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Rituals of Thanksgiving

11/30/2015

"Aunt Holly?" Josie said as I picked her up from chess club the day before Thanksgiving. "I love spending time with you!"

Josie launched right into the plans she'd made for our playdate: gratitude books. She would show me a special technique for making a book without staples or stitching, and then over Thanksgiving we'd pass them around and everyone would write what they were thankful for on the book's blank pages. I explained that I'd be out of town for the holidays with friends but she assured me it would be alright - we'd each have a book for our own Thanksgiving location.

Our book-making project experienced a few delays. First, the organic frozen yoghurt shop for some pumpkin pie fro-yo (I've convinced myself that because it's organic, it has no calories). Then a crisis to be tended to - Josie's turkey centerpiece lost a few of its feathers. But then we settled into instructional time, Josie leading me step by step through the magical construction of a book bound by a few clever folds and cuts.

The next day I announced to our friends over dinner: A New Thanksgiving Ritual. We could each write in the book, on our own time, and later Josie and I would share these gratitude books with each other. One old friend, absent from this gathering for the past five years, picked a page and wrote a beautiful tribute to all that deserved her thanks.

But then a funny thing happened. No one else wrote in the book. The artist who'd agreed to decorate it, didn't. And I didn't work the room to cajole participation. As I contemplated what I might write, I decided the best form of praise at the end of this challenging, rewarding, love- and grief-soaked year was quiet, wordless, a space of being rather than more doing.

I'd brought a photo of Marcy taken in this very place years ago. We'd spent so many Thanksgivings here together, so many slumber parties and celebrations. Her absence due to treatment side effects the prior year had been hard on us all. This year we'd welcomed Thanksgiving week with a gathering at her gravesite to inaugurate her new memorial bench. We'd huddled in a close circle to speak aloud what we were grateful to Marcy for, and to toast her with Proseco and Baci Perugina chocolates (each wrapped in a love note). Mt Hood, ghosted white against a cloudy sky, burst into golden light the rosy hue of Marcy's strawberry blond as we turned to leave.

Thanksgiving morning I observed my solitary annual ritual, an homage to my Mom who composes the most beautiful dried flower arrangements. I set out to forage the dried seed pods and twigs and bark and rope hips that would become our centerpiece. I tucked them into a basket of pomegranates and nestled in a little piece of Marcy: a hand-carved wooden bird I'd given her that she'd caressed during many an hour on the chemo ward, that sat at her bedside until her husband had passed it on to me.

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Take a Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

11/21/2015

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on our mantle: keepsakes from MichFest

As we pulled away from the Night Stage Parking Lot in August for the very last time, no other sound track would do. From a portable sound system in the back of a pick-up truck, the Carps crew was dismantling the stage to Janis wailing our shared primal pain, "Coooome on, coooome on, coooome on, coooome on, and TAKE IT! Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!"

For nearly every summer of the last 20, I've been among the thousands of women from newborns to 90 who've journeyed from all over the world to the woods of northern Michigan to build a city that celebrates female power. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival - I've written about it before.

This year, the 40th, was the last. Knowing that this beloved grandmother, sister, teacher, home was coming to the end of her life cycle, we mourned as fiercely as we celebrated. Three days before the gates opened for the Festival week, I co-led several hundred members of the worker community in a Living Funeral. We spoke our collective eulogy, sharing with each other what we loved about the place, the experience, the community. We made our bucket lists: what we wanted to make sure to do, see, say such that when it was over we would have no regrets. And we talked about how we would go on, what we would take from MichFest into our lives and the wider world.

The day before our departure, Amber and I took a final walk around The Land, a walk of remembrance. We scooped up pea gravel from the sublime outdoor showers, one of many unofficial community centers. A scrap of yarn from the weaving around the Goddess statue at the back of the Night Stage Bowl. A safety pin and painted washer from behind what had been the Acoustic Stage. A feather from The Quiet Walk out by the swamp. The papery orb of an oak gall, acorns, curly maple bark. All the precious flotsam and jetsam found its place in an old jam jar.

We headed back up to the campsite that had been our annual summer home for all these years, my eyes still scanning the ground. There, on the crossroads to our path, I saw a scrap of red ribbon nearly covered by leaves. I picked it up to add to the jar. As if to confirm the future life that would be fed by this conscious ending, the ribbon bore a single word: Phoenix.

As our final farewell ritual, after striking our camp the next day and loading our gear into position for our shuttle to the airport, we buried a time capsule. Into a mason jar we'd placed the polaroid photos of each of us from the who's who photo board in the Staff Services Tent where we'd worked. A finisher's ribbon from the 5K Lois Lane Run. A wrist ticket, the one piece of "clothing" every worker had in common, no matter how widely we varied in aesthetics otherwise. The crystal that commemorated the death of a community member in a fatal car accident, unpacked each year to hang in the window of our tent. A remnant of rope from the elaborate tarp Amber erected to keep us cozy in the epic rains.

Amber dug a little grave on the spot we'd pitched our tent. We laid our jar inside, tucking it in with a few ferns. We returned the shovel we'd borrowed, took our final outdoor showers, and pulled away to Janis making the broken-hearted sound we all wished we could make.

thank you, Janis (click image for a taste)

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Mourning, Five Months Later

11/9/2015

Marcy had many trademarks. Among them: her long, flowing skirts, her annual woodcut valentines, her little white dogs, and her flannel nightgowns. You'd see her in one of her voluminous Mother Hubbard nighties if you spent a holiday overnight with her, if you hosted her when she came to town to help you organize your neighbors against injustice, or if you visited her Facebook page in recent years.

Toward the end of the five years Marcy spent livingly dying, she began giving away bags of her things. There were several grocery sacks of these flannel garments. Did I want one? she asked one day. Of course, I told her. In fact, I'd take a bag or two and share them with the friends she called her Sisterhood. We would wear them at a memorial slumber party somewhere down the line.

Her response to that notion was the refrain she used often in her final weeks: "Happy. Grumpy."

The sacks of nightgowns sat in my basement, joined by the sheets and colorful cloth we'd used to drape Marcy's body as she lay in her home for visitation after her death. For weeks, I couldn't bring myself to launder them. Eventually I put myself to the task. Each nightgown I pulled from the bag seemed to carry an electric charge. I wept as I moved the load from washer to dryer. I knew I needed to do something more with them.

I had carried Marcy's story with me once before as I walked in Tucson's vast All Souls Procession (I wrote about it here). This year, I decided to walk in one of Marcy's nightgowns. Amber agreed to join me. Picking two and packing them for our flight, my nervous system reminded me how much I still hold from five long years of Marcy's illness, treatment, dying, not-dying, and death. My first night in Tucson brought a vivid dream soaked in ancient images of the deaths our lives depend on.

The day before the Procession we stopped by Armory Park to visit the many personal memorial shrines set up in conjunction with the children's Procession of Little Angels. Scores of families had set out picnic blankets as their children got their faces painted, decorated cardboard strap-on angel wings, and wrote messages to deceased loved ones. Amber and I wrote prayers and placed them in the large urn that would go up in flames during the next night's grand finale. I spent some time chalking a heart on the pavement for Marcy. I submitted some words to be projected in the collective digital shrine.

The next day we drove to Sanctuary Cove, a small ecumenical retreat center founded in 1957 by WWI vet Elmer Staggs to "provide a natural place of peace and unspoiled beauty that allows visitors the chance to 'draw apart' from the intensity of today’s hectic lifestyle and to reconnect to deeper meaning". We walked the trails into the Tucson Mountains, and then I walked the labyrinth. As I came to its center and touched the small cairn of special stones others had assembled, I felt some of the heaviness slip from my shoulders; the cape of grief no longer knotted so snug at my throat.

We drove home to paint our faces and don Marcy's nightgowns. We pinned cards from her memorial service to the front of our frocks and headed off into the night to join an estimated 150,000 mourners in the streets. Mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, dads, brothers, sisters, children; deaths from AIDS, diabetes, cancer; migrant deaths in the desert; LGBT deaths from hate crimes and suicide; deaths of endangered species - these and more were remembered through costumes, floats, banners, signs, hand-carried altars, chants, music, and the final catharsis of the Procession Urn going up in flames.

We returned to our casita for a final burning ritual of our own. We stripped off the nightgowns, scrubbed off our makeup, and then lit the memorial cards we'd carried in our casita's chiminea. In a final bow to Marcy, we ate a couple of pieces of pizza, her favorite comfort food.

Please consider joining me and Amber in donating in Marcy's honor to the Marcy Westerling Legacy Fund.

Read More:
Looking Death In the Eye (8.30.15)
Marcy Rocks On (6.29.15)
A Secret Chord (6.14.15)
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)

Rituals of Thanksgiving

Take a Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

Mourning, Five Months Later

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