Quilting Made Her Feel Closer to Her Departed Mother

Hello, Guideposts readers, I’m Valerie Stone and I’m from Oneonta, Alabama. My mom, Bonnie Thunderburg, passed away this past June 2020, after an 18-year battle with cancer. Didn’t stop until the last day and she’d still be going if God had let her. As a small child, we were very close. When I became a teenager, I distanced myself from her and kept that wall up and never let that go till it was too late. Her last few months were the first few months of COVID and as a nurse in the hospital, there was no way I could take a chance of coming to visit my parents. And it was hard enough being a nurse in that time, twice as hard knowing she was going through such a decline and I couldn’t be with her. My mom took up quilting probably the last year of her life. She’s always been very busy making candles, teaching Sunday school. And when she was too weak to get up and do those things, she wanted to be able to be productive, anyway, so she had never quilted before, decided to give it a shot, and she was amazing. I was Christmas shopping this past Christmas and happened upon some fabric I thought was really cute. I do a lot of crafting but had never tried quilting before so I just decided to take it up. When I got started on my first quilt, all I could think about was, I wish she were here for me to ask to get hints and tips. I never got to talk to her about it while she was alive. So I had been shopping for fabric to make my husband’s grandmother a quilt. And I’d picked out a couple of green ones that I really liked. And I got home with my mother’s bag of supplies and started going through it, and I found this fabric and a couple of others, exactly the same fabric. I thought, what a huge coincidence. And it was several moments later before I found the pattern that I’d been wanting to use. And that’s when I thought, this is more than a coincidence. And then it was nearly an hour later when I got to the bottom of the bag and found her squares she’d made. And this isn’t a coincidence. This is God bringing my mother and me together finally. It’s going to take a long time to finish the next quilt but I’m using the squares that my mother made. And as I make each one, it’s like we’re making the quilt together. Working on the quilt is like having the relationship I always wanted to have with my mom.