When her beloved mother Phyllis T. Zeff died on Christmas Eve of 1994 after a 15-month battle with cervical cancer, Shae Uisna was “nearly destroyed. If I could have willed myself to stop existing,” Shae recalls, “I would have.” Now Shae offers comfort and community to other women who are similarly bereaved through her annual Motherless Mother's Day Celebration.

Mother's Day is a time to honor our Mothers, but with this comes the assumption that our Mothers are alive and well. What if your Mother has already passed away?

Shae welcomes all to attend, but has created the experience for those who have suffered loss, specifically of a Mother, Sister, Aunt, Grandmother, Cousin, Friend. She invites participants to bring a photo of their Mother, a story, and a potluck dish to share that she would have enjoyed. “We tell stories about our Mothers, talk about unfinished business, and where it is appropriate and wanted, tell each other things our Mothers would have told us, or things we would have liked to have heard from our Mothers,” says Shae.

Through remembering, we are no longer alone. Through sharing their stories, our Mothers live on among us.



The first Motherless Mother's Day Celebration was in 2010 on a cold, gray, Portland Mother’s Day morning. Fifteen participants gathered under a covered picnic area in a park, wrapped in blankets and extra jackets that Shae had brought. 

This nurturing instinct runs deep in Shae’s DNA. She recalls huddling with crying women and screaming children under the framework of a dressing room doorway in a California department store during a severe earthquake. “Something came over me and I said in a loud voice, ‘It's okay! We're going to be alright, we're all together!’ As soon at the world stopped shaking I said, ‘Come on everybody, let's get out of here!’ and I led them to the nearest exit. There's something in me that wants to comfort and help people who are frightened or grieving, because I know what it's like to feel scared and alone.”

Scared and alone – Shae frequently experienced these emotions in the years following her mother’s death. “Grief moves cyclically through our lives, it is not a linear process,” Shae notes. “Every year on Phyllis’ birthday, the anniversary of her death and Mother's Day, I would experience an upsurge of grief. I avoided going into stores right before Mother's Day because of the constant stream of commercial-babble (E.g. 'Show Mom how much you care this Mother's Day!') It was like plunging a knife into my heart.”

We’re stronger when we’re together.

After completing her training as a Life-Cycle Celebrant, Shae realized there were other people in the world who were also experiencing this sense of loss and grief on Mother's Day. “We can be so isolated in our society, this is why it’s important to form logical or intentional communities,” Shae says. “My Motherless Mother's Day Celebration sprang from my belief that we can get through a dark night of the soul together much better than we can if we're alone.” 

Gathering with other “motherless” mourners on Mother’s Day, Shae was surprised that the celebration produced equal part tears and laughter. “I knew there would be tears,” she says. “The laughter part was a surprise, and a gift. It’s like the group is breathing a collective sigh of relief: I am no longer alone. Someone else understands. Other people have lost their Mothers too. I can rise from the ashes of my sorrow and form new bonds, new friendships."

Participants express relief; a burden has been lifted. They ask, “Why has no one done this until now?” Shae replies, “It is what is needed for our Time. There is a Spirit of the Time, of each Age…the Zeitgeist. Those of us who are paying attention, who have our finger on the pulse of what is needed, are creating new patterns, new celebrations, new rituals and ceremonies. This is what we do as Celebrants.”

What is today tradition, Shae believes, began in one person’s imagination. “Someone, or someones, felt a need for something in their community and it so resonated with what others wanted and needed that the community embraced and adopted it as their own. And repeated it. And passed it down to their children and their children's children.” Shae’s Motherless Mother’s Day, now in its fourth year, is well on its way to becoming an important community tradition. How do you mark Mother’s Day or other days of remembrance for those no longer living? 

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With thanks to Shae Uisna for sharing her story and her work. Shae says, "As a Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant, I honor participants’ beliefs, life-experiences, religions and spiritual choices, without imposing my own beliefs. My over-arching goal is to be as inclusive with as many people as possible." You can email her or visit her Motherless Mother's Day Facebook page.

To prepare for our first session at Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School, my class of scholars - as he calls us - was asked to reflect on the name bestowed upon our cohort: People of Mountain Longing. 

“Longing has the flavor of grief,” Jenkinson said at the workshop I attended at Marylhurst last Fall. To me, longing feels ancestral, something bequeathed to us, an embodied response to the full-hearted, broken-hearted condition of being alive. Paired with mountains – which cultures throughout time have seen as the meeting place of Earth and the heavens, a place where humans can communicate with their gods – mountain longing carries a sense of spiritual quest. At the same time, mountain conjures a physicality, a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other challenge, plodding at times but with the promise of elevation, freedom.

I don't yet know why this name was chosen for us. Perhaps it references the experience of those who came before us to this place in eastern Ontario: the Algonquin of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. Their name means "[beautiful] hilly country [covered] in evergreens". According to their web site, archaeological evidence indicates Algonquins occupied the Ottawa Valley for at least the last 10,000 years. Stripped of every imaginable freedom to practice their culture, speak their language, and traverse the land upon which they had subsisted for those 10,000 years, a deep legacy of longing must permeate the community to which I prepare to travel. 

These speculations stirred reflections of my own, about my experience of mountains, of the people in my immediate lineage, or the loss and longing I carry.

When I had the chance to choose a college, I picked one by a mountain, in Portland, Oregon – an hour from Mount Hood, an hour from the Pacific Ocean, a city dotted with extinct volcanoes. I had grown up in the harbor towns of New Haven and Honolulu. My mother saw to it that we camped in the mountains during our early years. Weekends during summer visitation in Hawaii, once my father had moved there with his girlfriend, included a hike in the mountains as often as a trip to a beach park. Reed College, besides being halfway between my two sets of parents (and 3,000 miles away from each), featured a freshman orientation backpacking trip on Mount Jefferson. Eager for a life unpopulated by my prep school classmates (not a single Hopkins graduate had ever enrolled at Reed) I knew who I wanted to claim as my people: backpackers. For my high school graduation my mother gifted me a frame pack and sleeping bag; my father, hiking boots. I spent that summer climbing the 29 flights of steps to my father’s Waikiki condo, the pack stuffed with laundry.

That first backpack trip confirmed my nascent longing for time in the mountains. Last year I took six backpacking trips into the Catalina Mountains of Southern Arizona and the Olympics and Cascades of the Pacific Northwest. This year I’ve been out twice; just this last weekend, a pilgrimage to the Chiracahua Mountains where the US Cavalry struggled for years to defeat the Apache.

More than anyone, my Nonna, my mother’s mother, put mountain longing in me.  She grew up in the Italian Piedmont, a region surrounded on three sides by the Alps. A tiny clan of Pre-Reformation Protestants whose cultural survival depended on the sanctuary of high places after being declared heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, the Waldensians arrived in Torre Pellice, what would become her hometown, in the early 13th century. Immense Roland family pride links us to Waldensian hero Henri Arnaud who led “the Glorious Return” to the valleys in 1689, in which two-thirds of a 1,000-strong band of exiles perished; the remaining 300 escaped slaughter by 4,000 amassed French troops under cover of a storm and, before the army could catch up with them, a change in political alliances. 

On my Nonno’s side, the Jervis family hadn’t been Italian for long. Immense family pride connects us to the British Admiral John Jervis, who imposed limes on the Navy, thereby curing scurvy and allowing Britain to rule the world’s seas. By the mid-nineteenth century with much of the family off colonizing India, teenaged Annie fell under the spell of the Garibaldi Freedom Fighters who were in England raising funds from the anti-Papist well-to-do for their Italian unification campaign. She ran off with one of them to Italy; the family jewels came too. The Freedom Fighter took the jewels and gave her syphilis in return. (My grandfather carried a childhood memory of visiting this blinded aunt in a ruined palazzo in Naples.) Her brother, my great-great-grandfather, sent to fetch her back, stayed to tend to the Garibaldi wounded and married a Waldensian woman.

Elena Roland and Ernesto Jervis conducted their courtship in the mountains, where their adolescent Waldensian group spent every opportunity outdoors, picnicking, climbing, hiking up with skiis on their backs and gliding down. The Jervis brothers embodied athleticism, adventure, escape from my grandmother’s strict Victorian father. Years later, she recounted these glory days on Mount Granero to me in great detail; she gave me her cool woolen ski pants which I wore to shreds in my twenties. 

When Mussolini declared Catholicism the official state religion and membership in the Fascist party was required for my grandfather to work as an engineer, they immigrated to the United States. I never heard Nonna express any yearning for the country of her birth – only those mountains. The mountain cost my Nonno's brother Willy his life: executed in the town square for aiding the Resistance with his mountaineering skills, a mountain refuge now bears his name. 

My Nonna embraced America wholeheartedly: a Protestant country, Roosevelt, the freedoms despite wartime restrictions and their limited finances, and – the mountains. They lived in eastern cities but she loved the Mountain West. When she visited me in Oregon she instructed me in how to walk down a steep grade – “You see, you place your foot like this” horizontally, across the mountain, “and now like this.” An adult backpacker by then, I humored her, not yet appreciating that even though I thought I didn’t need to learn this lesson, she had a strong need to impart it. 

When my Nonno died after ten years of cardiac and cognitive decline, I met Nonna back in Torre Pellice, her first return to her native land without her beloved husband and my first adult encounter with this ancestral place. We had planned for me to help her up to Mount Granero to spread his ashes. Before I arrived she got spooked about the legalities of transporting his remains. I found that she had already quietly mixed the ashes in with the soil of his mother’s grave while planting fresh begonias on it.

Of my father’s people, we know nothing beyond the assurance from his politically conservative, Southern Baptist sister that, “We’ve always been Americans” – but assuredly not “Native”. 

While there is much I don’t know about my people, I do know that I come from generation upon generation of emigrants. From the Waldensians fleeing persecution over high mountain passes to my maternal grandparents leaving Italy and never looking back; from my father leaving Charlotte, North Carolina to attend Andover and Harvard and never going back (his father was the traffic manager for a cotton broker and his mother cashiered at the A&P; their first car was a used one they bought to drive North to witness his graduation); to his moving from Connecticut to Hawaii six days after my parents’ divorce, and never coming back; to my own definitive departure from my mother’s home to the opposite coast at the age of 17.

“Longing is choosing,” I heard Jenkinson say last Fall. “Grief is the midwife that turns desire into longing.” In my 51 years I have known much of desire, and, increasingly, something of longing. I have some experience of grief, but more, a sense of carrying the grief of generations in my family, mute and inaccessible without the skills I seek to learn; of being surrounded by the unacknowledged grief of my culture, so desperately in need of the skills I long to embody and leave behind.

The first year, we stumbled onto Tucson's 100,000+ person All Souls Procession by accident. After an early dinner downtown we emerged to find swarms of  face-painted, costumed people of all ages assembling, many with floats and banners, some with small personal altars. All there to commemorate their dead, to bring death out of the shadows.

We followed the throngs to the eventual climax of the procession, where a construction crane hoisted a giant paper mache urn bearing slips of paper collected along the route into the air to be set aflame. I knew I wanted to return.

We flew back the next year without much thought to what participating in a more intentional way might look like. The day before the procession I realized I wanted to make and carry an altar focused on my father's death. I looked around our little place for found objects that I could employ. 

The plastic-fronted package from some greeting cards would serve as the container. The bathrobe I'd bought my father towards the end of his 18-month decline: I looked for a place I could snip a bit of the fabric and found a loop in the collar bearing the farewell benediction "Good night". Mexican bingo cards touched into archetypical themes while refrigerator magnet words put a finer point on some of the elemental emotions I experienced as I composed this 3-D collage. I topped it off with glow-in-the-dark stars and a wind-up Parking Angel left over from the days Amber and I had cruised the country in a beat-up RV, a carefree adventure that had ended with my Dad's diagnosis.

Carrying this altar through the Procession, I felt in possession of something holy. It moved me from spectator to participant. It connected me to the other bereaved who nodded in recognition or stopped me for a closer look: curious, empathetic, appreciative.

A few years later, back for the Procession and out for a hike, I looked down to find a butterfly wing on the ground, a bit tattered but vibrant, beautiful. I thought of my friend Marcy who is, as she puts it, "livingly dying" with Stage IV ovarian cancer. I decided to make a found-object altar to my dear Cancer Warrior friend.

The Mexican bingo cards came out again... "Loteria," game of chance, seemed an apt metaphor for the random application of fate: who among us gets sick, who stays well (for now). I just happened to have an ovarian cancer fact card in my computer case from a research conference I'd attended with Marcy. Then there were the saucy refrigerator magnets, another remnant from our days on the road in our mobile home. These provided womb icons, allowing my expression of solidarity: my vulnerable lady parts = your vulnerable lady parts. That fragile, durable butterfly wing hung in a plastic sleeve with side-by-side Loteria icons for El Diablito and La Dama.

I hung the whole thing around my neck with a vaguely medical strap dotted with game-of-chance dots. It seemed to call out for a shiny bow. Perhaps a symbol of the gift of life, the gifts brought even by foreknowledge of death. Perhaps a reminder to stay present.

I didn't know what to expect when I agreed to offer a workshop on Creative Rituals for Times of Transition for Villages NW, the grassroots movement that supports aging-in-place. What a thrill to have more than 50 participants resist the springtime sun breaks and gather together at TaborSpace! 

And what a range of life experience they represented: divorce, retirement, facing an empty nest, coming from isolation into community, from community into solitude, the adjustments within a military family, the incapacitation or death of a parent, the death of a partner, the birth of a new business, downsizing, illness, becoming a crone - and more. 

We explored ways to mark, mourn, or celebrate these transitions using some of the framework I shared in February's post on Ritual Vs. Routine. Those observations centered primarily on the role of ritual and ceremony in focusing our intentions and providing structure that helps us to access more meaning. 

But I've spent much of the week reflecting on another powerful function of ritual: the way it connects us to each other, to our common humanity. A workshop participant put it like this on her feedback form: "From birth to death we need ritual to remind us that we are part of the collective community."

A year ago in a Memorial Day post on year-round memorialization projects I highlighted Monday Hearts for Madelene. Every Monday I, along with thousands of others around the world, get an email with an image of a gorgeous handmade heart crafted by Page Hodel in memory of her beloved partner who died from ovarian cancer at age 46; it's the continuation of a ritual she began in their courtship days. Recently Page wrote to her email list:

Last Monday, Page sent out a plea for help. She invited her extended community to share their family's vintage black and white photos with her to complete an "Unfinished Heart". Mid-week she reported her astonishment at the response: literally hundreds of "stunning images" from all over the world... from South Africa to Japan to California... "The history contained in these images is extraordinary. The clothes, the hairdos, the cars, the cultural differences, yet we are all here sharing life's greatest joy, loving our families and friends. There are your parents when they were young and falling in love, the grandparents on picnics on blankets on hillsides. The babies, the loved one you have loved and lost. It's all there." 

Page's words attest to the power of the community created when she chose to share a ritual that was once between her and Madelene alone, with the broader world.

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With thanks to Page Hodel for the weekly inspiration, and Lily for introducing me to Page's project. Please visit Monday Hearts for Madelene to learn more.

And thanks to Chana Andler and Villages NW for inviting me to offer this workshop, and to all of the creative souls who attended. If you're in the Portland metro area, check out this dynamic new community-building resource: Villages NW. To find out about Villages in other parts of the country: Village to Village Network.