There is no good word for scrapbooks made out of obituaries.

Robert “Bob” J. Quinn, who started cutting obituaries out of newspapers in 1983, originally called them his “AIDS Memorial Books.” He completed 26 volumes, containing more than 7,000 obituaries in total.

The memorial books, now digitized, are a testament to loss and remembrance. HIV/AIDS killed many, many people during the epidemic that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. Since the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an estimated 675,000 Americans have died from the disease. More than 40 years later, it is apparent that we will never know the name of every American who died of AIDS.

Combing through Quinn’s memorial books, what sticks out most to me is that he literally highlighted people who were never in the headlines, their names in oranges, pinks, and yellows, with years of deaths written in blue, red, or black in the margins — loss in technicolor. Reading these obituaries and annotations provides a stark and painful reminder of persistent loss; when going through the memorial books, it becomes almost overwhelming.

Quinn himself had AIDS, and spent time as a patient at the Hospice at Mission Hill in Boston. John J. Podolske, Quinn’s eventual healthcare proxy, met Quinn as a volunteer at Mission Hill in 1992. As Podolske said of Quinn, he was “the type of person you never forget.”

“​​He did those books because he wanted to make sure everybody got remembered, and he knew a lot of people that passed away too,” Podolske explained.

“He didn’t want the AIDS crisis to be pushed as a non-memory thing. That’s why he did the remembrance books, and he did it for as long as he could,” he added.

Photo of Robert “Bob” J. Quinn with his “AIDS Memorial Books.” By Courtesy of Elsa Dorfman

Quinn pored over newspapers, carefully clipping obituaries for the blur of names, faces, and too-young ages dead from the disease he was struggling with. The obituaries were sometimes for people Quinn knew personally, friends now reduced to a few biographical lines.

Quinn kept persisting in this exercise, knowing that his own name could end up in the obituary section one day yet likely never a memorial book. Podolske witnessed Quinn “right up near the end” as “he kept going on those books, collecting those obituaries, making sure nobody was forgotten.”

“Those books were one of his high priorities,” Podolske said.

Patients at Mission Hill typically had six months or less to live. Quinn “way outlasted six months,” according to Podolske.

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Podolske described one of Quinn’s other favorite things to do: acquiring collector plates. “There wasn’t a week that went by that he didn’t get a collector’s plate in the mail,” Podolske said.

However, after six months, Podolske said he saw a change in Quinn: “I think he started getting depressed being in there, with watching everybody come in and die around him and he was still around.”

So Quinn left.

A letter addressed to Robert “Bob” J. Quinn, found in his memorial books. By Courtesy of The History Project

“The room he was in was on the higher side of the building,” Podolske described. “So, this one morning, he just hung himself out the window and dropped, something like a 12-foot drop, and he ran down and took off.”

Quinn ended up on an Amtrak train to his hometown, Albany, N.Y. After he was eventually brought back to the hospice, it was determined that he was “too well” to be a patient there anymore.

In lieu of continuing to stay at the hospice, Quinn was moved to an apartment across from Symphony Hall, where he became known for his annual Christmas parties — each party his “last,” since Quinn didn’t know when AIDS would finally kill him. As Podolske remembered, “I think we ended up having eight annual Last Christmas parties before he finally died.”

When Quinn died in 2002 — far outlasting the six months that Mission Hill had expected — Podolske ended up taking care of his estate, sorting through Quinn’s specific instructions on distributing his plate collection. Podolske, a Vietnam War veteran, got a plate commemorating the Vietnam War.

After Quinn’s funeral, his friends and family held a “big party at his apartment” — which felt more like a celebration of life rather than a rumination on death.

“He wanted people to live, that’s really what it was,” Podolske said.

‘A Special Place’: The Hospice at Mission Hill

The Hospice at Mission Hill was in an old brownstone, with various Boston designers each picking a room to decorate. By Courtesy of Brad A. Gregory

All these years later, Pat Gibbons still remembers Quinn. She remembers him collecting the plates (she believes she received one commemorating Ellis Island), and assembling the memorial books. When I asked her what she remembers from the Christmas parties, she said, “They were wild. I mean, he was just so funny,” emphasizing the words.

Gibbons opened the Hospice at Mission Hill in 1989, serving as its first director. The hospice was intended as a place for people in their final stages battling with AIDS to pass in peace. Through my interviews about the hospice, one phrase kept coming up — that Mission Hill was a “special” place.

For many patients with HIV/AIDS during this time, hospices provided a sense of comfort and acceptance which was difficult to come by; people with the disease were often stigmatized, and even rejected by their friends and families. Liz Kass, one of the first medical directors of Mission Hill, described the importance of providing housing and medical assistance for vulnerable, particularly unhoused and marginalized, populations: “People who would come from shelters or prison, or just sort of ‘street existence,’ you put them in a room, you actually gave them their medication regularly, and fed them. And lo and behold, although they looked like they were dying when we admitted them, they weren’t with a little bit of housing and care.”

“Shocker, right?” she added.

A table set for a Passover Seder at the Hospice at Mission Hill. By Courtesy of Brad A. Gregory

As Brad A. Gregory, the former head chef at the hospice who worked at Mission Hill from its opening to its closing, told me, “We were determined to make the place a home. We had an army of volunteers, people in the community who just said, ‘I want to help, how can I help?’”

A close-up of a table set for a Passover Seder at the Hospice at Mission Hill. By Courtesy of Brad A. Gregory

Gregory’s culinary creations worked to make the hospice more of a home. “I started doing holidays […] we’d do crepes and pancakes and all sorts of things on Mardi Gras […] and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Opening Day at Fenway Park, anything I could think of to make a themed luncheon or dinner,” he said.

The hospice also had some notable visitors. When Elizabeth R. Taylor, a prominent AIDS philanthropist and actor, was in Boston promoting a new perfume, she pulled Gibbons aside and expressed her desire to come visit the Hospice at Mission Hill.

“And she did,” Gibbons said. “Liz Taylor came and spent the entire afternoon and met with every single resident.”

Baba Ram Dass, a guru and psychology researcher at Harvard who led the countercultural push for psychedelics, also visited the hospice.

“I was awestruck in his presence. He would stop into the kitchen and have tea with me,” described Gregory.

For many of the employees and volunteers at the hospice, their endeavor in caring for patients with HIV/AIDS was deeply personal.

As Gregory said, “Many of my close friends came to the hospice and ended their lives there.”

Although he noted that these tragedies happened at different points in his life, Gregory remarked, “I did two tours of Vietnam in the late 60s, early 70s, and the AIDS epidemic was my trial by fire. I have to say, the war was less emotionally taxing.”

Panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt of the Mission Hill Hospice. By Courtesy of the National AIDS Memorial

Even dealing with death, the staff of the hospice wanted to practice comfort and honor. As Gibbons described, “What we always did was when someone died, that room would remain quiet for 24 hours after the death, and we would make a point of putting something that either meant something to that person or something that would remind us of that person in that space for that period of time, to honor the fact that they were there.” They would also place a candle and a card for the person who had passed near the entrance of the hospice.

Mission Hill needed to both honor losses and maintain a hopeful environment for current patients.

“There were a lot of really lovely things and a lot of really difficult things,” Kass, the former medical director, said.

Lives Beyond Death

Looking through Quinn’s digitized memorial books hurts. Conversations play out on the cut-out pages, as families describe the lives and wishes of the deceased and hope they are now in a better place. But this can only ever be a one-way conversation.

As the years inch on and we move further away from the start of the AIDS epidemic, we risk remembering only statistics. But numbers cannot communicate the personal nature of loss. An empty seat at a breakfast table or a side of the bed no longer used cannot be felt in a minus sign. What’s missing from the equation is grief and loneliness: love with nowhere to go but to a beneficiary six feet underground or sitting on a mantle.

When I look at the memorial books, I think of all the parts of people’s lives that couldn't fit inside the word limit of a newspaper obituary announcing that they died of AIDS. When thinking about Quinn himself, I think of his Christmas parties and his plate collection, undercurrents of joy and hope which revealed so much more about who he was than a simple line about a diagnosis. I think about the employees and volunteers who gave so much of themselves to the Hospice at Mission Hill, and how they showed up to help some of Boston’s most marginalized and vulnerable.

Learning from their examples, we must work to show up for people in our own communities, to see the life of each person around us as the complex tapestry it is. From supporting people with HIV/AIDS today to ensuring that places like Mission Hill can be created in the future, caring about the most vulnerable members of our communities starts now.

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The Hospice at Mission Hill has long since closed. But the ways in which it helped people both live and die must be remembered.

During our interview about what it was like working at the hospice, Gregory told me, “You don’t get prepared for letting go of the people that you’ve become a very intimate friend with over an intense period of time.”

The quiet over the phone was loud.

He continued: “I say that and in the silence here, faces come up. Faces that I remember very intensely.”

Shanivi Srikonda ’24, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology concentrator in Quincy House.