 38-year-old Chicago theater rigger. He gently unfurled a cloth panel, stitched with mementos of his wife, who died two years ago at 35. ``Laying this here just seems to put something to rest.''
``Look at this,'' said an awed Dawn Martinez, a nurse from Piscataway, N.J., as she searched for the name of a friend who died in 1985. ``I never learned about this in nursing school. When I was in school 14 years ago, we just had these young men come in diagnosed with `fever of unknown origin.'''
Thousands of people from all over the country walked slowly among the squares Saturday, hushed, heads down as they studied the lives stitched into the cloth. Some were uplifted. Some depressed. Most were both.
``It lifts you up like you're flying. Then it crashes you down to the gates of hell. But each time, you feel a little more healed,'' said Jennifer Titus, 44, of Bristolville, Ohio. She has been to each quilt display in Washington since the death of her brother Ted Johnson, 41, in 1988.
Janice Gates, a rose-cheeked grandmother from Foxboro, Mass., fumbled with her pocket camera and, slightly embarrassed, stopped a passing stranger.
``Would you take a picture of me, here, with my son's panel?'' she asked. Gates, 59, had come to see the section made for her son John, 33.
``When people ask me how many children I have, I still say four, but one of them is in heaven,'' she said. ``A friend made this for him. I was just thrilled. When I saw it today, I just burst into tears.''
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB