On May 19th I awaited a federal court ruling outside the Multnomah County Registrar's office with a line of gay and lesbian couples ready to obtain a marriage license if the judge, as we hoped, ended Oregon's ban. I was flooded with memories of those giddy days ten years earlier when marriage was briefly legal for us, and the opportunities I'd had to be on the front lines of history.

I wasn't the only one taking a trip down memory lane in those nervous hours before Judge McShane cleared the way, once and for all, for the freedom to marry in Oregon.

Kelly Burke and Dolores Doyle were among the very first couples wed in Multnomah County back in 2004. Together already for 16 years, they had a young son. They courageously stepped into the public eye to show the world what was at stake for their family, not only through media interviews surrounding those first marriages, but then later when the marriages were declared "null and void," in a lawsuit seeking to defend the validity of their union, in legislative hearings that helped establish domestic partnerships, and in countless other settings.

When Judge McShane announced that he would rule on May 19th, Kelly says, "I was ever so hopeful." But as she shared with friends and family in an email, "As you know, we have a long personal history in this battle having been among the first to sue the State of Oregon for the right to marry over a decade ago, so I was also nervous. I started getting phone calls from staff who had shepherded us through those times, inviting us to join them at campaign head quarters for the moment the ruling was announced. This sparked many questions from the kids." 

And so they spent the weekend engaged in a very personal home history lesson. Here's how Kelly described it:

"There is a large cardboard file box in the cabinet that I have not opened in many years. I spread the contents out across the playroom floor, so the kids could see all the newspaper articles, cards, notes from political leaders, press clippings, VHS and cassette tapes full of media interviews, copies of our testimonies & speeches, and photos of our family speaking out for equality. As we talked I realized they don't carry with them any of the ghosts of shame and fear nor the battle scars that I do from a lifetime seeking acceptance and basic rights. They have lived in a different world and carry no such scars. That to me is as beautiful as having the right to marry my love.

"Evan at one point said 'Wait! You and Mama AREN"T married? But we have wedding photos and you wear rings and our family is like other families!' Oh boy, did we have some explaining to do.  She was also rather indignant that Avery was in all the early media photos, didn't matter that she hadn't been born yet. 'Not fair that he was born first and I missed it!' And that's when I knew that they needed to experience this part of their family history for themselves to better understand and have their own moment in it."

So on that marvelous Monday, Kelly took her children out of school and down to the campaign office. 

"For me it was like old home week, full of hugs and tears upon reconnecting with many people with whom I share a deep connection and emotional history. Avery blushed repeatedly as people marveled at how 'little Avery' was now as tall as I. Evan grinned wide as they recalled a charming petite baby Evan upon my lap while I testified to a State Senate committee and her perfectly timed 'Uh oh!' as the name of the rabidly anti-gay religious leader was called next. 

As the rooms became full with more people and media, we awaited the news. Out of the nervous hum came a voice: 'It's a win!' and the room erupted in cheers, hugs, and joyful tears. The kids wrapped their arms around me, kissing and hugging me, big smiles on their faces whispering in my ears, 'We won, Mommy!  We won!' Within moments, Multnomah County began issuing marriage licenses and we were off to the Melody Ballroom where officiants were waiting."

Kelly and Dolores did not, however, join the nearly 100 couples who obtained a marriage license that day. Kelly explains:

"We've had a big, gorgeous commitment ceremony with our family and friends on our tenth anniversary, a quickie wedding in front of cameras and reporters near our 16th and quietly registered as domestic partners in a county clerk's office after our 18th. This time requires a different sort of celebration and we're just beginning to explore what that might be. However, I am leery we may have unleashed a monster as the kids are bursting with wedding planner  ideas/demands. For example, can our dog Henry be in or at the wedding? And Avery is heavily lobbying for a honeymoon in Hawaii. He doesn't seem realize those don't usually include children. This conversation was egged on as we spent the afternoon with friends and their children, cheering on newly married couples making their way down the marble steps of the hall as our children rushed towards them, arms outstretched offering flowers and congratulations."

Kelly called the day "the perfect bookend to a long chapter. Of all the things I've done, my children and the work I did for equality are the things I am most proud of in my life. And to still be here to see it happen, to thank the many, many people who have worked so tirelessly for this moment and to cheer on all the families stepping up to partake in their civil right to marriage, was incredible.  I'm still trying to absorb it all."

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My deep thanks to Kelly and Dolores for sharing their story, in this post and for the past 10 years. Stay tuned for stories in the coming weeks of other longtime couples (including yours truly) figuring out how to cross this latest legal threshold. And here's one you may have missed, from an "old married couple" in California who faced the same question: how to mark your now-legal marriage when you've already celebrated your wedding?

These days, with so many of our dead cremated, the cemetery is no longer the only focal point of remembrance. Memorial Day weekend is still the high point of any cemetery's annual visitation count, but more and more of us are finding other ways to remember our beloved dead - ways of staying connected that take place all year round.

Alongside the memorials now commonplace on Facebook, a new crop of blogs are flourishing that provide on-line spaces for grief and remembrance. 

Check out Modern Loss, for example, which uses high-caliber storytelling to promote "Candid conversation about grief. Beginners welcome." And What's Your Grief, offering useful posts on topics ranging from dealing with whether to read the diaries of the deceased to handling the old losses stirred by new funerals.

Recently What's Your Grief featured an interview with my neighbor, memorial quilt artist Lori Mason. The photographs of Lori's exquisite quilts along with her thoughtful perspective on creating memorial art from a loved one's clothing seemed like a fitting post for Memorial Day. Lori says, "The nature of my role is about hope and healing.  I believe in embracing the grief in others and recognizing their loss."  Read about Lori's work. 

Want more stories of loving acts of remembrance? Last year's Memorial Day post featured Monday Hearts for Madalene, "Perfume: An Illustrated Moment," a short film by Teresa Jordan; and a link to Andrea Carlilse's blog of living memories featuring her nonagenarian mother Alice. Or see my posts on Personal Altars, Ash & Earth remembrance stones, Becky Bent's quilt homage to her father, and a remembrance incorporated into a wedding ceremony. 

How have you memorialized your loved ones? I'd love to hear your stories.

On Monday, when Judge Michael McShane overturned Oregon's ban on same-sex couples marrying, it was a victory ten years in the making. But for me, it was also the culmination of nearly 26 years in the trenches fighting for gay rights. 

History is made through the concerted and cumulative actions of thousands. This is one woman's story - my story - of swimming in the rising tide of justice.  

I officially came out as a lesbian in 1988 just months before the Oregon Citizens Alliance placed the first statewide anti-gay initiative on the ballot. I threw myself into that campaign as a full-time volunteer. We lost.

By the time the OCA was back with their first attempt to amend the state constitution to declare homosexuality "perverse and abnormal" and on par with pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality (no, I'm not making this up), I was the director of the statewide coalition of battered women's shelters and rape hotlines. Our coalition mobilized a base of opposition to the OCA's hateful measure in every one of Oregon's 36 counties, leading to the formation of the groundbreaking Rural Organizing Project, founded by my brilliant friend and comrade Marcy Westerling. The nearly two-year No on 9 campaign galvanized and strengthened our communities even as it deeply terrified and traumatized us. We won.

We won - but the OCA came right back at us with a sanitized version of the measure. The prior campaign had disbanded. We had to start from scratch. I left my job and devoted myself full-time to the idea that we could build a campaign-ready gay rights organization that would not only win at the ballot, but build the movement for social justice. I served as the deputy campaign manager for No on 13 in 1994. We won. And from our campaign, we created Basic Rights Oregon, the primary author of this week's victory, widely recognized as one of the most effective state LGBT organizations in the country.

When the OCA came back in 2000, we beat them again. But when another opposition group placed Measure 36 on the ballot in 2004, to amend our constitution to define marriage as "one man, one woman," we lost, along with the other 10 states facing similar measures that year. 

The loss was particularly hard because the marriages the voters had chosen to snub had a face - over 6,000 faces, in fact. Earlier that year four courageous Multnomah County Commissioners, at the request of Basic Rights Oregon, had begun issuing marriage licenses, based on a legal opinion now validated by Judge McShane. Several counties followed suit and ultimately over 3,000 loving and committed same-sex couples wed.

Amber and I were among them. We had already pledged our commitment to each other in a DIY (do-it-yourself) ceremony before 100 family and friends on our fifth anniversary in 2001. (Read about that magical day, suspended midway between 9/11 and the day of my father's death.) To be honest, in the lead-up to the brief window in time when we could have the state certify what our community had already witnessed, my own marriage was not at the top of my mind. 

I had been asked to recruit the very first lesbian couple who would wed. I approached my dear friends Mary Li and Becky Kennedy with an unconventional proposal. How would you like to make the history books? The only catch is, you can't tell anyone until it's a fait accompli. I played secret agent, transporting the "first couples" to get their licenses and on to the wedding venue. I held their daughter Ava, my goddaughter, as Supreme Court Justice Betty Roberts pronounced them married in front of international news crews. A few days later Amber and I had caught our breath and added ourselves to the list of officially wed couples, before the courts closed the door to any further marriages. 

Later that year when Measure 36 qualified for the ballot, we along with thousands of gay and straight Oregonians, yet again exhausted ourselves in a defensive ballot measure battle over our lives, our loves, and our rights. We lost. Soon after, our marriage was declared null and void. 

Fast forward to 2014. My involvement has continued to be political, professional, and deeply personal. For the past three years I've worked as a part-time consultant to Freedom to Marry, alongside the nation's foremost message strategist, my dear friend Thalia Zepatos (who I met on that very first 1988 campaign). Since the Valentine's Day kick-off of the Oregon United for Marriage Campaign in 2013, I've conducted trainings, facilitated campaign events, co-organized one of the highest-dollar houseparties. And I approached the campaign with the idea of organizing Wedding Professionals United for Marriage, many of whom donated their services for the very first weddings conducted just minutes after Judge McShane lifted the ban.

I was one of those wedding pros. After volunteering for the campaign outside the County Registrar's office all morning, with nervous couples and campaigners awaiting the ruling, I hopped in a donated pedicab to the wedding celebration site where I joyfully officiated the weddings of some of those very first couples. After Portland Mayor Charlie Hales watched one of my ceremonies, he asked if he could borrow my script. I stepped aside to give the various VIP officiants their place at the front line of this historic moment and sat down for the first time in six hours. 

What an amazing privilege, to have been witness to the very first wedding of a same-sex couple in Oregon 10 years ago, with my chosen family Mary and Becky and Ava, and now, again, to be able to celebrate and support the marriages of these beautiful couples who had chosen each other against all odds, cherished each other through years when the state dismissed their love, and now at last could hear one of their own, a lesbian Celebrant who had fought in the trenches for 26 years, say the words, "By the power vested in me by the state of Oregon...."

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In the coming weeks I'll share more stories from these momentous times (including the most adorable cake toppers you'll ever see, and what Amber and I will do next, nearly 18 years into our love story). 

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.” 
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

The first memorial I ever officiated was for an 18 year old who had gone to great lengths to end her own life. It was the most difficult assignment of my professional life (and this was before I had trained as a Celebrant). At the same time, I knew that what it required of me was nothing compared to what it required of her mother and the others who had loved this child her whole short life.

When I was at Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School two weeks ago he described suicide as "a library or a temple," a place we can go "to wonder about the big things" where the lives ended in this fashion can function as "dusty scrolls" instructing the rest of us in "how it is," how whatever we have that passes for a culture is not enough - with the consequence that, after such study, life can never be the same again.

I spent much of this week wondering about the big things, as I served a family whose 27 year old son/ brother/ grandson had killed himself. As I stood before a chapel filled with his weeping family and friends, I cited the words of the young man's favorite author, Hunter S. Thompson, who said this about what he called The Edge: "There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

I felt extraordinarily privileged to learn about this beloved young man from the stories shared by his family, and to hold those stories up into the light. It's not my place to share those stories here, but knowing how many of us are affected by suicide, I share some of the words I summoned up for the ceremony that honored him. 

Grief is never an easy burden to bear – and never more so than when it comes suddenly, tragically, with so many questions. Alongside the tremendous love here today is the searing pain of sudden separation. There may be anger, too, and guilt; the search for someone to blame, the search for the answer to the question that can never be fully answered: Why? 

He tried avenue after avenue in search of relief, but despaired at the prospect of a future filled with suffering. We wish desperately that he had found another solution, even as we know we must accept that this was the end he chose.

It’s said that when you’re right, nobody remembers; and when you’re wrong, no one forgets. This is not the way we wanted to say goodbye. It’s a terrible tragedy. But an even greater tragedy would be for us to allow him to be defined by this final decision. Our purpose together here today is to look beyond the end to see the full picture of your beloved's life, the legacy of the 27 years we were fortunate to have him among us.

After delivering the eulogy, I quoted from another of the young man's favorite books.

In Lord of the Rings, Pippin says to Gandalf, “I didn't think it would end this way.”
Gandalf replies: “End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”
“What?” Pippin asks Gandalf. “See what?”
“White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
“Well, that isn't so bad.”
“No,” Gandalf says, “No, it isn't.” 

We don’t know whether your beloved is in a “far green country under a swift sunrise.” But we do know that he’s still with us as long as you keep a place set for him at the banquet table of your lives. As the grey rain-curtain of your grief rolls back, you will see those 27 years of his time here as a precious gift that will continue to give to you until your last breath.

In closing, I led participants in the recitation of a Litany of Remembrance, with this introduction: In recognition of the cycle of life and death where the two are inextricably bound, where your beloved's spirit and energy and presence persist even in his absence, let’s join our voices together. 

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Litany of Remembrance adapted from Roland B. Gittelsohn. "Love and the searing pain of separation from Sarah York. "When you're right, no one remembers" and "Grief is a heavy burden" adapted from The Free Methodist Church in Canada. 

During my Dad's brief retirement before brain cancer took him at 63, he started each day sharing the milk from his cereal bowl with his four cats. Now, plenty of people put their bowl or plate down for their pets once they've finished their own meal. But for my Dad, the cats drank first. And if they drank too much, leaving his cereal soggy but no longer afloat, he would simply refill, offer them a last chance at a few more laps, and only then eat his breakfast.

Some of you are recoiling - but I'll bet more are nodding in recognition. For many of us, our pets are our family. My Dad and his wife considered my cats their grandchildren; their cats, my step-brothers.

Last week in his Washington Post essay, "The death of pet can hurt as much as the loss of a relative," Joe Yonan discussed the "sense of surprise and even shame" that occurs when people find themselves grieving deeply for their pets. He also addressed the sometimes unhelpful reactions from others in the face of deeply-felt grief over the death of an animal.

Yonan goes on to note the importance of ritual, citing Joan Didion's distinction between grief as passive and mourning as active. In fact, it may be the loss of the pet-imprinted rituals (like my Dad's morning milk feast) that's so profoundly disorienting when one of them dies. As Yonan writes, "I spent so much time taking care of Red, and Gromit before him, that when each one died it didn’t merely leave a hole in my single-person household; it was as if someone had rearranged my life, excising without my permission many of the rituals that had governed it."

I recently heard from Kristin Zabawa, a former zoo-keeper turned photographer who helps ease this transition by shooting "Soul Sessions" of people and their animal companions in the days before their deaths. This is the kind of healing attention that can turn grief into mourning, capturing the joy amidst the despair.

Kristin says, "Every session with animals who are close to death has a deep resonance of love and presence, as people wordlessly say good-bye to their animal. I feel honored to be invited into this family circle for the time that I am with them." See some of her beautiful work in this post from her blog.

What rituals have you used to mourn the death of an animal companion?

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For more resources on pet loss, see Dove Lewis' wonderful blog by Enid Traisman.