Longboat Key resident helps sister with COVID-19 ribbon memorial

On Feb. 16, friends, community members and families spread out along a swath of beach more than two football fields long. As one, they raised thick lines of plastic ribbons tied in every color of the rainbow as onlookers snapped photos and the ribbons snapped in the wind. In total, there were nearly 30,000 ribbons, one for every Floridian death due to complications of COVID-19. 

“When you see it in ribbons, it’s like, ‘Oh, my,’” Longboat Key resident and ribbon tier Judy Tobias said. “There are all these families who are missing someone at the table.” 

Judy and her sister Cathy Tobias, who was the visionary behind the project, have been tying ribbons since November. Cathy, a photographer and visual artist on Anna Maria Island, enlisted her sister’s help, and Judy wound up tying more than 12,000 ribbons. Cathy began the project as a way to contextualize the pandemic deaths in her own head and wanted to create something dimensionally interactive to help her community come to terms with it, too. 

“I had a hard time wrapping my head around the numbers and grasping it,” Cathy said. 

At the event, Cathy invited those in attendance to write the name of a loved one who had died from complications of COVID-19 on a ribbon, and baskets with markers and hand sanitizer were placed at the base of every few stakes. She doesn’t have anyone in her life who’s died due to the pandemic and acknowledged that the virus isn’t always or even often deadly, but said she knows the pain of losing a loved one unexpectedly and wanted to provide a way to come together as a community and share that sudden pain. 

“I want this to be an opportunity to grieve together and heal together,” Cathy said. “I hope it gives a sense of healing and a chance to mourn.” 

Judy’s sister, Cathy, was the visionary behind the project. She got the idea in early November, when the death toll in the state was about 16,000. Since then, it’s risen to about 30,000. Cathy wound up enlisting a team of volunteers to help tie, but Judy was the first. 

“When she started it she told me about it and I said, ‘I like that, can I help?’” Judy said. “So she brought me the materials. I wasn’t doing anything. It’s COVID. We were barely seeing each other.” 

The sisters only live a bridge apart, but locked down their respective homes when the virus hit. When Judy requested to be part of Cathy’s project, Cathy brought her ribbons and traded them through the car window in the Coquina Beach parking lot. Working on the project gave them a sense of purpose during a time when little could be controlled. 

“It was something we could talk about,” Judy said. 

At times along the long thread of ribbons, the colors abruptly change, though Cathy tied certain colors every 100 and 1,000 ribbons to keep track. She doled out what supplies she could find — sometimes neon pink and green, other times primary colors. Judy remembers some materials being harder to make knots out of than others. Even still, as long her sister will continue the project, she will too. 

“I’m going to keep tying,” Judy said. “Why not, at this point?”