Memory Patches and Vests

Memory Patches

In the biker world, when someone dies, they are memorialized on a vest or cut with a patch. The patches tell only the briefest parts of the person: their names, nicknames, dates of birth and death. 

The colors vary from personal favorites to club colors - whatever is relevant and shows a little more about their lives.

Here at our store, Freedom Thirteen Cycle, we created a memorial for bikers from the Mahoning and Shenango Valleys. We had a small banner made with a quote from a song, "We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun..." - so appropriate for the life of a biker. It doesn't matter how they died, and some didn't ride, but instead rode on the back seat sharing a life in the wind with their partners.

The idea came to me while reading the book, All The Names, by Jose Saramago. In this book, the main character, Jose, has been a basic clerk at the records department which records all the births, marriages, and deaths in a large city. It's a huge facility with aisles and aisles and shelves and shelves of dusty boxes of the dead. They contain all the names. Well, it was a really good book, and it struck me that I'm like Jose, day in and day out getting to record the names of the dead, only in my world in the form of memory patches.

I've seen many names of the dead. I've met their loved ones. I've touched their vests and made them a monument of sorts, a wearable record, a place for the dead to get yet another ride in the wind and sun.

Sometimes bikers come up with other ways to remember. In early 2017, a trucker/biker had come into the store with his brother's vest - the one he was wearing when he was in an accident on his bike and died. The trucker, Mr. Bevan, had been looking for someone who would be willing to make life-like wings out of denim on the back of his brother's vest (he had tried with some faded denim and markers, noting that his brother had gone down on his right side by using red in the lines). It was one of those rare challenges I accepted. For a week, I painstakingly created layers of denim with a feathery look, sewing down parts and leaving parts flip up, with the result pictured here. 

It's up to the living to remember the dead.

They do so in many ways.

Sometimes the living forget, or avoid what may be too painful.

However the living deal with death, there are no wrong ways, but as evidenced here,

the living do care.

So if you're reading this, keep on living.

If you choose to, keep on remembering. 

Most importantly:

have joy

have fun

have many wonderful seasons in the sun.

~ Holly, a.k.a. Stitchblade