ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 21, 1996 TAG: 9605210054
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Outside Lois Webb's Roanoke County home, a triangular bed of pink tulips withers in the hot, mid-May sun. The stems have turned brown and stick-like. The flower heads have all fallen off.
At the kitchen table where she's labored since January, Lois Webb displays the quilt she stitched in honor of William Howard Webb III, who died Dec. 29, 1994. He was 32 years old, a truck driver and a former Air Force enlistee who loved rainbows, flowers and costume-jewelry crowns.
He was Lois Webb's only son.
"These tulips here are like the ones he planted in our yard right before he got sick," she says, rubbing her hand across the pink and green felt.
"He told me, 'When spring comes, I wanna see some flowers blooming.'"
Lois Webb hasn't cried since the day she buried her son. Searching the craft stores, the fabric stores, the library for tulip quilt patterns - none of that seemed to bother her.
The day she finally figured out how to fashion the quilt's centerpiece - a gold felt crown with rhinestone studs - she even laughed. She'd been looking all over for a pattern, when finally it dawned on her: She could trace the crown off the Burger King kid's meal box.
Memorializing her son in fabric didn't sadden her so much as it made her nervous. "My needlework looks awful," she says, downplaying the simple beauty of her hand-stitched felt. "I used to sew for a living, production work. And me and sewing machines do not get along."
Still, there was something about the project that allowed her to commune with William. So that every time she had to put the quilt down, she became anxious and on edge.
"When I was sewing, I felt like I was working with him," she says. "If I laid something out, and it wasn't quite right, it was like this inner voice would tell me: 'That doesn't quite look right to suit me.'"
Lois doesn't cry, either, when she retells the story of her son's final days: his rush to decorate the Christmas tree before he fell bedridden, the way she had to nudge him awake Christmas Day to open his gifts, how he'd forgotten all about it the very next day.
"The day he died, we knew he only had a few hours left. So all of us went down to his room, and I took one of his hands and his daddy took the other. I kissed him, and told him we loved him. And then I told him, 'Grandma's standing up there waiting for you.'
"And as soon as I told him that, he just stopped.... It was beautiful."
Lois Webb isn't an AIDS activist. She's never given a media interview before, and she's not so sure she has anything political to say now. She points to the gap in her cluster of felt tulips - and to the single white tulip that floats above, nestled in the rainbow.
Asked to explain the symbolism, the 51-year-old says: "Once we cross that rainbow, we're all gonna be the same color, no matter who or what we are.
"I don't guess God discriminates against anybody. To me we're all his children."
She doesn't mind telling people that her son died of AIDS. But the point of her quilt - and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt it will soon be stitched into - is to show how many sons and daughters, brothers and mothers have been killed by the virus. In October, Lois and her husband, William, will travel to Washington to see the exhibit: a quilt 15 city blocks long, the names of the dead ringing out over the National Mall.
"When people look at my quilt, I hope they see it as a labor of love," Lois says. "We did this for him, not to say that he had AIDS, but to say that he's gone and we miss him."
May 11, Lois drove to the post office to mail William's quilt to Washington - an early Mother's Day gift to herself. She had thought the tears would come, finally, with the closure of the project. She had imagined herself breaking down as she handed the package over to the clerk.
But the clerk was too rushed to realize the significance of her package; too busy to listen to the mother's story. "I was a little disappointed," she said afterward. "It kinda took it away from me."
But she was relieved to finish one chapter in the grieving process. The tears will come eventually, too, she knows.
Maybe this summer, when she gives William's old clothes away.
Or maybe in October, when she hears her only son's name echo throughout the nation's capital.
More than 70,000 names will be read - more names than appear on the nearby Vietnam War Memorial. But to a mother too heartsick to cry, only one name will pierce the wall of numbness:
William Howard Webb III.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II/Staff. Lois Webb recently completed aby CNBquilt in memory of her son, William Howard Webb III, who died at the
end of 1994. color.