Category: Community

The Thread of All Sorrows

5/31/2016

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
~ from "Kindness," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Memorial Day with Amber's Dad

I've just taken perhaps the longest break from my blog since I committed at the start of 2013 to write 50 posts in a year's time.

The death earlier this month of my close friend/ neighbor/ former mentor Bill has caught the thread of all my sorrows.

Bill's diagnosis with a rare and aggressive form of leukemia came not 24 hours after Marcy's five-hour memorial service last August. During the six months Bill spent in a clinical trial (at a cancer center dubbed the City of Hope) in California, my father-in-law Dean Wilson suffered several health crises. In March he died less than 48 hours after entering hospice. Two days after we buried Dean, Bill returned home for what turned out to be his last six weeks of life.

On the surface, these seem clear examples of what Francis Weller calls the First Gate of Grief: the recognition that everything we love will die. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow Weller enumerates "Five Gates of Grief" (summarized here). The image of the gate implies something linear or sequential - you pass through one gate at a time, entering into what Weller calls "the communal hall of grief".

I find myself at the threshold of all five of these portals. The threads of sorrow I've got ahold of feel like they're woven into the same cloth. As Weller says, citing Nye's poem, "The cloth is immense."

I recognize intimately the Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love; the Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World; and the Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief. But the warp upon which all these threads serve as weft is Weller's Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive – the grief of not being born into a village.

Weller quotes T.S. Eliot's lament, "Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth," and writes:

We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred....This is our inheritance, our birthright,which has been lost and abandoned....This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it so hard to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.

Neighborhood candlelight walk the night after Bill's death

My studies these last two years at the Orphan Wisdom School have introduced me to the concept of dying as a village-making event. I've dedicated much of this current chapter of my life to tending relationships between the living and the dead and to strengthening community around the dying. I've glimpsed moments of the village showing up - beautiful, sacred moments.

And I've also been a faithful witness to how each of these deaths - along with the burgeoning movement that seeks to "do death differently" - bears the marks of our times.

Tugging at the thread of the sorrow of our times, a sorrow that hears the muffled but insistent sound of ancestral trauma, a sorrow that erupts as shame and self-abuse, can feel like an unraveling when there's no village to weave the larger story back together.

Seeing the size of the whole cloth is not easy. As Weller writes, "So much in this world needs our attention. So much is threatened and clinging perilously to the edge of existence. Grief is our witness to these painful realities. Grief is also our response that confirms our intimate bond with all of creation."

At the center of all my sorrows, I have felt a presence that was not mine alone.
~ Susan Griffin

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Death Without Religion?

4/29/2016

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The family business: my cousin Mary Foulke-Hill being installed as Rector at St Mary's Episcopal Church, Harlem

When I traveled to my ancestral homeland last spring, my Italian cousins asked, "What do you do?" Not an easy question to answer, even without a language barrier. I was happy when my aunt jumped in to help. A Presbyterian minister, she explained: "Holly does what I do, but without God."

Over the past few weeks, several people have forwarded me an opinion piece from The Guardian titled "Are we ready to face death without religion?"

They imagined it would bolster me in this thing I'm doing - what the writer Andrea Carlisle called "finding new ways to pass through old portals," that's reduced in this piece to "a rise in atheist funerals".

To my aunt's explanation of my vocation, and the assumption that I might embrace the mantle of "atheist funerals," I have to say: fair enough. I myself often describe my work as a Life-Cycle Celebrant as being "like a secular clergy person."

But I'm no longer sure that's accurate.

sec·u·lar
(ˈsekyələr/) adjective
1. denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.
"synonyms: nonreligious, areligious, lay, temporal, worldly, earthly, profane

Reading The Guardian opinion piece crystalized my misgivings. It describes a "deeply humanist conception of death" as springing from "the idea that needless suffering is the greatest evil there is and that autonomy is the supreme value."

If autonomy is the supreme value of secular humanism, I'm out. I hold interdependence as my supreme value. I'm not sure, as the author argues, that "we’re the ultimate owners of our own lives." I believe that how we live and how we die has consequence for many more than just ourselves.

That said, I'm no fan of organized religion. I myself am Christian-injured, to borrow an apt phrase from a friend. Orthodoxy doesn't look like much of an answer to me either.

My life these days, my work as a Celebrant, my time with the dying and the bereaved, may be without religion. But it's not without what has come to be called Capital-G-God-with-no-S.

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The Facts of Death

2/28/2016

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When my dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at the age of 63, I was not yet 40. My mom (long divorced from my dad) sought to comfort me by pointing out that we were going through the same experience - she had a parent dying then too. I responded with an aggrieved protest. "Yes," I said, "but it's not my turn."

"The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning," writes Thomas Lynch, the literary undertaker.

Too few of us, these days, grow up learning the facts of death.

In a recent interview Stephen Jenkinson breaks this poverty down into three of its primary faces:

We no longer have a shared understanding of what happens to us when we die.
We no longer understand, culturally, what dying asks of us.
We have hardly any lived relationship with those who came before us, our ancestors.

Attending four memorial services in the past week (and officiating three of them) reinforced for me the importance of these ceremonies not just in comforting the bereaved, but in establishing a relationship that bridges the gap between the living and the dead.

Many funeral and mental health professionals speak of "closure"; of accepting the reality of the death that occurred. As Lynch puts it, "seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away.... The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark."

the spectacular Frances Wasserlein

For me, a good memorial is less an ending than a new beginning; less about closure than opening. It's the beginning of a lived relationship experienced not through coexistence on the physical plane, but through memory, story, inspiration, and all the other ways we become attuned to feeling the presence of that which is no longer seen.

All the ways we keep a place set at the banquet table of our lives for those who came before us: The lighting of six memory candles at a memorial that will be relit in six separate households going forward. Pebbles and petals from a beachside scattering ceremony that carry the potency of the day into other settings. The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of a sister's birth in the year after her death. The gathering of hundreds of mourners from two countries and many communities, bound into one people with memorial nametag buttons.

Our ancestors are more than our most recently deceased, of course, far more than those few whose names and faces we'll ever know. But the ways in which we honor and stay connected with those who die on our watch seems a decent starting place for the ancient relationships most of us in North America no longer know how to access.

Click the image to view a one-minute video clip of Frances Wasserlein, used to "give Frances the last word" at her memorial.

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Happy Lupercalia!

2/14/2016

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"I’ve always thought that tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual. And if you lose your memory, you wake up in the morning, you don’t know where you are, who you are, what ground you're standing on. And if you lose your tradition, it’s the same thing."
~ John O'Donohue

What do a she-wolf, a sacred cave, a goat, and the mating season of birds have to do with a holiday now associated with roses, chocolates, and frilly red hearts?

I grew up in a household skeptical of Hallmark holidays and the kind of forced sentimentality that's often a greater expression of commercial consumerism than any deeply inherited meaning.

But Hallmark is only one in the long line of forces that has channeled ancient rites and rituals into modern mores. The Christian Church grafted its holidays onto any number of pagan celebrations in an effort to coopt the rhythms of nature-based rites that had created meaning and strengthened communities for countless centuries.

Lupercalia, for instance: a sacred festival held in the middle of February to connect Romans to their origin story and to Faunus, their god of forest and fields. You could hardly get more nature-based than Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, who were suckled as infants by a she-wolf, a lupa. An order of priests called the Luperci would gather at the cave thought to be the site of this early day-care center. According to History.com:

The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.

At the end of the 5th century AD Pope Gelasius outlawed Lupercalia as sacrilegious and replaced it with St. Valentine’s Day. (No one knows exactly who Valentine was; there are at least three martyred saints by that name.)

It just so happens that the day chosen by the Catholic Church to honor St. Valentine's was the same day known by many in the Middle Ages as the start of birds' mating season. It's not surprising that these longer days of February have been heralded by fertility rituals throughout the ages.

We know so little about the ground our ancestors stood on, the traditions that sustained them and connected them to the seen and unseen worlds around them. But occasionally we get a sense, a stirring in the season - in our cells, even - of the thin line that connects our lives to theirs.

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Celebrating Silas

1/28/2016

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Silas would have entered Kindergarten this year and turned six on March 16th. But five years ago he died just a week after his first birthday. "Every parent's worst nightmare," his mother Jodie Brauer says. He died in the night, "no calls for help, no warning signs, and no explanation."

About six months later, struggling under a tsunami of grief, Jodie decided to work towards running 12 miles, one mile for each month of Silas' life. What began as a private focus to mark Silas' first birthday, shared with a small group of family and friends, is now the Celebrate Silas 5K, an annual run/walk benefitting the Dougy Center.

After Jodie began volunteering at The Dougy Center, she says, " I recognized that my grief was not the only thing out there. Many, many other people are grieving too and sharing my grief with others is therapeutic for me." She realized that the annual run could be "an opportunity for other folks to share their grief too". And so last year she featured a “We Remember” board, created by Silas' brother Felix, and called names of those being remembered.

"It was definitely a somber few minutes and some folks were openly crying," she says, adding, "That is okay though. There is nothing wrong with crying in my opinion. One of my personal goals in this event is to help bring grief out into the open. I want to talk about Silas, even when it makes me sad."

Once participants took off running and walking, it "shifted the energy of the group back into the celebratory," Jodie says. "There is something about exercising together as a group that is uplifting."

Jodie's journey as an event organizer has been closely intertwined with her own journey of mourning. Since the beginning, the route has included a pause mid-event to tour the Crystal Spring Rhododendron Garden where there's a memorial bench for Silas. ("We wanted to have a public place to go and remember him and to have his name written out in the world. To tell the world that he was here," she says.) But that first year "I was hyperventilating while at the garden and could hardly look at the bench. Now, I really enjoy sitting on the bench at the event and chatting with folks about it."

In the third year, when she first opened the event to the public, Jodie invited the team from Fire Station 9 who had responded the morning that Silas died. They offered to bring the fire truck and let folks tour it. It sounded like a great idea until they pulled up at the site. "Seeing the fire fighters in uniform brought me right back to the morning Silas died," she says. "I started crying and shaking. They all felt so bad for me and offered lots of hugs. Luckily, I was able to pull it together."

That same year she realized that sticking to her own 12 mile run while public participants did a shorter route created more than a literal distance between her and the others. She says, "I welcomed people at the beginning, but most folks were long gone by the time I was back at the park. This combined with typical March weather and the singing of happy birthday to a dead baby made it less than celebratory. I decided to switch things up if we were to do it again."

That led to the ceremonial elements she's incorporated, and a unified route accessible to all. This year Jodie will use name tags to encourage participants to share the name of those they're remembering to encourage folks to talk and share stories about their loved ones. "I'm envisioning people coming up to you," she tells me, "seeing your name tag and asking, 'Will you share a story about Marcy with me?' I love to talk about Silas and don't get many opportunities. I hope folks will find this meaningful and that it will help build community within the group."

Jodie still marks Silas' birthday with her own 12 mile run, followed by cake and videos of Silas. Separating her personal birthday run from the day of the public Celebrate Silas 5k has made it easier for her.

I asked Jodie how she balances celebration and bereavement. "The short answer," she says, "is that I combine them. I live with the magnitude of Silas' loss everyday. I feel like I balance bereavement with everything that I do. When I was new to grief, I was really concerned about forgetting Silas. Me forgetting, other people forgetting. I think most folks want the opportunity to remember and talk about their loved ones. Especially this year, I hope that Celebrate Silas will be an opportunity to celebrate/talk about/remember our loved ones and that this helps honor our grief. Someone once told me that the magnitude of my grief was a testament of my love for Silas. I believe this to be true. I celebrate my love, my grief, and my memories because it is all that I have left."

Check out the photos and participant feedback below and please consider joining me and Amber in supporting Celebrate Silas 2016 on Sunday, March 6, 2016. More info here. To hear Jodie discuss anniversaries and birthdays in greater detail, listen to this Dougy Center's podcast.

"Not everyone has the wherewithal to create such a public, meaningful tribute to their precious loved one. As a fellow bereaved mother, I love the opportunity that Celebrate Silas provides to remember and honor my own son. The course is beautiful and tranquil. Thank you Jodie!" Jami Keene

“It was a really lovely event- as always. It's cool how it's grown, and I'm sure will grow every year. It will never make up for Silas' death, but it does help celebrate his life and the lives of others. Thanks for all that you put into it. I plan to be there every year!” Sara Ohgushi

“Congratulations, Jodie! We were honored to have the opportunity to participate again this year in what is such a wonderful event. The walk/run is so aptly named, because it really does feel like a celebration. Such an awesome sense of community and camaraderie is created when friends and strangers get together for a shared goal. What an amazing way to kick off the week!” Sue Johnson

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The Peace Militia

1/23/2016

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The news is full of the daily outrages committed by the armed militia occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in remote southeastern Oregon. What it doesn't report is the hard work taking place behind the scenes among those who seek real solutions to the dwindling opportunities and dismantled civic infrastructure experienced by rural communities.

That's the work of the Rural Organizing Project, founded by my dear friend Marcy Westerling. While Marcy is no longer living, her work carries on.

When Marcy's husband Mike was in Burns to bear witness to the armed occupation, he noticed the local cancer support group had an upcoming event. Seeing a way to express solidarity with this community under siege (and pay homage to the organizing Marcy did among others with cancer), he reached out to the coordinator who welcomed the broader connection.

After I helped Mike get the word out through Marcy's blog, he heard back from his contact in Burns:
“Words cannot express how appreciative our community is for your support. Just the mere mention of your concern brought many of my coworkers, cancer survivors, and community members to tears (and goose bumps)! Someone mentioned, 'It’s like they’re the Peace Militia.'"

I wrote a note and sent a check this week and invite you to do the same. Details are in Mike's post, reprinted below.

My late wife Marcy liked to describe herself as a ‘kick-ass community organizer’. We met doing the work of speaking up for social justice and progressive values in rural Oregon, where Marcy founded the Rural Organizing Project. Here’s how I would compare us: If I was a pretty good basketball player in neighborhood pick-up games, Marcy was an NBA first-round-draft pick.

Lately, rural Oregon has been in the national and international news as armed militia men have occupied theMalheur Wildlife Refuge near the SE Oregon town of Burns. Burns is a wonderful small rural community, which Marcy visited several times for the ROP. The Refuge is incredible – think all the cowboy film scenery you’ve ever seen, only 10x better.

I knew Marcy was not going to forgive me if I didn’t get involved, so I’ve been working with her old Rural Organizing Project colleagues to witness events and help people see beyond the divisive shock that the armed takeover has dealt to the community and to the whole state. As the occupation drags on, we are learning that the bonds of community are being stretched to the breaking point.

The people of Oregon, and the whole USA, owe something to the people of Harney County and Burns. They have persevered despite some tragic and unjust events, and a lot of just plain hard times. From the violent dispossession of the Paiute people, to the dust bowl, to the collapse of the rural economy in the last three decades, the people of the area have managed to come together and maintain and manage a treasure in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

In a small effort to ‘pay it forward’, we are urging our friends to support the upcoming Feb 6th Sip for the Cure Masquerade Tea Party in Burns, a fund raiser for CAN Cancer – Communities Assisting Neighbors with Cancer.
This non-profit helps cancer patients with financial assistance for the many expenses that having a diagnosis imposes, from travel, to cozy blankets for chemo sessions. All the money stays in the community.

Tickets are $8.00. Write a check to CAN Cancer (there is no on-line portal). Address it to CAN Cancer, Harney District Hospital, 557 W Washington, Burns OR 97220.

Since you must use the postal service anyway, please take the time to include a Thank You card to the people of Burns, Oregon to let them know we stand with them in this hard time.

Marcy never missed a chance to organize. She spent the last three years of her life organizing her fellow ovarian cancer sisters through this incredible blog, Livingly Dying. She is, no doubt, urging us on to pick up the baton and run with it.

Thank you for your support,
Mike Edera

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Elephants Never Forget

12/29/2015

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As a Celebrant I've served young and old, living and dead, humans and pets - but never before have I celebrated a family of pachyderms!

Portland loves the elephants who for more than 50 years have thrived at the Oregon Zoo. This month their new habitat opened, four times the size of their previous space and setting a new standard for elephant health and well-being.

I was asked to help create a dedication for the grand opening, one that honored each member of this beloved family, that showcased their individual attributes along with the features of their new world-class home.

I know the question of housing any animals in a zoo is unsettling to some, and these Asian elephants are certainly far from their native lands. But the Oregon Zoo has done a remarkable job in support of this endangered species. Some of their research discoveries have even been applied in Asia to reduce human-elephant conflict.

East African mother mourns her baby (c) BBC

The three-generation-strong family of elephants at the Oregon Zoo proves the adage that home is where the herd is. The seven (five of whom were born in Portland) are inter-related and inter-dependent. How this matriarchal society lives can teach us more than a thing or two.

The entire herd shares in the care and tutelage of their young. Chendra, rescued in Malaysia orphaned and hungry with a gun shot wound to her left eye, earned her full place in the herd when she became doting auntie to baby Lily.

Elephants join dolphins, apes, and humans as the only animals known to recognize their reflections in a mirror. According to Scientific American, elephants can recognize and keep track of the location of as many as 30 companions at a time. The researcher says, "Imagine taking your family to a crowded department store and the Christmas sales are on. What a job to keep track of where four or five family members are. These elephants are doing it with 30 traveling-mates."

There are numerous accounts of elephants grieving: shedding tears, standing vigil over their dead for as long as three days, traveling long distances to visit the bones or dying grounds, moving the bones, perhaps even trying to bury' them.

Shine welcomes Tusko back to the herd

We don't yet know how grief is affecting the Oregon Zoo elephant family, but it followed immediately on the heels of the joyous habitat grand opening for the elephants' human family.

On December 22 the Zoo announced with great sadness the death of Tusko, at 44 one of the oldest and largest male Asian elephants in North America. A former circus elephant, he suffered from a decades-old leg injury and had been in poor health.

Six months earlier Tusko had been able to rejoin the herd after more than a year of medical treatment. The Zoo reported that the rest of the family greeted him with "a chorus of chirps, trumpets and thunderous roars". Apparently when Sung-Surin (known as Shine) first walked up to Tusko, "her roars sounded like something out of Jurassic World."

Tusko's return was particularly important to his male offspring Samudra, as Sam learns how to be an adolescent bull. Tusko made his mark on the new habitat, too. The builders counted on him to "Tusko-proof" many of the new features, knowing if they were suitable for this gentle giant, they would work for the rest of the herd.

The obituary released by the Oregon Zoo recognizes Tusko's legacy and the interdependence of his elephant and human families: "Tusko's energy, strength and spirit live on in the personalities of his two Oregon Zoo calves, Samudra and Lily, as well as in the new Elephant Lands habitat, the design of which he helped inspire."

The humans who worked with, cared for, observed, and learned from Tusko over his decade at the Oregon Zoo were deeply saddened by Tusko's physical decline and death. It's not hard to imagine that his deeply connected elephant family is now mourning his death too. Tusko, no doubt, will be remembered.

Elephant Lands Dedication

Home is truly where the herd is. As we welcome our herd into their new home, we begin with Rose-tu, who shares a name with the City of Portland, and is named after her mother and grandmother. To Rose-Tu, the devoted mother of our Sam and Lily, we dedicate our state-of-the-art barn, which has everything you and future mothers need to take care of your babies.

To our youngest, to underscore the investment our region’s voters have made to the future of the herd. To rambunctious young Lily, great-granddaughter of our first elephant Rosie, we dedicate our splash pool and water cannon. We know how much you’ll enjoy playing in the shooting stream of water and how much your family – and all of us – will enjoy watching you do what elephants love to do with water.

Lily is not the only young elephant who loves water play. Her big brother, Samudra, loves to swim. In fact, his name means Lord of the Ocean. To Sam, the very first third-generation elephant to be born in the United States, we dedicate the new 160,000-gallon pool, so you can swim to your heart’s content and expend some of that new adolescent energy.

This is for Tusko, the gentle papa of Lily and Sam. To you, Tusko, we dedicate Forest Hall, our new 43-foot tall indoor facility. Despite your gentle nature, you did your part to make this habitat great by “Tusko-proofing” its features during construction!

And now for Auntie Chendra, who was found in Borneo — orphaned, alone, and hungry. Chendra, to you we dedicate our natural habitat timed feeders; with your new family, in your home here at Elephant Lands, you will never be hungry again.

To the herd’s matriarch, Auntie Sung-Surin, we chose a fitting tribute for this daughter of Packy and Pet. Sung-Surin, to you we dedicate the outdoor shelters because your name in Thai means Sunshine and we know you prefer to stay dry.

This community loves elephants, in no small part thanks to Packy, the oldest male of his kind in the country, born 53 years ago right here at Oregon Zoo. His birth made international headlines, and ushered in a whole new era of elephant care and welfare. To Packy, our icon and your herd’s venerable patriarch, we dedicate the square footage of this new habitat -- four times the size of your previous home -- a space large enough for your family to stay together. For home is where the herd is.

~ dedication delivered by Metro Council members at Elephant Lands Grand Opening, December 15, 2015

Click image to watch a two-minute montage from baby Lily's first three years, including when she meets her dad Tusko for the first time, the herd's entrance into their new habitat, and good times with a pumpkin!

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Rituals of Thanksgiving

11/30/2015

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"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)

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The Thread of All Sorrows

Death Without Religion?

The Facts of Death

Happy Lupercalia!

Celebrating Silas

The Peace Militia

Elephants Never Forget

Elephant Lands Dedication

Rituals of Thanksgiving

Take a Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

Mourning, Five Months Later

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