Eatontown Woman Helps Gold Star Moms Remember Their Fallen Children

This Independence Day when many Americans will celebrate their freedom to grill, Helen Phillips of Eatontown will help a growing contingent of moms instead celebrate lives of sons given in service to a higher ideal.

Phillips makes memorial flags, mostly for the families of fallen servicemen, that feature photos and text on patriotic backgrounds that families can display in their homes or in their gardens. Each is personal and unique, and Phillips can narrate each one as the life story of that serviceman, where each photo was taken, like the last family vacation to Disney World that one soldier took just before he was deployed, and the photo of a fallen 19-year-old soldier playing the drums as a kid.

"You have to give me your story," she tells families. "I have to have it in my mind when I make the flag."

This isn't something the retired science teacher set out to do. In fact, at the outset, all she was looking for was a hobby to get her out in the community meeting and helping people. After begrudgingly attending a quilt show with her sister in 2010, Phillips came across quilts imprinted with photos and an idea broke open in her mind.

She would make quilts for people with memory impairments featuring the names and photos of their loved ones to help jar their memories. She started first with her Aunt Mary, who is in her late 90s, teaching herself everything from quilting to social networking to launch Remembering Quilts, which at first focused on people with Alzheimer's disease.

Phillips' husband Rob is a retired Naval officer, one of her sons is in the Navy and her daughter-in-law is in the Coast Guard. With those military connections her work soon gave way to helping vets and their families, particularly those with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. The memory quilts and pillows went to vets recovering from injuries and soon, families who were struggling with the loss of a loved one to war, and it's aftermath, like ultimately fatal injuries and suicide.

It was one mom who's son died as a result of injuries and subsequent surgeries, who approached Phillips about creating a memorial flag that quickly changed her business' focus. Phillips was making quilts for her son's daughters then when the mom said she needed a flag for her memorial garden.

"I said, 'I don't make flags,' and she said, 'I can't wait to see it."

This spring that original flag ended up in Pennsylvania in the Gold Star mom's garden where she has created a memorial for her son who is buried in Texas. Gold Star mom is the term for a mother who has lost her son or daughter during his or her military service. Doing this for the moms, Phillips said, is important because they don't receive any support or benefits from the military like military spouses do.

In creating that one flag, Phillips realized she had landed on something pivitol.

"I can help more people with these flags than I ever could with quilts," she said about the flag making process, which is much less time consuming. Seeing that pushed Phillips to throw her energy behind the new idea and gave herself a challenge to comfort as many families as she could by Memorial Day, and created 34 flags for 34 different grieving families.

To date she has created 50 flags and promised more than 20 more, with her goal to connect with as many Gold Star Moms as she can, to hear their stories and bring them some comfort, sometimes by locating long lost photos of their beloved sons. Phillips has yet to make a flag for a daughter lost in service, but with the rate she is connecting with Gold Star Moms in NJ and beyond, that likely won't take long. Phillips does not charge Gold Star Moms for their flags and instead directs those who want to give something to donate to OperationWard57 or FamilyofaVet. For anyone else who wants a flag, she charges $30, though she says she only charges to cover costs of her other work.

Perhaps the most compelling of all the flags she has made so far was for Debbie Moore, a Colorado Gold Star Mom who lost her son Nicholas when he was killed in action in Iraq in 2006. She found Phillips on a Facebook page for Gold Star Moms. In one photo taken by his buddy her son Nick appears is his camoflauge uniform in the field, arms outspread, head back, eyes closed, his mouth in a serene smile. Behind him the sun, low in the sky, is breaking through clouds.

"It looks as if Nick is at total peace, looking up to the Heavens...just beautiful," Debbie told Patch. The flag reads, "Sgt. Nicholas D. Torcotte, KIA Iraq, Our hero...forever loved, forever missed. Deployed to heaven 12/4/06."

"When I saw the finished flag," Moore said in an email. "I was so happy! It's just beautiful! Helen is so wonderful for doing this for our Gold Star Families, she has a very beautiful heart!"

Phillips continues to network, at meetings for New Jersey Gold Star Moms and on the web to connect with as many grieving families as she can. She also sees her work expanding to families who lost a loved one on Sept. 11, many of whom she said, have memorial gardens as well.

If you would like more information about Remembering Quilts and the flags, pillows and quilts Phillips creates, you can find her on Facebook at Remembering Quilts.