Mary Elizabeth Hennighan Kerr (December 12, 1930 - December 18, 2004)

Mary Elizabeth Hennighan Kerr was born in December of 1930 and died shortly after her 74th birthday. She was an Irish lass whose determined spirit guided 7 children, 19 grandchildren, numerous in-laws and countless friends. Her courage in battling ovarian cancer and her quiet dignity in death touched us all.

I was blessed to be her daughter-in-law. We shared a mutual admiration born of years spent butting heads. We were both Army wives whose interpretation of situations and protocol were 20 years apart. We were both stay-at-home moms yet our daily lives were light years apart. She stayed at home and I always seemed to have my children on the road with me. She was a stock-market queen and I am a quilter. I loved her dearly and she was one of my most vocal cheerleaders.

Mary’s battle with cancer spanned 5 years. As anyone who has lost a loved one can attest, her final decline was the longest few months of our lives. She was not expected to make it to Thanksgiving of 2004 as we drove the 10 hours home to be with her. She loved being surrounded by her family and insisted we leave the doors open so she could hear us in the house. There were 22 of us there for dinner that year. Her brief periods sitting up were filled with music, laughter and conversation.

Following the Thanksgiving feast, we said our tearful goodbyes and drove back to Virginia to wait. We fully expected to return any day for her services. She had other plans, however, and I needed to keep myself busy.

Mary was not a quilter but her mother, Julia Hennighan Denslow, had been. Unfortunately, time and family members had not been kind to her quilts. I received 3 tied quilts in tatters and had put them away in hopes of salvaging some of the scraps. I work almost exclusively with vintage textiles but only rarely are pieces saved that are in such ragged condition.

In my workroom in late November of that year, I pulled out one of the tattered tops and started to work. I cut 68 six-inch squares from the top and planned to set them in a strippy set using the original quilt backing fabric (the dark blue), light blue fabric that had been salvaged from another quilt top, and a light green cotton that had originally been a shirt of my husbands -- a gift from his mother years ago. A friend helped me transfer 16 photos from Mary’s life onto muslin and these were pieced with leftover scraps from the family top. The resulting squares numbered 84 and thus determined the approximate size of my quilt.

I wanted to use the snapshots to capture moments of Mary’s life and those events and people that were important to her. She is shown with her precious grandbabies, holding the hand of her one true love, hugging her sister and making the funny faces we all enjoyed at infrequent and unexpected moments. The photos set within the blocks are subtle and unnoticed until you get close to the quilt. Then the viewer is drawn in and will continue to search the blocks for additional photos. 

I finished the top the day after my mother-in-law died on December 18, 2004, just 6 days after her birthday. She left us in time to be in heaven for her most favorite holiday of all. Her impeccable timing also ensured that all the family was free of school and work obligations so we could travel to Georgia for her funeral celebration and a family Christmas gathering.

The top was quilted by my good friend and expert quilter, Cyndi Souder. Cyndi’s work features magnificent free motion machine quilting and generally contains words and phrases. I had found a Jewish saying, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us as we remember them”. This inspired me to search for additional quotes that embodied Mary’s life. I ended up presenting Cyndi with 6 pages and additional notes to be “written” on the quilt. This was a larger piece than Cyndi generally tackles on her Pfaff but her free motion quilting was the perfect finish. The quilt contains 36 quotes and phrases that range from single words to complete paragraphs.

Throughout history, women have used creative outlets to remember loved ones, to create a tangible memorial and to work through their grief. My purpose for sharing this project is to encourage other quilters to use those unusual and unexpected pieces of their lives to create a special memorial. I had never used photo transfer in a quilt before nor had I ever had a quilt finished by machine. My grief and the grief process allowed me to think outside of my normal box and create a truly memorable quilt.

This quilt was presented to my husband, her youngest son and fifth child, in January of 2006.