I’ve been nursing all my life. I have six other children besides Wimoka. Three girls and three other boys. I suppose I enjoy life and try not to worry too much about what’s been, and hopefully what’s to come will make a lot more sense.

Wimoka had many talents. He qualified in dressmaking and was a beautiful artist. He loved his brothers and sisters and he cared about life. As a son and a brother, he was loved very dearly. His grandmother thought the world of him, and he carried the name of my father, who I never knew. My husband was his step-dad and you would never have known that he wasn’t his real dad. He had great respect for him. My youngest daughter was only eleven when he died.

My mum and sisters and I found out about the Quilt through a coordinator in the Kaitaia region. We sat down one afternoon and decided how we were going to make this quilt. Myself and my mum and Huia my older sister. Wimoka’s quilt is made up of a whole lot of love and the depth and the intensity of the quilt is from our hearts.

The white rose signifies the love that his cousins all had for him. It’s from his oldest cousin in the girls, Lee. The chain is the trail of love that comes from the rest of the cousins, and the word ‘love’ was from all of them, his brothers and sisters, his cousins.

Wimoka’s grandmother was an ardent crocheter and he always loved her work. Those little hats are just ‘I love you’ from Nana. He’s also got what you call the baskets of knowledge. The baskets of Knowledge being the knowledge that he imparted during his lifetime. The knowledge of heart and hope and life and death. He has, on his panel, a lifetime membership of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. My mother is one of the few remaining life members of that association. She was one of the founding members in 1943 of the Taitokerau District. She was presented that badge in 1953 and, in her love for Wimoka, she imparted it to his panel.

Another brooch on his panel is from the Catholic Mercy Hospital and this comes from me. The other basket of knowledge belongs to his grandmother. They signify life in the true sense. From a Maori point of view, the basket of knowledge is my mother being able to impart a whole lot of things that made up my life, that made up Wimoka’s life. They contain the understanding to, hopefully, educate people.

The red velvet material the panel is made up of, Mum bought many years ago. It was a piece that Wimoka always wanted. She felt it was an appropriate remembrance for him. The guipure lace that surrounds the panel was used years ago on bridal gowns and was also a piece that Wimoka admired. I did the date that he passed away . . . sat down all afternoon trying to make it as nice as possible. He was always a very conscientious person in that respect. “If you don’t do it properly, it wasn’t worth doing.” I think we probably all inherited that.

Even as I am sitting here nearly three years down the line it’s as if it was just yesterday that all this took place.

The past ten years, prior to Wimoka’s death, I’ve been involved in the care of terminally ill patients at the St. Joseph’s unit at the Mercy Hospital. Wimoka actually passed away in the unit and all the people that looked after him were all very dear friends of mine. So it became like my own extended family.

The Taitokerau block that Wimoka is on is made up of many people that I have got to know. Wimoka’s great-great-grandfather actually sold the land to Ian’s (the panel next to Wimoka) grandparents, when they first settled in the northern district. Wimoka’s panel is the Maori side of the Kaitaia district and Ian’s is the Pakeha side. I still miss Wimoka very, very much today. We shared many, many lovely thoughts and there was a song that he always sang to me that was called ‘When a Boy Falls In Love‘. Wimoka had a beautiful voice. He could sing any song. His grandmother often says today that he wasn’t meant for this world.

I remember him saying to me once, ‘My greatest wish would be to give you a grandchild. Which I can’t do.’ I said to him that even if he couldn’t give me what obviously hurt his heart so very deeply, I was happy that he was such a loving son.

The day that Wimoka and I actually got the confirmation that he was dying of AIDS and that it could only be a matter of weeks, he looked at me and said, ‘Mum, I don’t want to die. Why was I so stupid?’ I said, ‘No, it wasn’t stupidity that brought you down this road, it was lack of education.’

Wimoka left behind some nieces and nephews, and I know that, in his heart, if they have a safer world to live in, then his death would never have been in vain.

When the panel was made up in Whangarei, Nicki Eddy [National Convenor of The Quilt Project at the time] was designated to take it to the South Island, to the Dunedin unfolding. Three of us decided that we would like to go too. We left Auckland early one morning and travelled all night to Dunedin. There was a big snowstorm down in the South Island at that time and planes couldn’t take off and people couldn’t use the roads. We caught the ferry in Wellington and went across. The snow was blocking the roads behind us. Prior to getting to Dunedin, they had closed the road and we had to detour. It was as if everything had waited for us. By all calculations, we should not have even made it to the South Island.

But we got to Dunedin and were privileged to be there and hand it over to the people of Dunedin with the full blessing of the Mayor of Dunedin and many other respected citizens of the community. It was a real thrill to say that our Taitokerau block had been right from the North, at Cape Reinga, all the way to the south where it was handed over with the dignity with which it left our area.

To me, the Quilt Project is a very important part of our whole grieving. I still feel a deep sense of loss for Wimoka, but I know that what his panel is doing is educating. So, hopefully, my loss is someone else’s gain. The Project and what it represents has helped me to heal. I know that Wimoka’s panel is only a small token of what he really was in life, but if it helps anybody in bringing their awareness to the fore, then it will be a blessing.

You look at the Quilt and could think, ‘Oh, they’re just pieces of material put together’, but to the Maori you are actually taking a spiritual person and as such it doesn’t only depict Wimoka, it depicts my father and cousins of his and mine and you are actually taking the history of the whole family.

This is Maori aroha, the love that we felt for the ones that are on his quilt.

Alma’s mother, Maude Smith, who assisted her in the making of Wimoka’s panel, passed away on 15 January 1994. She is resting between Wimoka her husband, and Wimoka her beloved grandson.

Spring’s Quilt by Bessie Hohepa

My husband’s name was Spring. We were almost twenty when we got married. When I look at it now, I think we were too young. Consequently, we went through a lot of hard times. In 1989 we got a divorce. We had been living apart for about five or six years. Two and a half years ago, Spring died from an AIDS-related illness.

We told the children that he had AIDS and that he was dying; there was never any question that we were not going to tell them. Their reaction was, ‘Dad, we love you.’ They all jumped on his bed and we were all crying. We had about a month with him before we had to come back home to Whangarei, and in that month we talked more than we ever had.

One day in the hospital, Spring said to me, ‘Would you marry me again?’ I said, ‘Yes, give me a week to sew up a new dress.’ As it goes, he died on the second weekend in March, so we never got a chance to get married but I guess the important thing is that he asked me and, more importantly, we knew that we loved each other anyway. That memory is something that I will hold precious always. When life has a short span then you really get down to the nitty-gritty. I thank God that I had that opportunity to do that with him.

Spring loved the land and the sea. He was a very vibrant, very motivating person to be around. When he did something, he did it with his whole heart. He was a good husband and a good father. So we wanted to depict that on our quilt. We picked a royal blue, a calico material for the land and a lighter blue for the sky. We have put the sea on the quilt at the bottom. He loved going fishing and camping. Those are the sorts of things that the children really enjoyed doing with him.

We’ve done the land in an earthy-toned calico and zigzagged the hills in different colours depicting different shades of the earth. When he was back with his mother on the farm, he had big gardens going with corn and kumara and potato. Our children used to help him in the garden, weeding. The gardens around the house were always really tidy with flowers and lovely colour everywhere, the lawns always manicured. He loved the country more than the city, the quietness and the tranquillity of it.

The white designs on the sky represent the stars and I puff-painted clouds on. In one corner on the left-hand side, we put a pair of hands. To us, that represented God, and how when Spring had made his peace with God, we had a strength to go on because we knew that he would be going into the Father’s arms. The dove represents the Holy Spirit.

From the red cross, down to the little figure in the middle of the hills, which represents Spring at rest within the earth, and up to the dove, is a fine line of glitter, which represents the peace that he received through Jesus Christ. Inside on if the hills is a bell, so that every time that the quilt is lifted up and billowed when they have a showing, the little bell will tingle.

There are about eight or nine quilts from the Taitokerau region. We joined them at the Marae at Titoki. It was really nice to sit around with the other families, sewing things together by hand, putting last-minute touches on, singing away with each other, retelling stories. I found being able to talk to people, really knowing that they understood where I was coming from and where I’d been, was very healing for me.

I have a special feeling for our Taitokerau quilt. I know that it has aided a lot in education in this region. It’s really neat to know that our quilt will have that effect on other people. To be able to use it to educate people is a great thing.

When people found out, in his little community, that Spring was diagnosed HIV-positive, they ostracised him. He was a very important part of that community. He was responsible for instigating a lot of their work schemes, was very involved with the children’s rugby, the Marae. He was their chief fundraiser, their chief cook.

To have the community turn on him like that hurt him really badly. I’ve never known Spring to run away from a situation, but he ended up having to because he was feeling so sick. The ostracism on top of that was too much.

The hardest thing to deal with has been people’s ignorance. Shannon too was ostracised by his teachers and his peers when they found out what was wrong with his dad. He got to such a state where he was really explosive and had to leave school, and when I went for counselling from a pastor at the church, I was told not to tell anyone else in the congregation. I found that really hard to cope with because I really needed to talk to people.

However, I have dealt with that and I have been able to carry on. My life is rich and it’s full, it’s hard sometimes, but I have a strength now that I never had before. I am more able to plot my course. I know I am going to be a good nurse. I will know what people are going through.

I found a release, really, in doing the quilt. Before that, the children and I just dealt with it on our own. No one on the outside knew. Doing the quilt has helped us to, you could say, go public. It has helped us in another stage of accepting what has happened in our lives.

Spring told me once not to fret and I’m not. I’m looking forward to the rest of my life. I’m looking forward to the things that are going to happen, to the grandchildren we’re going to have, and it’s really sad that he’s not here to share it, but I know that in spirit he’d be with us.

At the time of writing this, in the mid-1990’s, Bessie was studying to be a registered nurse in Whangarei where she lived with her three boys aged between 12 and 20 and a 6-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy. All the children helped Bessie in the making of Spring’s Panel.