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Memories are made of this

Sharon Carty's personalized quilts give tangible comfort to the bereaved.

For Sharon Carty, a psychiatric nurse and passionate quilter, fabric is an intimate thing. "It covers our bodies, it covers our beds. It's where sex and death happen," the Amherst woman says. And when death comes knocking, it wants your body, not your wardrobe. Your clothes stay behind, intensely personal reminders of your scent, your personality, your physical form.

Carty's interests in psychology and quilting came together last year, after a friend's mother died at 105. Eventually, Carty suggested to her grieving friend that using some of her mother's clothes in a quilt could be a way of reconstituting her memory.

When another friend, who had lost her husband to cancer, heard about the project, her reaction was "I could never do that," recalls Carty. But after two years, the friend had not yet been able to clear out her husband's closet. Last summer, Carty came home to find an urgent message on her answering machine: The grieving woman had changed her mind. She wanted to get busy on turning part of her dead husband's wardrobe into a bedcover.

Carty worked with both friends, exploring their grief as well as the lives of their loved ones. The women talked, gathered garments, and roughed in mental images of what the quilts would look like. The daughter chose to use her mother's everyday clothes rather than cut up garments that "still have use in them" for others, says Carty. Fittingly, the everyday, slightly worn fabrics give a better sense of the woman who wore them than her "good" clothes would have.

For the widow, the first step was to retrieve from a bag in the closet the shirt her husband had been wearing when he died. Eventually, she chose seven shirts to incorporate into her quilt.

And for each there came an important threshold: the moment to start cutting. "Cutting - the word even sticks in your throat," says Carty, but it begins the process of transforming memories. "Cutting becomes a courageous act," she says, the beginning of moving on.

The widow settled on a traditional nine-patch design - blocks of nine small squares amid solid blocks of the same size - because she and her husband had received a similar quilt as a wedding gift from the children of her first marriage. The basic quilt is in place, but meditative hours of hand-sewing lie ahead.

The daughter's cover is shaping up to be a crazy quilt, another traditional design popular in Victorian times, composed of many variously shaped pieces.

Carty has been approached by others for help in this new genre of grief counseling, which she calls "night sky quilts." She hopes to work on the next batch of quilts in a group, with participants working and talking together, under her direction, as they cut and stitch and recombine the fabric of their lives.