Since mid-May when I left my friend Marcy's bedside expecting her to die the next day, and got on a plane bound for my family's ancestral home in Italy, my life has been soaked in intensity: joy and sorrow, the simultaneous uplift and ache of conscious endings. 

The work for Freedom to Marry that I've done part-time for nearly 5 years: done. The women's music festival I've been a part of for nearly 20 years: I leave tomorrow for the 40th and final Michfest. Every day I steward a small piece of Marcy's legacy as I prepare for her public memorial celebration later this summer, as I help make arrangements for her gravemarker, as I tell her story - our story - to the bereavement chaplain and the friends who are good enough to want to hear about it as often as I need to speak about it.

In the midst of these endings, I've been privileged to mark other milestones, no less rich in meaning: the 12th birthday of my goddaughter Ava, and the 80th of my father-in-law, Dean.

For the first time since I was present for Ava's birth, I missed her birthday (I was in Italy). I'm not sure 12 is a big deal for her, but it was for me. On my 12th birthday (on December 12th) I got my period for the first time, and my parents got divorced. The self-inflicted risky behaviors that serve as a proxy for the coming-of-age rites we no longer observe in our dominant culture began, for me, way too early.

Beholding my innocent Ava and imagining her now, going through what I went through at that age, brings my heart into my throat. How to protect her childhood while acknowledging the threshold on which she stands? How to honor her innocence while preparing her for the wider world?

I proposed to her moms that they allow me to take her on a trip out of town, the first without them, outside the protective bubble of their mini-van. We took the train to Seattle and bumbled our way around town on public transportation. We did a bunch of fun kid stuff - the Space Needle, a Star Wars costume exhibit, making fantasy maps at the Experience Music Project. And we had a few brief forays into topics that belong to the world of adults.

One the other end of life's fragile cord, Amber's dad turned 80. The lead-up was fraught with emotion for my spouse, an only child, as she reviewed a lifetime of family photos and plotted how to celebrate her dad. We made a book of images from his life going back several generations (including the gravestones that he and Amber have been visiting in cemeteries from Camas, WA to Roseburg, OR); presented him with magazines from the week of his birth, one for each decade; and threw him a party at our home.

Life is full and rich and good.

It's not everyday that I get to shake the Vice President's hand. Just another surreal moment in the cascade of intense endings pouring through my life this summer.

For the past 5 years I've worked part-time, behind the scenes with Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage equality nationwide. Our Supreme Court victory on June 26 was the culmination not just of thousands of people's blood, sweat, and tears over decades - but for me, personally, of a through-line of activism that began in 1988 after I'd just come out as a lesbian and volunteered on the first of a string of anti-gay ballot measures. (See links below for more on my personal journey.)

Oregon has faced more anti-gay initiatives than any other state - so it's no coincidence that lessons and political operatives key to our national victory emerged from our local experience here - messages that opened America's heart and movement heros like Thalia Zepatos, Roey Thorpe, and Thomas Wheatley. After co-leading the successful campaign to defeat the third hateful OCA ballot measure in 1994, I stepped off the front-lines. I'm grateful to Freedom to Marry, and Thalia in particular, for providing me with the opportunity to continue to contribute while pursuing my work as a Celebrant.

The struggle for full LGBT equality is far from over. But the incredible team that dedicated itself to achieving this astonishing win on marriage is done. On July 9th Freedom to Marry celebrated with the Vice President and 1,000 key activists and donors. The next day, we met as a staff for our final, farewell retreat. We spilled out stories of the difference the work had made in each of our lives and the lives of countless others, along with tears, disbelief, pride - and most of all: love.

Here's a beautiful 6 minute video that recounts this remarkable piece of history that was years in the making but finally arrived, as President Obama notes, "like a thunderbolt".

Earlier posts on our years living with and working against marriage discrimination:

• I Now Pronounce You: In which my friend and colleague Thalia Zepatos officiates our latest and last wedding.
• My Big (Null & Void) Gay Wedding: Our White Salmon and Lucky Lab ceremonies.
  
• Yes, I'll Marry You: A whirlwind tour through my 26 years of activism for LGBT equality.
  
• The Perfect Bookend to a Long Chapter: Kelly and Dolores sharing their role in history with their children.
  
• Old Married Couple Legally Weds: Another couple navigates the question of how to cross the new legal threshold for the marriage they'd already celebrated.
  

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.

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.