CLEVELAND — Each stitch of Kimberlin Dennis' quilt represents a piece of Darryl Dennis, her husband who was diagnosed with AIDS and died 30 years ago.

“This quilt here is the one that my mother-in-law made of him,” Kimberlin said. "This quilt here represents my husband. He was born in 1958, the year the rocket Sputnik went up into space, so that's how he got his nickname — Sputnik.”

Kimberlin said she received the same diagnosis.

“Thirty years ago, I was diagnosed two weeks after him. We both were diagnosed in March of 1994, and I gave myself five years, and here it is 30 years later,” she said. “So I'm just thankful and grateful to even be alive, to even be here standing before you today [and] to even be able to share my story.”

Now, she is sharing Darryl’s story as the executive director of Ministry of Hope Inc., book author and advocate for AIDS awareness. This month, she’s joining thousands of other families in showcasing their loves one’s legacy. The AIDs Memorial Quilt, founded in 1987, is the biggest community project in the country and is now made up of more than 50,000 panels. These blocks are on display across the United States, including MetroHealth Hospital in Cleveland.

“It's just a beautiful thing to be able to see and know that these people were loved and that they share this personal moment in their lives, a little piece of their story,” Kimberlin said. “And that's what I wanted to do with Darryl's quilt. I wanted to share a little piece of him with the world.”

While Darryl’s mother’s quilt is on display at the hospital, Kimberlin said she’s unsure where her panel ended up but is still carrying a photo of her creation.

“In the quilt that I made for my husband, he loved the poem footprints in the sand. So that's why I have the feet going across the bottom,” she said. 

Jen McMillin Smith is the manager of compass services at MetroHealth, a program for people living with HIV and AIDS. Cases have decreases significantly since the start of the epidemic, she said, but numbers still remain high.

“So in Cuyahoga County, there are approximately 6,000 people living with HIV [and] we treat about 2,000 of them here at MetroHealth,” McMillin Smith said. “So it is still something that impacts a lot of people in our community and disproportionately impacts marginalized and minoritized people.”

That’s why the hospital is partnering with the LGBT Center of Cleveland and the Early Center for the Arts to display blocks of the AIDs memorial quilt around the city.

“We really want people to know that HIV is still a thing. People can live long, healthy lives with HIV,” McMillin Smith said. “... People can get to what's called undetectable, which means there's such a tiny amount of virus in their system that they're actually not transmittable to anybody else.”

Even though treatment has come a long way, Kimberlin said there’s still a need for more compassion and education. 

“If we can get past the ignorance and the stigma of people treating us like we got the plague, or like this disease is so dirty, you know and love on us and show us the love that we so deserve,” Kimberlin said. “Because if we had any other conditions or diseases, people would treat us different with those.”