Halloween. All Hallows' Eve. The beginning of Hallowmas, the time of the year dedicated to remembering the dead.

Does it seem to you like Halloween has overtaken Christmas as an excuse to deck out our houses and yards with thematic decor? On my walks through the neighborhood I'm amazed by house after house that's gone way beyond a little nod to harvest time (pumpkins and corn stalks) to full-scale graveyards, bloody body parts, and cavorting skeletons.

A simple expression of creative dress-up for our homes? Or is the increased embrace of the macabre at this time of year an acceptable way to bring death out of the closet, into our front yards, and onto the streets? Perhaps this is an itch we as a society are longing to scratch more than one night a year?

To observe this Hallowed time, I'm heading off to a Death Cafe, the first I'll attend here in Portland as participant and not organizer. To share the experience with all of you, I'm featuring Why I Talk About Death, a short video created by one of my PDX Death Cafe co-founders, Kate Brassington.

My answer, at the moment, for why I talk about death? So that every day may be Hallowed.

I lost my father early on to his work and then to the four-year affair that culminated in my parent's divorce on my 12th birthday. Six days later he moved across a continent and an ocean, in a self-imposed exile that lasted twenty years. By the time he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at age 63, I had so much practice in losing my dad that I knew how I wanted to do it this final time. I spent eighteen months as his part-time caregiver. It was the best our relationship had ever been. When he died, I had no regrets. 

I’ve heard it said that forgiveness is a process, not an act. In my case I recognized the process only once it was complete.

I had held it together during those precious months when my father and step-mother's needs were at long last congruent with my desire to be family with my father. But when it was over, I needed an outlet for the hurt I still felt over his repeated abandonment; for the fear I felt throughout this, my first real confrontation with mortality.

My father hadn't wanted a funeral, according to my step-mother - and she couldn't handle one more thing. I received a yoghurt container with a portion of his ashes, his veteran's flag, a threadbare B Kliban cat t-shirt I'd given him 25 years earlier, and other mementos of his life. I decided to organize a backyard memorial service of my own. 

I'd completed all the logistical planning, determined the elements of the ceremony. Only one piece remained: clarifying what I needed to say to my father through this memorial, what I needed to embrace and to release. I planned a two-day retreat to the Oregon coast where I would immerse myself in the remnants of my life with my father - the letters we'd exchanged, the family story interviews I'd done with him in graduate school, photos, journals.

I asked my mother to be there for me, a primal "I want my mommy!" impulse as I faced my grief. As soon as we settled into our motel room I feared I'd made a huge mistake. We had shared the loss of my father from the very first, when he brought us home from the hospital after my birth, left the car running, and went immediately back to work. But she, of course, had her own experience of this man - her first love, her husband of 15 years, the father of her children whom she'd seen only twice after their divorce, who had refused her request to say good-bye once diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our feelings about this man, loving and losing him, had been so enmeshed for so many years, could I step into and through my own process in her presence?

Without needing to discuss it, my mom wisely headed out to the porch looking out to the sea. She sat with her back to me reading as indoors I spread all of the artifacts out on the bed and wrote and sobbed my way to what I knew to be true. When I finished, she came inside. I read what I had written to her. 

Among the things I was ready to say to my father was: “You did the best you could.” My mom objected: No! He could have done better. He should have done better!

Yes, of course, he should have. And in theory, he could have. But what stood sturdy inside me then was not the ways I’d been hurt by his failings, but my recognition that his capacity to love had been so stunted. I remembered the story he’d told me about a contest of wills with his 1st grade teacher; he’d refused to draw because she hadn’t told him how. What first grader doesn’t know how to draw? 

I felt blessed that my heart had not been similarly confined. I knew in that moment that I’d crossed a bright line from the treacherous emotional terrain I’d traversed with my mother and father, to a new, more spacious place. 

Read the story of the surprising end to the memorial ceremony I created for my dad, how I marked the 10-year anniversary of his death, and the eulogy I wrote for him after all those years.

Downsizing into a studio apartment would be a challenge for most of us. For a quilter with a lifetime supply of fabrics - ouch!

But quilters are adept at patching together ingenious solutions. And so Becky Bent devoted a whole wall of her one-room home in a retirement community to a 3-D collage of textiles, quilt pieces, and other visual inspirations. A coworker gifted her with a loft bed to stack against the opposite wall, creating a nook for her sewing machine underneath. In place of the folding panel doors covering the two wide, shallow closets she hung heirloom quilt tops she had discovered in long-ago forays to antique shops. 

In her early 60s, Becky is one of the youngest residents at Westmoreland Union Manor. "When most people see me they assume I'm visiting a parent here," she tells me. But despite the cramped quarters, the place suits her needs in retirement. She gets to garden ("Gardeners are the nicest people," she says) in a hidden landscape ribboned by Crystal Springs. There's her daily hour at the pool tables in the rec room, and a gang of women teaching her mahjong. The crafts room gives her space to stretch out her quilting projects and the place is full of interesting people with a lifetime of stories. All in all, a nice balance of communal activity and the privacy of a solitary studio. 

But one of the greatest benefits to her new situation - and the one that inspired my visit - is that it finally provided a home for "B. George: A Portrait of My Father," a life-sized quilt Becky created nearly 25 years ago as the thesis project for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

"My father died in 1983 of lung cancer which had metastasized to his brain. He was 60 years old," reads her artist's statement alongside the quilt, now hung in a main hall of Union Manor. 

"He was a kind and gentle man who loved to garden, and was a voracious reader who kept a notebook listing every book he had read. He had a great sense of humor, and was a great punster. I still miss him, and I think of him every time I hear a pun (bad or good!!)"

Becky's mother "didn't do funerals". So creating this tribute quilt provided Becky with some sense of closure. The shirt is one of B. George's own, a wild striped affair of stylized animal heads. The books feature titles her dad had treasured. A real garden glove keeps his flowers perpetually tended.

For all the soothing the making of the quilt provided, Becky finds even greater completion in seeing it hung, 30 years after his death, in a place where others on the downslope of life can connect to it, their own stories, and to her. It's likely B. George, if he could hear the chatter in the corridor, might learn a few new puns, both good and bad.

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Deep thanks for this story to Becky Bent, who takes commissions for quilts. Contact me if you'd like to connect with her. For more stunningly beautiful commemorative quilts, check out Lori Mason Design.

When her mother died 19 years ago, the funeral, "was like a bad Seinfeld episode," Kathy says. "It provided me with a good story to tell at parties but not much else." Elizabeth Marie Hollway Halverson had died rather abruptly when Kathy, her youngest daughter, was across the country on a business trip. "She was just gone,” Kathy remembers – there was no opportunity to say goodbye.

During the last year, events in Kathy's life turned her thoughts increasingly to her mother. She found herself in a closet pulling down a nearly forgotten box she'd packed away at the time of her mother's death. Inside was a veritable treasure trove: packets of letters Marie had written to Kathy, photos and other keepsakes. 

And then she read the blog post I'd written, titled "It's Never Too Late," about the celebration of life a colleague had done for her step-father eight years after his death. Kathy decided, as a birthday present to herself, to create a ceremony of remembrance for her mom.

Over several months we worked together as Kathy excavated her memories of her beloved mom. She read through all the lovely letters her mother had written her, many from the happy period in later life when she and her second husband roamed North America in a travel trailer. Kathy wrote a letter in return, sharing who she had become and expressing what she hadn't been able to at the time of mother's death. She sorted through photos, creating a beautiful book captioned with some of her mom's wise little observations on life. Together, we wrote a eulogy, weaving Marie's words together with Kathy and her sister's memories. 

As Kathy's birthday approached, she curated the other elements that would comprise the ceremony: an opening chime; a favorite poem, dog-eared in her mother's worn leather-bound poetry volume; the song Stand by Me performed with raw emotion by a longtime friend who had weathered much loss of his own; and a fountain for the garden, to be dedicated to her mother with a blessing through this ceremony.

On a late summer day in her backyard, surrounded by her husband, the 18 year-old son who had never had the chance to know his grandmother, her sister and a few close close friends, Kathy said goodbye - and hello - to her mother in a new way. 

About the experience she says, "After Mom died, I missed her deeply. It shadowed most everything.  Now, having put in the work I did to create this ceremony, I feel like she's there, inside of me. Not as my mom, necessarily, but as her. As Marie. I can feel how and why she made the decisions she made in her life. I can feel her as a part of me - the best part. I guess she's always been there, but before, I didn't really conceive of how alike we are, and I get that now. 

"I'm at peace.  And I can look out my back door and there are hummingbirds, and bushtits and chickadees that all bathe in that fountain.  How cool is that?"

The ceremony closed with these words, drawn from one of the childhood books Kathy and Marie had cherished together:

"Kathy, today, for your birthday, you’ve given herself the gift of writing a closing chapter to her story with your mother. With the suddenness of your mom’s death, there was no last page. Now, there is. The story is not over, of course, for Marie’s legacy clearly lives on. But the book is now like Marie’s poetry collection, well-worn, well-loved, full of emotion, full of beauty – complete. 

"It’s as though Marie is saying to us as Charlotte said to Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web: 'I feel peaceful. Your success is to a small degree, my success. Your future is assured.  You will live, secure and safe.  Nothing can harm you now. All these sights and sounds will be yours to enjoy – this lovely world, these precious days….'

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