12-Year-Old Brandon’s Journal — Entry 28 — 2/1/1993
Dear Journal,
I thought that it was sad that so many people have died of the HIV virus and AIDS. The parts of the quilt that we had were huge, yet they were so small compared to the whole thing. I saw one that had a little toy truck on it, that probably meant that it was a little boys section. I saw a lot of kids about to cry, or had tears in their eyes but didn't want to show other people. There was a fairly good amount of people who knew of someone who had died. I couldn't see how many people's sections were on one square but it looked like a few. The fact that I couldn't believe was that the quilt in it's whole form was fourteen football fields. That is a huge quilt but I want it to say smaller.
The quilt I'm talking about in this entry is the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. According to its Wikipedia page:
The Quilt is a memorial to and celebration of the lives of people lost to the AIDS pandemic. Each panel is 3 feet (0.91 m) by 6 feet (1.8 m), approximately the size of the average grave; this connects the ideas of AIDS and death more closely, even though only about 20% of the people lost to AIDS related causes are represented.[8] The Quilt is still maintained and displayed by The NAMES Project Foundation.