D.C. CROWDS RECALL AIDS VICTIMS THROUGH A COMMON THREAD

The emotional tumult still is so very fresh for Ellen Nason. It rushed up on her yesterday on the Ellipse as she stood, surrounded by thousands, before a big red heart on a panel of the AIDS quilt. "Our son, our brother, our uncle, our friend," it read. She stood and cried, which was what so many others were doing. A volunteer with the quilt project handed her a tissue.

Her brother, Bill Gillooly, 25, had AIDS. He died in December.

"We all took care of him," she said, adding that her 9-year-old son Timmy, who stood nearby with his hands stuffed into his pockets, had designed the panel. Gillooly "died in our home. We had him for five months and we went through the wasting away, the incontinence and the diapers, and by the end you're just begging for him to die. You don't think you'll reach that point, but you do."

The memory sent her tears rushing out even faster. She had come from Boston with her husband and two children to lend support to the AIDS quilt project and see her brother's panel displayed with thousands of others commemorating AIDS victims.

"These are tears of joy. There's just so many people. It just warms your heart to see," she said.

The Ellipse was a sea of humanity. U.S. Park Police estimated the crowd at 15,000. People walked slowly along the five miles of fabric walkways in the quilt's grid, often locked arm in arm, and viewed the 8,288 handmade rectangular panels, each created in memory of a person who died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

A roll call of the names of dead went on like a funeral dirge throughout the day.

And last night, U.S. Park Police said about 8,600 people kept a candlelight vigil around the White House, the Ellipse and on the Mall around the Reflecting Pool. As the crowd finally began to break up, candle bearers set their lights adrift on the pool.

The quilt, which will be on display at from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. today, is five times bigger than one laid out along two blocks of the Mall last year. It is the product of San Francisco's Names Project.

Along with individual panel tributes to victims, the quilt includes blank sheets of canvas on which people can scrawl messages to the departed or to the world. "Please, no more," read one such message, signed "Joshua Stuart, Baltimore."

"Dear God: I pray that soon this plague, too, shall pass. Be with us and those departed. Amen," said another. And then there was this: "James, you silly boy, you weren't supposed to leave yet. Love ya, Douglas."

Roger Spotts, 52, of San Francisco, knelt down on the canvas and penned a message to two special friends.

"Hi, Jack and Bill. I told you I'd be here in Washington, and I am. I love and miss you so very much." They were Jack Mort and William F. Brown.

Spotts, a medical technician and volunteer with the Names Project, said: "Jack was my companion for 27 years. He passed away two years ago . . . . He went from almost 200 pounds. When he died he was 94 pounds . . . .

"Bill is a friend of many, many years. He died in May."

The emotional impact of the quilt, which is spread out in view of the White House, could be heard in the chorus of sniffles and seen in the parade of people wiping tears from their cheeks and clinging to each other.

"I don't know how much of this I can take," one man said.

Gordon Overslaugh, Tom Bartlett and Andrea Stollmach, all of the District, walked along slowly with a man named Mike, 23, of Virginia, who said he did not want his last name published because his employer does not know he is gay.

The sight of one panel "just made me realize that these are real people that are dying," said Bartlett, 27. "I was walking along fine and just fell apart."

"When you see things in the panel that belonged to them -- T-shirts, hats, there's a stuffed dog on one -- it's just devastating," said Stollmach, 45. "It's tough."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.