"The image I have of myself during these weeks is twofold. First, I see a sodden rag being wrung and wrung and wrung. All the tiredness, all the energy I gave and absorbed over the years is being released.

"The second image is of a bell — a bell being rung and rung and rung. Its sound is one of welcome. It is a signal to the worlds that the silence of my heart is transforming into a call to prayer."

~ From The Gifts of Hibernation by Andreana E. Lefton

I had plans for these days at the end of 2014. Plans to reflect on the year; to write a year-in-review post and a newsy, illustrated holiday letter; to catch up on my volunteer work and further develop my business plan.

It turns out, I've been too busy. Too busy sleeping in, making pots of soup, putting pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place. Too busy reading. Napping. Playing with the cats. Listening to Christmas music. Visiting with friends. Walking in wild places. Glorying in the winter sky.

I let go of the plans. And for the last day of 2014 and the first day of the New Year, I'll go one step further. I'm going to cut my electronic umbilical cord. My I-Phone will get a few days of rest. And so will I.

For the New Year: May you have all that you need, and may love in all its forms be both guide and companion.

“What are your fears?” and “What are your hopes?” These are among the questions that Being Mortal author Atul Gawande encourages doctors to ask to guide medical decision-making. They also happen to be the first two questions in My Gift of Grace – more specifically, your fears and hopes about playing this conversation game designed to promote living well and dying well.

Gilah Tennenbaum is no stranger to the big questions of life and death. Ten years ago, her holiday gift to family and friends was a gift-wrapped set of living will documents and other end-of-life paperwork. Even so, she worried a bit when she turned her most recent birthday party into a chance to play My Gift of Grace.

Her invitation explained, “Winner of the California HealthCare Foundation’s End-of-Life Challenge, this game helps families, friends, and co-workers get unstuck and have important conversations. I don't see playing this game as a negative, sad or depressing thing to do. I am not planning to die soon. I see playing the game as life affirming and important sharing for me to do with friends. I have been wanting to play the game for some time, and this seems like a great opportunity.”

Reflecting on and then sharing responses to questions like “What do you think happens to you after you leave this life?” or “What habit makes your life worth living?” – would her guests be too uncomfortable?

The seven friends who attended admitted that, yes, they were afraid of being vulnerable, of being judged. “But none of that happened,” Gilah reports. “It was wonderful. People loved it.” One friend asked when they could play again. Another has since completed the paperwork from that decade-old holiday gift. And for the friends attending who are living with serious illness, Gilah says, “It helped me better understand them and what they need.”

I had heard about My Gift of Grace from Gilah when she gifted me a game of my very own on the Death Café’s first road trip, to the White Eagle Memorial Preserve.  We made a coffee date for her to tell me more about the cool new conversation game created by her nephew, Jethro, and his partners at Action Mill, an east coast design shop that creates tools to improve communication and decision-making about end-of-life care. I found much to relate to in the partners' background in community organizing and nonviolent action. I was excited by their approach.

But I remained a bit stuck, myself, when it came to playing the game. I kept it on my desk, took it with me over Thanksgiving, tried to imagine inviting friends to play. The timing never seemed right – but the truth is, after supporting conversation about death among hundreds of strangers, I still feel awkward about raising the topic with my closest friends.  

I got to try a hybrid recently, when I played the game with Jethro and Nick, another Action Mill partner, along with several other community colleagues who were eager to pilot this new tool. Here we were in a professional setting, a bit more exposed than in the anonymity of a Death Café, but still at a remove from the ongoing intimacy of a family system. We began by revealing our fears and hopes about playing the game, and then rolled right into writing our own epitaphs – five words, max. Our last question, chosen randomly: “If you were diagnosed with a terminal disease, who would you turn to for advice?”

Big questions, met with sincerity, vulnerability, laughter, tears. “What’s happening here is connection,” one person observed part-way through our session. And reflection. “Play the game over and over,” Action Mill encourages. “Your answers will evolve as you get better talking about life, death, and dying.” (They suggest recording your answers on post-its kept with the card set, annotated with the date of each round of play).

The My Gift of Grace website has tips for inviting others to play, and a Conversation to Action Toolkit to turn your answers into “a set of documents, plans, and rituals.” And the Action Mill’s sister site Death & Design features a number of other innovations that support the conversation.

As for the name? Nick told Modern Loss: “Gift comes from Martha Keochareon, a nurse from South Hadley, Mass. who learned she had pancreatic cancer. She called her old nursing school and suggested they send over students who wanted to learn about hospice. This flipped our thinking on what people at the end of their lives need. Turns out, it’s the same thing the rest of us need: to feel useful and needed. To give.

“Grace has to do with how people express what they want at the end of their lives: dignity, security, love. To us it’s about how we aspire to live our lives: connected to the people around us.”

"I'm feeling complicated," a Facebook friend posted recently. When it comes to my birthday, I know how she feels.

No matter how incredibly blessed I am in my life on so many levels, there are always some "It's my party, I can cry if I want to" moments when the calendar turns to 12/12. The echoes of the past pound loudly in my ears: my first birthday, spent in an isolation unit of an Army hospital in Germany; my 12th, the day of my parents' divorce; four years ago, the two trips to the ER with a ruptured disc in my neck.

This year the traumas of birthdays past were met by fears of the future. I had marked the entrance to my fifties two years ago with a ceremony in which I asked "for the courage and the grace to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of my own unfolding."

I am loving, for the most part, where the current is taking me. I just hate what it's doing to my skin.

In my mail box this last week arrived the latest issue of my college alumni magazine featuring a truly lovely profile of my current work, with an equally lovely full-page, nearly life-size photographic portrait - the first photo I've seen in which I look my age: neck wattled, eyelids droopy, skin coarse. (Believe me, the digital version glosses over what's revealed on the heavy matte page.)

I feel humiliated by my vanity; humbled by my unexpected age-phobia. I know how extremely fortunate I am to enjoy good health and vitality as so many around me suffer severe physical afflictions; to be in a loving partnership of 18 years while so many live lonely; to have such meaningful work in my life, and to be so recognized and appreciated for that work.

But "Facing the End" remains complicated. I may talk about it every day. But that doesn't mean I don't recoil to a deeply fearful place when I contemplate my mother's death, or Amber's, or Marcy's. Or look with confusion and aversion on the impact of time and gravity on my skin.

And so, on my birthday, I honored the complicated parts with some tears, in the sturdy embrace of my beloved. And I celebrated the many blessings of my life with a succession of sweet moments of connection, culminating with a raucous performance of an epic birthday play written, acted, and produced by Ava (11), Bennett (newly 8); Josie (7 for two more months), and Jules (nearly 3).

Later, as Amber and I sat by our fireplace for a wind-down round of Bananagrams, I realized the complications had washed away. I felt bathed in love and gratitude.

by Randall Barton
Published in Reed Magazine Volume 93, No. 4: December 2014

If you knew your death would come when you finished reading this article, you might greet it like Anne Boleyn at the block: accept your fate with courage and dignity, pay the executioner, and die with one stroke of the blade. You might also read very slowly.

The truth is that until it’s imminent, few of us are willing to contemplate death—and even fewer to talk about it. 

Holly Pruett has taken the subject out of the closet and made it the centerpiece at her PDX Death Cafe, where people gather to consume sugary desserts and discuss shuffling off the mortal coil.

In a Portland park, strangers gather, six to a table, to experience their first Death Cafe. A woman shares that she started thinking a lot about death after being diagnosed with cancer. Another recounts a wake where children played near the open casket of their kindly grandfather. A man relives the fiery, ghoulish nightmares he had after viewing his grandfather’s corpse when he was a child.

It may sound like a scene from the film Harold and Maude, but the notion of folks coming together to discuss death gained steam 10 years ago when Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz began hosting what he called the Café Mortel. Attendees talked about the nature of death, and how our fear of it informs the way we live. In an age of tweets and text messages, these conversations proved engagingly authentic. Frothy “I am here” postings on social media and sound-bite news stories felt mundane and fleeting compared to something so profound and final.

In 2011, Londoner Jon Underwood established the Death Cafe franchise, providing open forums for talking about death while eating cake. (The cake is supposed to help people steady their nerves.) The not-for-profit events have no structure, themes, or guest speakers, and are not intended to provide information or grief counseling.

Bucking the conventional wisdom that people don’t wish to talk about death, Underwood discovered legions eager to discuss one of life’s crowning experiences. The declining influence of organized religion in people’s lives may contribute to the Death Cafe’s rapid growth. There are now more than 900 Death Cafes in 19 countries. But Underwood suggests that another factor spurring interest is the baby boomer generation coming to the top of life’s escalator.

“That’s the generation that has had the best services throughout their lives,” he says, “and I don’t think they’ll settle for second-class services when they come to the end of their lives.”

Holly Pruett radiates the clear-eyed conviction of a cleric. Three of her female relatives are Presbyterian ministers, and though she operates outside of that paradigm, she often describes her work as being like a secular chaplain. As a “life-cycle celebrant,” she weaves her client’s stories, beliefs, and traditions into ceremonies that commemorate major life events.

“Celebrations connect us to each other, to our community, and to the meaning in our life, which we can often skate behind,” Holly says. “When it is done well, ceremony allows us to bring the sacred into our lives—whether or not you use that word.”

Because humanity continues to cross the same thresholds, acknowledging these passages gets people outside their own story to connect both with those who have come before and those that will follow. Nonetheless, Holly says that the ways we approach funerals, births, marriages, and deaths have become formulaic and overly commercial.

“The needs are timeless,” she says, “but the conventional ways they are being met have become anachronistic and stale.”

Using skills honed as a student at Reed, Holly uncovers narrative needing to be strengthened, transformed, released, witnessed, remembered, affirmed, grieved, or memorialized. She suggests a path of inquiry to get there, and often officiates at the resulting ceremony.

Attracted to Reed for its academic rigor and counterculture reputation, she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, taking to Portland “like a duck takes to water.” She chose history as her major, and wrote her thesis on the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition.

During her senior year she volunteered at the Portland Women’s Crisis Line, and after graduating took a job at a women’s shelter. Facilitating peer-led sessions, she witnessed the power that comes from hearing someone else’s story.

“I wasn’t there to solve any problems or provide answers,” she says. “But I could hold up a mirror and reflect back images of the women as capable, worthy, and intelligent that were different from the reflection that the abuse had shown them.”

At 25 she took a break and traveled through Europe and Southeast Asia, during which time she came out as a lesbian. By the time she returned to Oregon the state was embroiled in a battle over Measure 8. Sponsored by the Oregon Citizens Alliance, the 1988 initiative repealed Governor Neil Goldschmidt’s executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in the executive branch of state government. Holly joined in the fight, and though voters approved the measure, she got an education in how the advocacy process works at the ballot.

Entering the world of Salem politics, she took a job as a lobbyist for the Women’s Rights Coalition, followed by a stint as director of the Oregon Coalition against Domestic and Sexual Violence, a statewide coalition of women’s shelters and rape hotlines. For nearly 20 years she worked as a leader in the nonprofit sector and behind the scenes in advocacy campaigns. Then, in her late thirties, her father was diagnosed with cancer.

“The theme in my life had been losing my father,” Holly says. “First it was his work, then a four-year affair culminating in a 6,000-mile relocation just six days after my parents’ divorce. He never came back.”

Holly  helped care for her father and lived with him the last summer of his life. But when he died 18 months after his diagnosis, her stepmother was too exhausted to go through the ordeal of a funeral. She had the body cremated and sent Holly some of his ashes in a yogurt container.

“I had to figure out for myself some kind of ritual that would help me,” Holly says. “I realized later it was less a memorial for him and more a rite of passage for myself, fully becoming a fatherless daughter. That’s what really set me on the path.”

A door had closed, but another opened and Holly stepped forward on a path of new professional engagement.

“I was raised to get to the level of highest impact,” she says. “Why be a teacher when you can be a principal? I had developed the strategy that could bring 5,000 people to the state capitol or affect the biennial budget, but I wanted to be more personally and directly involved with the important things in people’s lives.”

A friend shared a magazine story about a green burial preserve in South Carolina and suggested they bring the idea to Portland.

In natural burial, human remains are interred without being embalmed or entombed in a vault or liner. Placed in a shroud or biodegradable casket, the body simply decomposes into the earth.

In America, embalming gained currency during the Civil War because it enabled the interment of dead soldiers back home. Tens of thousands viewed the fallen president as Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train progressed from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois. In more than a dozen cities people filed past his casket and marveled at the preservation of the corpse, establishing a precedent for creating a focal point for the funeral.

Holly was working with Portland’s River View Cemetery to offer natural burials—concurrently taking instruction in funeral celebrancy—when she first heard of the Death Cafe. Approaching several other Portland practitioners, she suggested they give it a try.

Why don’t we talk about death and dying?

We live in a death-phobic culture where the end of life is seen as a failure rather than an achievement, Holly answers. Everyone recognizes the difficulty of giving birth and being born, but few honor the work it takes to die. In one century our society has progressed from families laying out their dead in the parlor to what Kenneth Hillman, professor of intensive care at the University of New South Wales, Australia, calls “ICU conveyor belt death . . . where even doctors don’t feel comfortable talking about death and dying.” Studies show that almost half of the cost of health care is spent in the last six months of life.

“We want people to be medicated and shunted off so that we don’t see the work that it takes to die,” Holly says. “We don’t have the opportunity to learn from it.”

PDX Death Cafe has drawn attention for the large numbers it attracts. It isn’t unusual for Holly to receive 100 requests for an event that can accommodate 80. In other parts of the country, events typically draw between 15 and 25 people.

Jeremy Appleton ’88 attended an alumni reunions Death Cafe hosted by Holly. He points out that some Buddhist sects contemplate death as a profound spiritual practice. The more we talk about and reflect on death, the less we are afraid of it, Jeremy says, but he finds this easier to do in the company of others. Listening to the myriad perspectives at a Death Cafe can induce a taboo-breaking exhilaration.

“As long as I fear death, I am not living life to its fullest,” Jeremy says. “By attending a Death Cafe, actively contemplating death, and making its reality more fully conscious, I endeavor to overcome my fear.”

Holly likens the experience to chatting with a stranger during a layover at an airport. Intimacy is easy when you don’t have to worry about any consequences.

“From my experience, I find it real and intimate that people are able to connect around this common humanity,” Holly says. “It’s not necessary to have expectations about that going further.”

“We live in an amnesiac culture with very little connection to our lineage and what came before us,” Holly says. “There’s no sense that there’s a future to be tended by making our stories available so that others might study them. Our stories show we matter and made an impact—that there was a space we occupied and the shape of that space can still be acknowledged.”

At a PDX Death Cafe picnic, people were invited to come early to complete a checklist of activities preparing them for death. They were asked to think about how they would like to die, in what surroundings, and with which people present. One man stalls in his progress and a facilitator approaches to ask if she can help.

“I’m still not certain that I’ll ever come face-to-face with the Grim Reaper,” he jests.

“I’ll give you better than even odds that you will,” she smiles.

Last weekend as I prepared to lead a memorial service, the fourth in four weeks, I found myself soothed by the rituals I've developed around them. 

It starts when I read the ceremony script aloud, sometimes to my patient spouse Amber. It's been approved by the client by that point but I always catch a little typo or two, a little stumble in how the words enter the room from my mouth. After making those fixes I print out a reader copy for myself, large font with sensible page breaks, and a keepsake copy for my client. I load the pages of the reader copy into my presentation portfolio. 

The keepsake copy is more of a project. Following a prototype created by Mary Elliott, the virtuoso designer who did all of my graphic design, I clip the corners of the pages to a pleasing rounded shape. I add a sheet of card stock to the back, robin's egg blue or fresh spring green, punch two holes at the top, and bind it all together with some natural died hemp string bound round a stick of bamboo. Often I write a note to my client expressing my appreciation for the chance to get to know their loved one through their memories, and tuck it into a nice folder with my card and the keepsake.

I rehearse the script aloud another time or two into my Iphone voice recorder. This recording accompanies me, via headphones, on the drive to the ceremony. If it's a long drive I may listen to it several times over, in between my not very original vocal warm ups ("Doe, a deer..." and the Alphabet song).

But before I leave, I have to pack my bag. Presentation portfolio, cards, sometimes my Tibetan singing bowl. A thermos of Throat Coat tea with honey. Lately I've also brought along a purple pouch threaded through with dragon flies. It holds ceramic hearts created by the 18th Avenue Peace House community, offered through their nonprofit Griefwatch. 

I discovered the hearts one day when I visited the Peace House, preparing for the Death Cafe they hosted. The whole front stoop of this mission-centered mansion was covered in ceramic hearts, basking outdoors for this phase of the production cycle. I've bought a few bags since then and find myself dipping into them for all sorts of ceremonies. 

Just before the memorial I invite the bereaved partner to reach into the bag of hearts, selecting a touchstone to hold during the ceremony: a final, grounding point of connection before we begin the hard and important work of carrying the memory of their loved one through the raging river of grief, into the future.