Holly Pruett
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Celebrating Silas

1/28/2016

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Silas would have entered Kindergarten this year and turned six on March 16th. But five years ago he died just a week after his first birthday. "Every parent's worst nightmare," his mother Jodie Brauer says. He died in the night, "no calls for help, no warning signs, and no explanation."

About six months later, struggling under a tsunami of grief, Jodie decided to work towards running 12 miles, one mile for each month of Silas' life. What began as a private focus to mark Silas' first birthday, shared with a small group of family and friends, is now the Celebrate Silas 5K, an annual run/walk benefitting the Dougy Center.

After Jodie began volunteering at The Dougy Center, she says, " I recognized that my grief was not the only thing out there. Many, many other people are grieving too and sharing my grief with others is therapeutic for me."  She realized that the annual run could be "an opportunity for other folks to share their grief too". And so last year she featured a “We Remember” board, created by Silas' brother Felix, and called names of those being remembered.

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"It was definitely a somber few minutes and some folks were openly crying," she says, adding, "That is okay though. There is nothing wrong with crying in my opinion. One of my personal goals in this event is to help bring grief out into the open. I want to talk about Silas, even when it makes me sad."

Once participants took off running and walking, it "shifted the energy of the group back into the celebratory," Jodie says. "There is something about exercising together as a group that is uplifting."

Jodie's journey as an event organizer has been closely intertwined with her own journey of mourning. Since the beginning, the route has included a pause mid-event to tour the Crystal Spring Rhododendron Garden where there's a memorial bench for Silas. ("We wanted to have a public place to go and remember him and to have his name written out in the world. To tell the world that he was here," she says.) But that first year "I was hyperventilating while at the garden and could hardly look at the bench. Now, I really enjoy sitting on the bench at the event and chatting with folks about it."

In the third year, when she first opened the event to the public, Jodie invited the team from Fire Station 9 who had responded the morning that Silas died. They offered to bring the fire truck and let folks tour it. It sounded like a great idea until they pulled up at the site. "Seeing the fire fighters in uniform brought me right back to the morning Silas died," she says. "I started crying and shaking. They all felt so bad for me and offered lots of hugs. Luckily, I was able to pull it together."

That same year she realized that sticking to her own 12 mile run while public participants did a shorter route created more than a literal distance between her and the others. She says, "I welcomed people at the beginning, but most folks were long gone by the time I was back at the park. This combined with typical March weather and the singing of happy birthday to a dead baby made it less than celebratory. I decided to switch things up if we were to do it again."

That led to the ceremonial elements she's incorporated, and a unified route accessible to all. This year Jodie will use name tags to encourage participants to share the name of those they're remembering to encourage folks to talk and share stories about their loved ones. "I'm envisioning people coming up to you," she tells me, "seeing your name tag and asking, 'Will you share a story about Marcy with me?' I love to talk about Silas and don't get many opportunities. I hope folks will find this meaningful and that it will help build community within the group."

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Jodie still marks Silas' birthday with her own 12 mile run, followed by cake and videos of Silas. Separating her personal birthday run from the day of the public Celebrate Silas 5k has made it easier for her.  

I asked Jodie how she balances celebration and bereavement. "The short answer," she says, "is that I combine them. I live with the magnitude of Silas' loss everyday. I feel like I balance bereavement with everything that I do. When I was new to grief, I was really concerned about forgetting Silas. Me forgetting, other people forgetting. I think most folks want the opportunity to remember and talk about their loved ones. Especially this year, I hope that Celebrate Silas will be an opportunity to celebrate/talk about/remember our loved ones and that this helps honor our grief. Someone once told me that the magnitude of my grief was a testament of my love for Silas. I believe this to be true. I celebrate my love, my grief, and my memories because it is all that I have left."

Check out the photos and participant feedback below and please consider joining me and Amber in supporting Celebrate Silas 2016 on Sunday, March 6, 2016. More info here. To hear Jodie discuss anniversaries and birthdays in greater detail, listen to this Dougy Center's podcast.

"Not everyone has the wherewithal to create such a public, meaningful tribute to their precious loved one. As a fellow bereaved mother, I love the opportunity that Celebrate Silas provides to remember and honor my own son. The course is beautiful and tranquil. Thank you Jodie!" Jami Keene

“It was a really lovely event- as always. It's cool how it's grown, and I'm sure will grow every year. It will never make up for Silas' death, but it does help celebrate his life and the lives of others. Thanks for all that you put into it. I plan to be there every year!” Sara Ohgushi


“Congratulations, Jodie! We were honored to have the opportunity to participate again this year in what is such a wonderful event. The walk/run is so aptly named, because it really does feel like a celebration. Such an awesome sense of community and camaraderie is created when friends and strangers get together for a shared goal. What an amazing way to kick off the week!” Sue Johnson
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The Peace Militia

1/23/2016

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The news is full of the daily outrages committed by the armed militia occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in remote southeastern Oregon. What it doesn't report is the hard work taking place behind the scenes among those who seek real solutions to the dwindling opportunities and dismantled civic infrastructure experienced by rural communities.
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That's the work of the Rural Organizing Project, founded by my dear friend Marcy Westerling. While Marcy is no longer living, her work carries on.

When Marcy's husband Mike was in Burns to bear witness to the armed occupation, he noticed the local cancer support group had an upcoming event. Seeing a way to express solidarity with this community under siege (and pay homage to the organizing Marcy did among others with cancer), he reached out to the coordinator who welcomed the broader connection.

After I helped Mike get the word out through Marcy's blog, he heard back from his contact in Burns:
“Words cannot express how appreciative our community is for your support. Just the mere mention of your concern brought many of my coworkers, cancer survivors, and community members to tears (and goose bumps)! Someone mentioned, 'It’s like they’re the Peace Militia.'"

I wrote a note and sent a check this week and invite you to do the same. Details are in Mike's post, reprinted below.

My late wife Marcy liked to describe herself as a ‘kick-ass community organizer’. We met doing the work of speaking up for social justice and progressive values in rural Oregon, where Marcy founded the Rural Organizing Project. Here’s how I would compare us: If I was a pretty good basketball player in neighborhood pick-up games, Marcy was an NBA first-round-draft pick.

Lately, rural Oregon has been in the national and international news as armed militia men have occupied theMalheur Wildlife Refuge near the SE Oregon town of Burns. Burns is a wonderful small rural community, which Marcy visited several times for the ROP. The Refuge is incredible – think all the cowboy film scenery you’ve ever seen, only 10x better.

I knew Marcy was not going to forgive me if I didn’t get involved, so I’ve been working with her old Rural Organizing Project colleagues to witness events and help people see beyond the divisive shock that the armed takeover has dealt to the community and to the whole state. As the occupation drags on, we are learning that the bonds of community are being stretched to the breaking point.

The people of Oregon, and the whole USA, owe something to the people of Harney County and Burns. They have persevered despite some tragic and unjust events, and a lot of just plain hard times. From the violent dispossession of the Paiute people, to the dust bowl, to the collapse of the rural economy in the last three decades, the people of the area have managed to come together and maintain and manage a treasure in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

In a small effort to ‘pay it forward’, we are urging our friends to support the upcoming Feb 6th Sip for the Cure Masquerade Tea Party in Burns, a fund raiser for CAN Cancer – Communities Assisting Neighbors with Cancer.
This non-profit helps cancer patients with financial assistance for the many expenses that having a diagnosis imposes, from travel, to cozy blankets for chemo sessions. All the money stays in the community.

Tickets are $8.00. Write a check to CAN Cancer (there is no on-line portal). Address it to CAN Cancer, Harney District Hospital, 557 W Washington, Burns OR 97220.

Since you must use the postal service  anyway, please take the time to include a Thank You card to the people of Burns, Oregon to let them know we stand with them in this hard time.

Marcy never missed a chance to organize. She spent the last three years of her life organizing her fellow ovarian cancer sisters through this incredible blog, Livingly Dying. She is, no doubt, urging us on to pick up the baton and run with it.

Thank you for your support,
​Mike Edera
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R.I.P. Geezer John

9/27/2015

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PictureJohn Worley Symons, 6/7/39 – 9/5/15
I've written before about serendipity - a secular word for some of the mysteries that religion and quantum physics seek to explain. This is another story of the everyday magic that seems to be blessing my life on a regular basis....

Of the thousand-plus email address I've scrolled through as I've managed PDX Death Cafe and Death:OK event registration, a few provoke a smile whenever I see them - such as "geezr.symons". When I met the man who claimed the "geezer" honorific at a Death Cafe, I was immediately drawn to his warmth. 

Geezer John also turned up at a Death:OK volunteer gathering. He couldn't take on much, he told us, because he was in treatment for a rare form of leukemia. But hearing that we planned to feature a display of origami cranes created as a suicide prevention project in Alaska, he said he could fold cranes.

Little did I know that he was already an expert crane folder. When John and his wife Ann were living in Russia he folded 10,000 cranes in protest of George W. Bush's war with Iraq. Together they had made a pilgrimage to Hiroshima, where the origami crane tradition began with A-bomb victim Sadako Sasaki. The millions of cranes that continue to flock to that site have created a conundrum for local officials.

Earlier this month I discovered a few messages from John logged as unpublished comments on the Death:OK blog. I opened up my email program to compose a response to him when I noticed an email from someone with the same last name. It was John's wife of 48 years with sad news. "Well - hard to say," Ann wrote, "but my husband was quite looking forward to Death:OK… and then he died this past week quite unexpectedly and peacefully from leukemia."

She went on to say, "I know you have a 'crane lady' but I also have some cranes from John that he was making for the event." Ann and I arranged to meet. The bag she brought me contained hundreds and hundreds of cranes, nearly enough for each of the 500 participants at our upcoming event.

I had the privilege, in visiting with Ann, of learning a bit more about John, about the war protest cranes and their pilgrimage to Japan. I admired the simple but stunning hammered silver jewelry she wore, rich in symbolism, made by John - he never sold his work, she told me, only gifted it. We talked about her work as a librarian, about the kindness of John's oncologist (who called her to check in while we were having a cup of tea), and she gave me two of John's books on mortality.

​When I told a few of my Death:OK colleagues about John's death and the posthumous gift of his cranes, one remembered that John had been the very first person to purchase a Death:OK ticket. Through his cranes, he'll be there with us.

Ann told me, "Last Friday John wasn’t 'dying' and Saturday morning he was gone. We had spent almost all day at the infusion center - he was total John that day. Thursday we had gone to the Japanese Gardens. Saturday we were planning an outing to Art in the Pearl. The human body works in very mysterious ways and while we always think we have control, we don’t. He lives on in our hearts and memories."

In a final flourish of serendipity, I had an exchange with Ann today, sharing this blog post with her. She shared with me that the day had brought her another blog post from a longtime friend who also cited John's signature cranes. In it, the friend recounts a time the two couples chaperoned a student trip to Egypt. The kids were disinterested in the WWII cemetery in the North African desert until John intervened. His friend recalls:

"As each student stepped off the bus onto sand, John handed her/him an overflowing handful of paper cranes. 'Place these on graves, and as you do, read the names and ages of the soldiers,' he said. The students walked slowly, quietly among rounded headstones, reading. Within minutes, the tan landscape was dotted with color."

With the Jewish high holy days this month, I've thought often of the phrase, May his memory be a blessing. Yours is, John, yours is.

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Raspberries and Remembrance

7/25/2015

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I'm sad that the raspberries are done for the season. Sure, they're still for sale in the store. But in our yard, in the sunny southern patch we opened up during our kitchen remodel for the express purpose of planting these canes - they're done.

A raspberry in my mouth ranks among my favorite summer pleasures; right off the vine, even more so. Yet for me, the gastronomic pleasure has become the least of it.

Every time I approach the tangle of green in this corner of our yard to pluck its scarlet fruit, I think of my dad. Every time the berry releases into my fingers and travels to my mouth, I feel my father's presence.

Fifteen years ago when my vigorous brainiac father was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer at the age of 63, I cast about for moorings. A friend who'd lived through the death of her young father was one who threw me a line. She told me that her dad would make himself felt from time to time, a powerful felt-sense washing over her, more than a memory.

During the 18 months from my father's diagnosis to death I spent part of each week at their home off a gravel road on the Kitsap peninsula near Washington's Puget Sound. I lived with them the last summer of his life. The home was built into a hillside with a large garden cascading down the slope. My dad and stepmother had planted fruit trees, built raised beds for veggies, scavenged old tires for blueberry beds. They put in rows and rows of raspberries.

Every day during that last summer I went down to the raspberry beds and picked and ate, picked and ate. From the vine to my mouth, not stopping in my palm or resting in a bowl. I don't remember bringing any up to the house, though I imagine I did. What I remember is gorging myself, feeding something beyond hunger in my daily pilgrimage to these bountiful bushes.

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Earlier this week, as I officiated the funeral for a woman who died at the same young age of 65 as my Dad, of the same disease that took my friend Marcy, just up the hillside from where we buried Marcy, I shared these words by the great Irish poet John O’Donohue, on remembrance: 

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows,
And music echoes eternal tones.


Dad, I feel your presence in many moments. And always, always, at the raspberry canes.

My last post about my father links to the other writings I've done about him and his death.


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Marcy Rocks On

6/29/2015

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Marcy's long, elegant fingers were rarely at rest. "Purposeful" defined her every waking moment, even - or perhaps, especially - once she was livingly dying. For her hands, this often meant being occupied in the service of art and beauty. A quilter, Marcy laid down many a stitch while plotting organizing strategies in living room meetings around the state, and later, in the chemo chair and on flights en route to experimental treatments.

I'm not sure whether the rocks came before or after her Stage IV cancer diagnosis. I do know these exquisite touchstones became one of her many trademarks. Painting them calmed her and fulfilled that sense of purpose. Gifting them provided a physical link connecting her to scores of supporters and sister sufferers. 

When Marcy asked for prayers on Facebook, many responded with photos of their rocks. Her rocks in their hands. Her rocks on their altars. Her rocks on their supper tables. The day after her burial, when Rural Organizing Project activists gathered from across the state for their annual caucus, Marcy's rocks were among the cherished items on the remembrance table honoring her. 

I glimpsed the full impact of her rock project when I received a condolence note from Paul Cacciatore, founder of Libby's H*O*P*E* (*Helping *Ovarian Cancer Survivors *Persevere Through *Education). For years Paul had been providing Marcy with in-depth research leads, presented in layperson's language with the utmost care and compassion. When he learned of Marcy's death, he wrote to me with this story:

I understood who Marcy was soon after "meeting her" online. About a week after I provided Marcy with a detailed written email regarding ovarian cancer educational and treatment information, I received a mail package from her. The package contained a hand-painted "meditation rock" and a brief handwritten thank you note.

Marcy's thank you note read as follows:

"August 2012 -- Thank you, Paul & Libby's H*O*P*E*, for cheering me on with information and support as I live with stage IV ovarian cancer. Your work makes a huge difference to me and my community. I enclose a small token of appreciation. I paint these "meditation rocks" -- May this remind you of the amazing positive ripples you have on this planet. With love, Marcy Westerling"

Marcy's note of encouragement and meditation rock mean the world to me. If Marcy only knew what a tremendous impact her simple act of kindness had on me and my ongoing ovarian cancer advocacy efforts. To date, when I am responding to ovarian cancer survivors and their family members late at night on weekdays and weekends, I often pick up Marcy's meditation rock and pray for strength and inspiration. Moving ahead, Marcy's meditation rock will carry additional meaning for me, as a reminder of the positive impact that one person can have on the world. Truth be told, the rock will always remind me of the "amazing positive ripples" that Marcy had on this planet.
Libby's H*O*P*E* (*Helping *Ovarian Cancer Survivors *Persevere Through *Education): www.libbyshope.com
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A Secret Chord: Mourning Marcy

6/14/2015

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PictureMarcy Westerling, 3.25.59 - 6.10.15
During the five years and three months Marcy lived with stage IV ovarian cancer, she devoted most of her still-considerable energies to staying alive: ferreting out and tracking clinical trials; flying to Philadelphia, the Bronx, Marin County, and San Jose for ferocious treatments that she endured without complaint; organizing support teams and other patients wherever she went; exercising to maintain her strength; biking to twice-weekly acupuncture and shiatsu to bolster her system; trying to solve the the dilemma of what to eat when her gut was in rebellion; and telling the truth about it all on her widely-read blog, Livingly Dying. 

Most of the rest of her energy went to enjoying her hand-built life: quilting and reading, visiting and laughing with friends, working on her memoirs, advising her colleagues at the Rural Organizing Project and in other social justice endeavors (even serving as a Chief Petitioner on the minimum wage campaign this spring), walking her dog Sawyer, hanging out with her beloved husband Mike, and - perhaps most of all - sitting in and looking out at the lush gardens they'd built together at the home in Portland that became their refuge when cancer had evicted them from their life on a pond in the country.

But every once in a while Marcy directed her thoughts and her words to what would happen on the inevitable occasion of her death. On the one-year anniversary of her diagnosis she wrote a letter to her chosen sisterhood with instructions. Last week we faithfully fulfilled them. In the hours after she exhaled her last in her bed at home we washed her, dressed her in the clothes she'd chosen, tucked in all the items she'd wanted to have with her on her journey. As her loved ones gathered around her we finalized details of her burial. The next day her personal honor guard lowered her body into her new earthen home at River View Cemetery, by the edge of a wooded ravine on a sunny slope with a spectacular view of Mt Hood. She was wrapped in a shroud sewn by her sister, resting on a board crafted by her brother of white pine from his farm in upstate New York. We blanketed her with flowers and words of love and surely changed the pH of the soil with the abundance of our salty tears.

But there was something else Marcy said she wanted: kd lang to sing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. It's up to the magic of social media to make that happen at her memorial later this summer. But in the meantime I had planned to include the recorded version in the burial ceremony. 

As it happened, I had that very song on a CD in my car, Track 1 on a memorial mix for another dear friend who died of cancer a year ago. 

The last night of Marcy's life, as her body was laboring towards death, I left her bedside just after 11pm, expecting to return at 7am to relieve her night-time team. By that point she'd outlived so many goodbyes, endured so much, defied her clinical decline for so long, part of me had concluded she was immortal.

I turned on my car to the jarring blare of something annoying on the radio. I snapped the sound off. But as I started to drive away from the house, my heart still tethered to the people inside, I knew I needed something. I punched the CD button. Out poured kd lang, voicing our lamentation and wonderment.

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click to listen
Well I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
Well it goes like this:
The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
I drove north to my home, the song excavating held-back emotion from my chest. Two miles down the road my phone rang. Marcy's sister. "Marcy died." 
"I'll be right back," I replied. I took the first left, slingshotting myself around the block to retrace the asphalt I had travelled in the moments it took Marcy to cross the threshold. Marcy had died to the prayers of Leonard Cohen. 
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
My eventual return home was bathed in the yellowing glow of dawn's first light. The next night, as I prepared to lead Marcy's burial service, I realized we hadn't yet tested the CD player we planned to bring to the cemetery. Amber set it up with fresh batteries. I got the CD from the car. Wait, I thought. I fetched a photo of Marcy and the candle I'd been lighting for her and placed them on the kitchen bar with the CD player. I lit the candle, drew Amber close, and hit the play button. Out came the song, clear and strong.

I looked down at my watch. 11:20pm. Exactly 24 hours since the song had last played as Marcy took her last breath.

I sobbed and wept as Amber rocked me.

PictureMarcy, 2.5 years into her terminal diagnosis, at my 50th.
Please consider joining me and Amber in donating in Marcy's honor to the Marcy Westerling Legacy Fund. 

Read More:
Marcy Rocks On (6.29.15)
In Memory of Marcy Westerling (6.10.15 obituary)
Our Stories Matter (3.7.15)
I Am With You (2.5.15)
Marcy Speaks Her Truth (10.28.14)
My Friend Marcy Has Cancer. I Don't. Yet. (12.14.13)

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The Glorious Return

5/26/2015

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PictureL'Envers, in our family longer than anyone remembers
The last time I visited L'Envers, our ancestral farm on the shady side of the Val Pellice in Italy's Piedmont, the arbor was covered with kiwi vines. I was 25 years old. That was my first - and until now, only - visit since toddlerhood. 

In the first three years of my life, we lived on an air force base in France, affording multiple opportunities to join my mother's family across the Alps beneath the "treille" (French for trellis) draped with grape vines. 

My mother first brought me to L'Envers as a baby, not yet one year old. Chubby and tan and mobile, unlike the Italian bambini kept swaddled on a diet of baked flour paste, I earned the nickname "raggio di sole" (sunbeam) from my mother's granny. 

This month Amber and I joined my mother and her sister for an extended stay at L'Envers. I'm calling it "The Glorious Return," a bit tongue in cheek, after the legendary mountain crossing of our Pre-Reformation Protestant ancestors to these high alpine valleys from which they'd been driven. (Read my earlier blog post for this historic family back story.) 

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Below, photos from the last time we were all together around the stone table under the trellis: my mom Jane holding me, next to her grandmother Mary Bellini Roland, my grandmother Helen Jervis holding my infant sister Cindy, my aunt Madeline holding my cousin Mary. In the next photo we toddlers have been released, and on the right, more of the family. In the next row, me and Mary on our mother's laps at the newly opened Dulles airport awaiting our flight to France; Mary and me toddling in front of the wood shed in L'Envers two years later; the same ladders in the loft of the refurbished shed today.


For my mother and aunt, too, it's been an historic return. They lived at L'Envers for a third of 1947 when they were 9 and 10 years old. As soon as civilian flights started up following the war, my Nonna decided it was time to introduce her American children to her Italian family (she and my Nonno had immigrated to the US on the eve of WWII). The night they arrived in Torre Pellice they were at the center of a huge family dinner at the town house on the Piazza Liberta (where I later stayed 41 years later as a 25 year-old traveling with my Nonna, and where we had dinner with cousins last week, after another 27 years elapsed). Walking around town as a child, my mother reports, "I had the extraordinary experience of frequently being recognized by strangers on the street as 'la ragazza Americana di Elena e Ernesto.'  It suddenly felt as if I had a home town!

"To get to L’Envers, the family 'house in the country,'" my mother continues, "we had to walk through town, past the Waldensian cemetery, across the Pellice River on a bridge, then along a dirt road up the shady side of the valley. Approaching the house from the footpath, we crossed a meadow and saw it from below, a wide two-story house with large shuttered windows on the upper floor. Below the house was a large vegetable garden fenced with crossed sticks. The lower floor had a number of storage rooms, root cellars and the like. A steep climb at the right end of the house brought us to the upper level, with the front door to the house at our left, a grape arbor with a stone table and benches to the right, a large courtyard behind the house, and a two-story barn across the courtyard from the grape arbor. The far end of the main building, attached to the family house, was the house of the tenant farmer and his family. In 1947 there was still a lot of war damage visible in the house and in the vicinity."

My mom's memoir of their four months at L'Envers as children is a fantastic read. Since then, both she and Madeline have returned a number of times, but never as residents. L'Envers has passed through the male heirs in the family; the town house on the Piazza Liberta, to the females. Visits have been limited to a few hours, a glass of wine or a meal under the arbor. This year we had the great good fortune to be invited by our cousin Dan who is restoring the place (grapes back on the trellis, among many other improvements) to have it to ourselves, three weeks in all for my mom and aunt.

Irreverence aside, the return has been glorious indeed. I've documented its spectacular beauty and our various adventures on my Facebook page. Most important for me, though, has been the chance to inhabit the same rooms, roam the same hillsides under the same ancient chestnut trees, be dazzled by the same mountain peaks as generation upon generation of my matrilineal ancestors. To feel, in some ways as my mother did in 1947 - despite not speaking the language and barely knowing a soul - "as if I had a home town".
Upper left: my Nonna Elena Roland in large white collar with her brother Paulo to the left (killed by a sniper just after the war), and sister Anna on the far right holding baby brother Alberto, who also immigrated to the US; his son Dan is now the master of the house. Upper middle: My Nonno Ernesto Jervis. Upper right: my newlywed grandparents shortly before emigrating. Lower left: My Nonna, my mother, and me in the mountains above L'Envers in 1964. Lower right: The Glorious Return, Madeline and Jane in 2015.
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Our Stories Matter

3/7/2015

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PictureMe, Marcy, Suzanne Pharr, Deb Ross
When I was just 26 years old and barely qualified, I was hired as executive director of Oregon's statewide coalition of battered women's shelters and rape hotlines. Three of the women I met through that work remain my closest friends. Some were mentors from the founders' era, good enough to help me learn what I didn't know I needed to learn. Some were comrades, doing the work with me, side-by-side. 

Comrade-in-chief was Marcy Westerling. Director of the women's resource center in a struggling rural county northwest of Portland, she stepped forward to chair the state coalition board during the key years of my five-year tenure. My apartment became her pied-à-terre in town; her houseboat was my country escape. We protested in the nation's capitol together. We strategized any number of internal and external political dilemmas. We became family. And when she was ready to leave Columbia County Women's Resource Center to found the Rural Organizing Project, my office served as fiscal sponsor.

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As readers of my earlier posts about Marcy know, she's been living with Stage IV ovarian cancer for nearly five years now. While it sidelined her from her daily work in small-town communities, it hasn't kept her from forging new roles as a leader. Her blog, Livingly Dying, has built a large, devoted audience around the world with her truths from the frontlines of medical science.

And she's been diligently documenting her life's legacy, alongside the stories of dozens of other everyday activists, in a new project called Rural Oregon Voices. Last Sunday a large crowd abandoned the early spring sunshine to gather at the Peace House for a preview of this extraordinary project, shepherded by former ROP organizer Sarah Loose. 

I defy anyone to listen to the 7 minute teaser of the oral history clip featured below without wanting to hear more. The verdict in the room was unanimous - people doubled and tripled what they'd planned to give in support of the project (and the Marcy Westerling Collection on Rural Organizing being established at the University of Oregon). In a world steeped in cynicism and despair, where communication is now meted out in screen shots and sound bites, we need these stories. 

Please join me in making a donation to this important project, to make these stories available to the people whose lives they will change.

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click the image to go to the preview site & then please join me in making a donation to this important project
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RIP on Facebook

2/28/2015

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Pictureclick photo to learn about Donna
Today when I woke up, Facebook reminded me that it's my step-brother Joseph's birthday. It also reminded me that my friend Donna Parson is dead. Of course, that's not what the Facebook notification said. It told me only that it's Donna's birthday. Donna died last December from complications following heart surgery. 

The year before, she had accompanied me and other members of the Karuna Foundation board of directors to Bhutan. Traveling there had been on her bucket list, but aside from scratching that itch, her presence on the trip added depth to our understanding and warmth to our group dynamics.

While I'd only known Donna a bit more than a year before she died, she deeply influenced many of those who've had a deep influence on me. I miss her. I miss the opportunity to get to know her better, to learn from her, laugh with her, read her novel about her Estonian ancestors.

I appreciated Facebook for stirring the longings that connect me to Donna's life - but I also cringed. Would there be posts on her page from people oblivious to the fact that Donna could no longer read their birthday greetings? Facebook has been much in the news for the modern dilemmas of on-line memorialization.

I clicked over to her page and found perhaps a few of those, but mainly lovely messages of remembrance. People visiting her page much as once we visited a gravesite.

Donna's daughter Joanna offered a lively list of ways to celebrate Donna today. May we all be remembered so well.

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Hearts Open Hearts Broken

1/31/2015

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PictureMarcy's Angel Flight to treatment
In a week that began with a sad and joyful celebration of the life of a beloved matriarch; that ends today in another such ceremony, each the result of 30 hours of immersion in some of the most intimate tasks of family life; a week in which I sat in a circle with a 30 year old and heard him say the words, "I have a brain tumor" while maintaining a long-distance vigil for my friend Marcy who lies in a California ICU bed undergoing experimental treatment for her nearly five-year-old stage IV cancer - in this week I've thought much about what it takes to live broken-hearted. 

Without reliance on the easy platitudes, the bargains, the distractions. To feel the pain of it all, the wonder of it all, the mystery that envelopes and perhaps even carries us all, if we can only glimpse it.

If we're to develop the muscles that enable us to live hearts-open/ hearts-broken, reading Andrea Carlisle's exquisite blog about life with her near-centenarian mother Alice should be required reading. A regular dose will do your soul good and teach you much about wrapping your arms around all of it: the pain and the joy of the full catastrophe of life.

This week, with Andrea's permission, I share a story of the ways Andrea and her mother honor and feed their relationship with sister Marla. Thank you, Andrea, for the fine example you offer to our grief-illiterate times.

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Go Fish
by Andrea Carlisle (c) Go Ask Alice

Marla liked to play cards. Specifically, she liked to play a game called Go Fish. During her lifetime, we played many thousands of games of Go Fish.

You can play with two people. The rules are simple:

Deal six cards to each player.

One player asks the other for something she already has in her hand. For example, if I have a five in my hand, I may ask if you have any fives.

The goal is to accumulate pairs. The pairs pile up. Whichever player ends up with the most pairs is the winner.

If you have a card I ask for, perhaps that five I mentioned above, you must give it to me. I take it and put the two fives down together on my side of the table.

If you do not have the card I ask for, you tell me to “Go fish.”

The anniversary (36 years) of Marla’s death was on Monday. She died on my father’s birthday. He died twenty-one years after she did. Twenty-one sad birthdays.

A few days before the anniversary, Alice seemed to be on and off track about my sister’s life. She could remember some things, but not others, things I thought she would never forget. “Who put the deck of cards in Marla’s hands at her funeral?” she asked me one day. “Did you?” 

Read the rest on Andrea's blog...


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