LINK: https://fb.watch/4tOFslnnb8/
Story Circle story from Lynette Kaufmann
First I was thinking of something that relates to the arts, but when Kevin told the story about the quilt, and I quilt, and you said Washington DC and it reminded me of seeing the Vietnam Wall for the first time. I had seen the travelling Vietnam Wall twice, and I cried every time. I lost my uncle in the Vietnam War when I was almost six, and it made a huge impression. And I remember my mom saying, when we were there with my six week old daughter, and all our children - so three generations looking at this wall. And the tears were just flowing, and I said, well, I mean, fifty thousand people killed in the Vietnam War, that’s so many.
Now we’ve had five hundred thousand people, and I don’t know how we commemorate that, I don’t know. It needs to be remembered. We remember things like Vietnam and it’s very moving to stand at that wall and realize how many people are gone. But we don’t envision how many people are gone from COVID. My mother has lymphoma and was thinking she didn’t want to get the COVID shot, and my dad had had Polio as a child; he’s gone now. But I said, “Mom, Dad would tell you to go get it” - the shot came a year and a half after he had Polio, the vaccine came out. And she said, “you’re right.” And my saying that has affected our whole family. Because everybody who was thinking, I don’t know if I want to get that, is realizing that Papa would be telling us to go get it.
I don’t know how I’m going to remember COVID yet, other than my year at home, my year of almost not seeing my grandchild because we were afraid of, you know, cross exposure. He was born in February of last year; he just turned one. But...quilting would be a beautiful way to remember it, and I’d like to find a way to do that.
