You may have heard of a home funeral – but a funeral for a home? That’s what Nancy knew she needed as her family home was headed onto the real estate market.
 
Known as the “Pink Palace” in her hometown of La Crosse, Wisconsin, this 1880s-era house had witnessed 60 years of Wernecke family life. Nancy and her sister had grown up there, sneaking out of the windows as teenagers. Their parents, Pa and Meme, presided over sprawling additions including an upstairs apartment that housed Grandma Sally and Grandpa Bill, and home decorating schemes later likened to a Mad Men set.
 
Meme’s decorating was part of our childhood history. I got a canopy bed and purple poodle wallpaper; Julie, a bed fashioned in the shape of a stage. I remember the fragrant lilac bush and glorious peonies that lined the front of the garage where I got my first bee sting as I stopped to smell the flowers. I remember how Dad turned your lawn into a skating rink in the winter. He would join us on the rink, hanging on to a wooden chair for balance as he donned his black ice skates.
 
Grandchildren had played for hours around the indoor pool and the park-like yard featured monuments to two of them who had tragically predeceased both their parents and grandparents.
 
Nancy’s distress over losing this family treasure chest and local landmark was compounded by the expectation that any buyer would raze the structures and rebuild, the land considered more valuable than the idiosyncratic house. It was one straw too many on the camel’s back of a family that had recently suffered the deaths of first Pa and then Meme, with Julie’s health fragile, and Nancy still recovering from divorce and newly navigating retirement.
 
For years your walls held our laughter, tears, and many warm memories. Now you stand starkly empty, evoking sadness in my heart, reminding me of all of the important people and experiences that were the very essence and bedrock of you.
 
At the suggestion of a member of a grief program she was attending, Nancy decided to hold a funeral for the family home. She began by writing a letter to the home and assembling a video montage from decades of photographs. As she worked through her memories and associations, we distilled the essence of the home’s presence in their family life to three words that would serve as themes for the ceremony: Foundation. Sanctuary. Witness.
 
On a late spring day she assembled her nephews in the empty home, her niece too pregnant to travel and her sister Julie not well enough to attend. After reciting the Lord’s Prayer out of respect for Pa and Meme’s beliefs, we began with a candle lighting and a calling of names.
 
Think now of those loved ones whom you’ve known here in this home. Parents, grandparents, siblings, nephews, nieces, friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, spouses, caretakers… Let their faces and names come into our presence… let them be part of our circle of gratitude and celebration and farewell… let them know they are welcome and remembered.
 
Nancy read her letter to the home, speaking not only to what had transpired within these walls but updating this beloved structure on the flourishing of the lives nurtured here. After a video trip down memory lane, each person began a solitary walkabout through the many floors and corridors, returning with a representation of something they wished to carry forward from the home, and something they wished to release, written down on slips of paper.
 
Coming back together, the family shared stories and affirmed the legacy of the place that would continue in their own lives. After joining their voices in a Litany of Remembrance, goodbyes were spoken in a ritual of release that drew on the transformative power of fire.
 
And so, as we prepare to say our final farewell to you, dear home, we reflect on your gifts and life lessons. You’ve taught us about the impermanence in all of life. As we’ve left and returned to your sheltering foundation over the years, you have underscored the poignant presence of love in our many relationships. And you’ve witnessed the complicated relationships laced within the tapestry of the lives of all who have traversed the landscape of your rooms and gardens. We offer gratitude to you, dear home, for our many precious memories, for holding our joys and sorrows, for providing the sanctuary and foundation we could return to over the years. As we bid this final farewell, we move forward carrying many cherished memories in our hearts. We thank you for all we can return to draw upon, reflecting on your faithful witness that will forever touch our tender hearts.
 
The ceremony closed with champagne, Meme’s classic Cheez Whiz canapés, and dancing in the kitchen, before the family headed down to the banks of the Mississippi River to release the ashes of the papers they had burned.
 
For Nancy, it was the culmination of years of faithful tending to the grief of the deaths of her parents and other endings in her life, of recognizing the importance of fostering a culture of remembrance in a family that would weather still more tragic losses.
 
She had no way of knowing that as she prepared to hold this funeral for the home, a resurrection was in the works. Buyers came forward who saw not the prospect of the money to be made from the blank slate of this prime property – but, instead, the capacity of this home to provide a foundation, a sanctuary, and witness to the recovery of those who'd been exploited and abused.
 
After preparing to see the “Pink Palace” demolished, the family could now celebrate that it would serve as a shelter to those who needed a home. Just recently, these socially conscious developers announced a new program – the space will serve as a Scholars House for single moms who are in school, offering supportive community and a palatial play space for their kids.
 
“I’m absolutely ecstatic,” Nancy told the La Crosse Tribune. “I consider myself a humanitarian and social activist, and repurposing it that way warms my heart.” 
 
May each of you feel the lightness of release, the satisfaction of a farewell well said, and the richness of four generations of memories. May those memories enrich the lives of the next generation. May you continue to feel the presence of this home and all the life she has sheltered, as your foundation, as a continued witness to the ways you honor your family legacy. And may you continue to find sanctuary in your memories, and most of all, in each other.

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​View photos of the "Pink Palace" through the years and read news coverage in the La Crosse Tribune: 
'Pink Palace' offers jaw-dropping window in time
'Pink Palace' to assume another persona as home for moms in school, their kids

Endings don't seem to be waiting for December 31st this year. After a 12-month cycle that saw the deaths of three in my inner circle, Amber and I traveled to Tucson this month to close a 13-year chapter in our lives.

It actually started back in 1999 when, on the uncertain brink of Y2K, we decided to sublet our houses and travel the country in a 1973 motor home we named Betty. Our originally-planned six months turned out to be not long enough. With summer gigs in Michigan and long-distance contract work, we managed to live in Betty for 18 months, until my father's brain cancer diagnosis called us back to the Pacific Northwest.

We spent the winter of that magical sojourn on some women's land just west of Tucson's Saguaro National Park. The Sonoran Desert was endlessly fascinating to us, with its idiosyncratically animated cactus shapes and all manner of bird and animal life: quail, coyote, rabbit, dove, owl, lizard, javelina.

After my Dad died and we resumed "life as normal" back in Portland, the desert continued to call our names. We returned on vacation and noticed many houses featured casitas out back. We contacted a realtor and not too much later, we'd sold Amber's condo in Portland and bought a three-bedroom house in Tucson with a separately-fenced, one-bedroom off the alley that became our beloved retreat for the next 13 years.

Not exactly a "vacation home" - no pool, no view. But the sky was nearly always blue. The plant and bird and animal life, abundant. The rental income from the main house pretty much paid for itself. Every time we visited, we enjoyed old favorite places. Every time we visited we discovered something new. ​We joined, most years, with over 100,000 others in the remarkable All Souls Procession, first memorializing my father with a personal altar, later processing in Marcy's nightgowns five months after her death.

But in this time in which we all must learn the ending of things, it was time to let go of the responsibility of owning property 1,500 miles away. We sold the place easily and booked a flight to go down to clear out our humble but cherished casita.  

​While I knew it would be sad to say goodbye to our sweet little place, I didn't expect to have so many endings wrapped into this one. ​

This week I participated in two ceremonies to celebrate new spaces, each a home for innovative organizational endeavors. 

I wasn't able to attend the building dedication ceremony for the Wayfinding Academy, a new college opening next week in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood - but their plan captured my imagination and inspired me to support the celebration with a donation.
​
After renovating an old YMCA building, the Wayfinding Academy issued an invitation to the community: "Help us make our house a home." 

Rather than repeating the tired old model of having VIPs cut a ribbon over the threshold, and offering naming rights to only the highest donors, Wayfinding set out to "fill our building with the names of supporters. That way, our students will be reminded every day that there is a community of hundreds of people who believed that they are worth supporting, that this community made the Wayfinding experience possible for them. We want to envelop them with community."

Their donation program offers "rooms and doorways and appliances and toilets (yes, those too)" for donors to claim and name - I funded a light switch! At the dedication celebration, donors signified their commitment by cutting ribbons throughout the building.  As they prepare to welcome their first class of students, they're still a few thousand dollars short of their fundraising goal. Check out this great opportunity to support a community-based model of learning.

The second space-warming ceremony, one I led for a friend's new workspace, was more intimate. Their social change mission requires both an external orientation - to the conditions they seek to change, to the constraints and partnerships of the communities they serve and engage - and an internal focus on their creative process and their life as a team.

As the team stood facing outwards, I asked them to identify a core condition in the external world that affected their work. Turning back to each other, they wrote these words on rocks I'd brought - from racism and poverty to naysayers and devices that distract. Then I asked them to assemble the rocks into two cairns. These cairns can function as a touchstone, a way to keep themselves always oriented to the external context for their work.

Then, turning inward, I passed around a bag of ceramic hearts made by the 18h Avenue Peace House's cottage industry Grief Watch. I invited the team to bring to mind a quality or condition they wanted to foster within their new work space. Each person named a quality they were committed to embodying as they passed their heart to the person next to them. We closed with a round of rose water lemonade toasts and a poem offered in tribute to their work.

Go visit Lynda Martin-McCormick at her home on the slopes of Portland’s Mount Tabor and you’ll be greeted by the words and essence of her beloved husband David. In a nook of her front stoop hangs a gorgeously calligraphed plaque that reads, “If God is Love Then Love is God”.

“The idea of creating a piece of calligraphy with this saying came to me as a visual image a few months after I had bought a house here in Portland,” Lynda says. “I think the quote is David's own epiphany. It is very much his spirit: logical (if A=B, then B=A), but also soaring, spiritual, and simple. He often went right to the heart of a matter.”

I first met Lynda when she was seeking support in anticipation of David’s death. Three thousand miles from their home in Washington, DC, he was to die in their Airbnb, a lovely garden apartment near OHSU where he’d come for treatment of the cancer he’d lived with for a number of years. They had family here, including their daughter and son-in-law with their newborn baby, Lynda and David’s first grandchild. Lynda wanted to keep David’s body at home for 24 hours after his death. Their story is told in the 5-minute mini-documentary DIY Death.

The first year, we stumbled onto Tucson's 100,000+ person All Souls Procession by accident. After an early dinner downtown we emerged to find swarms of  face-painted, costumed people of all ages assembling, many with floats and banners, some with small personal altars. All there to commemorate their dead, to bring death out of the shadows.

We followed the throngs to the eventual climax of the procession, where a construction crane hoisted a giant paper mache urn bearing slips of paper collected along the route into the air to be set aflame. I knew I wanted to return.

We flew back the next year without much thought to what participating in a more intentional way might look like. The day before the procession I realized I wanted to make and carry an altar focused on my father's death. I looked around our little place for found objects that I could employ. 

The plastic-fronted package from some greeting cards would serve as the container. The bathrobe I'd bought my father towards the end of his 18-month decline: I looked for a place I could snip a bit of the fabric and found a loop in the collar bearing the farewell benediction "Good night". Mexican bingo cards touched into archetypical themes while refrigerator magnet words put a finer point on some of the elemental emotions I experienced as I composed this 3-D collage. I topped it off with glow-in-the-dark stars and a wind-up Parking Angel left over from the days Amber and I had cruised the country in a beat-up RV, a carefree adventure that had ended with my Dad's diagnosis.

Carrying this altar through the Procession, I felt in possession of something holy. It moved me from spectator to participant. It connected me to the other bereaved who nodded in recognition or stopped me for a closer look: curious, empathetic, appreciative.

A few years later, back for the Procession and out for a hike, I looked down to find a butterfly wing on the ground, a bit tattered but vibrant, beautiful. I thought of my friend Marcy who is, as she puts it, "livingly dying" with Stage IV ovarian cancer. I decided to make a found-object altar to my dear Cancer Warrior friend.

The Mexican bingo cards came out again... "Loteria," game of chance, seemed an apt metaphor for the random application of fate: who among us gets sick, who stays well (for now). I just happened to have an ovarian cancer fact card in my computer case from a research conference I'd attended with Marcy. Then there were the saucy refrigerator magnets, another remnant from our days on the road in our mobile home. These provided womb icons, allowing my expression of solidarity: my vulnerable lady parts = your vulnerable lady parts. That fragile, durable butterfly wing hung in a plastic sleeve with side-by-side Loteria icons for El Diablito and La Dama.

I hung the whole thing around my neck with a vaguely medical strap dotted with game-of-chance dots. It seemed to call out for a shiny bow. Perhaps a symbol of the gift of life, the gifts brought even by foreknowledge of death. Perhaps a reminder to stay present.

There were other moments with my mother that marked my passage into adulthood - when she pulled the car away from the Reed College campus after depositing me and my belongings for my freshman year, for example (she swears I looked terrified; I recall nothing of the sort).

But the threshold-crossing that I remember best at this time of year is when she packed up my Christmas ornament collection and shipped it across the 3,000 miles that separated us. Her aunt Scooter had started the family ritual, bestowing a special Christmas ornament upon me and my sister. My mom adopted the practice, curating each year's offering from a museum gift shop, a local arts and crafts sale, or her travels.

Christmas was typically crappy at my house growing up, my father's comings and goings and poorly kept secrets adding reckless speed to the usual rollercoaster of heightened expectations and dashing disappointments. But the annual ornaments, unwrapped on Christmas Eve, never failed.

By the time I was fully established as a West Coast resident - my trips back east for the holidays no longer annual and that "home" (as defined by wherever my mom lived) shifting with my mom's career moves - my ornament collection had grown to several dozen. My mom sorted through the boxes, separating the twinned pairs - each of my ornaments matched by one of my sister's, thematically related but as distinct as she and I. My mother nestled each into the protective sleeve of a wine carton. Taped and addressed, some of the best of my childhood made its way across the continent to me.

Since I've been the custodian of my own collection, others have added to it. For a few years I held a tree trimming party but the truth is, I prefer to place the ornaments myself. The newest goes up first. I no longer wait til Christmas Eve to unwrap my mom's latest. She sends or delivers it earlier in the month, triggering my always-fervent announcement to Amber, "We need to get my tree!"

The bird wing of this eclectic menagerie is now the largest - I like to put them together up at the top. The oldest ornaments, all faded felt and unravelling gold thread, go on the more private back side of the tree revealed when I open the pocket door to my office. Writing this at my desk, there they are - talismans of my childhood. 

Other ornaments bring their own associations. The one from the Alaska State Ferry trip where my grandmother spent a week narrating her life's story into a tape recorder. The ones made by the kids in my life, to whom I will someday bequeath my collection.

This year I decorated the tree the way I like it best. My mom was in town for a visit. She and Amber and I ventured out to a neighborhood tree lot - too cold to cut our own, we decided (we are a practical clan). Amber took care of getting it in the stand and hanging the lights. And then my mom unpacked the battered old wine carton, releasing each treasure from its shroud of old wrapping paper and packing peanuts. She handed them one by one to me and I found them each a place on this year's tree.

I'm a terrible pack rat. I still have every love note my high school boyfriend and I passed back and forth nearly four decades ago. To celebrate my 30th high school reunion I couldn't keep myself from embracing yet another vestige of the past - the Frye boots I'd worn back then. No, these aren't the same pair, just the same idea. All the excellence of a Frye boot with the added bonus of nostalgia, a connection to what I can barely remember but somehow don't want to forget.

And so I'm always fascinated by people who are able to clear themselves of clutter, who shed their skin and don't sit around in the desiccated dust of it.

While I travel this month, blissfully living with the bare necessities as the rest of my crap makes do without me, I thought you'd enjoy the story of a ritual designed to say goodbye to the stuff no longer needed.

Click to read A Funeral for Riding Boots by Jacki Hollywood Brown, on unclutter.com. How have you bid farewell to your well-loved things? 

Downsizing into a studio apartment would be a challenge for most of us. For a quilter with a lifetime supply of fabrics - ouch!

But quilters are adept at patching together ingenious solutions. And so Becky Bent devoted a whole wall of her one-room home in a retirement community to a 3-D collage of textiles, quilt pieces, and other visual inspirations. A coworker gifted her with a loft bed to stack against the opposite wall, creating a nook for her sewing machine underneath. In place of the folding panel doors covering the two wide, shallow closets she hung heirloom quilt tops she had discovered in long-ago forays to antique shops. 

In her early 60s, Becky is one of the youngest residents at Westmoreland Union Manor. "When most people see me they assume I'm visiting a parent here," she tells me. But despite the cramped quarters, the place suits her needs in retirement. She gets to garden ("Gardeners are the nicest people," she says) in a hidden landscape ribboned by Crystal Springs. There's her daily hour at the pool tables in the rec room, and a gang of women teaching her mahjong. The crafts room gives her space to stretch out her quilting projects and the place is full of interesting people with a lifetime of stories. All in all, a nice balance of communal activity and the privacy of a solitary studio. 

But one of the greatest benefits to her new situation - and the one that inspired my visit - is that it finally provided a home for "B. George: A Portrait of My Father," a life-sized quilt Becky created nearly 25 years ago as the thesis project for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

"My father died in 1983 of lung cancer which had metastasized to his brain. He was 60 years old," reads her artist's statement alongside the quilt, now hung in a main hall of Union Manor. 

"He was a kind and gentle man who loved to garden, and was a voracious reader who kept a notebook listing every book he had read. He had a great sense of humor, and was a great punster. I still miss him, and I think of him every time I hear a pun (bad or good!!)"

Becky's mother "didn't do funerals". So creating this tribute quilt provided Becky with some sense of closure. The shirt is one of B. George's own, a wild striped affair of stylized animal heads. The books feature titles her dad had treasured. A real garden glove keeps his flowers perpetually tended.

For all the soothing the making of the quilt provided, Becky finds even greater completion in seeing it hung, 30 years after his death, in a place where others on the downslope of life can connect to it, their own stories, and to her. It's likely B. George, if he could hear the chatter in the corridor, might learn a few new puns, both good and bad.

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Deep thanks for this story to Becky Bent, who takes commissions for quilts. Contact me if you'd like to connect with her. For more stunningly beautiful commemorative quilts, check out Lori Mason Design.

With increasing interest in divorce ceremonies, Life-Cycle Celebrant Dannielle Yates brings us a story of a ceremony she conducted that supported healing for a couple who had travelled to the brink of divorce. 

As Dannielle's client J. recalls, "My husband and I had been through a long and difficult journey that created much uncertainty as to whether we would continue to be together. After working diligently for several months with a couples' counselor, we made great progress and recommitted to our marriage. 

"There was much healing to do, though, and one aspect of our healing was to clear our home of negative energy that had accumulated through arguments, hurt, and anger. We reached out to Dannielle for her clearing talents."

In addition to her expertise in ceremony, Dannielle brings her gifts as an intuitive healer to clear, heal, and bless living and work spaces. She uses sound, among other modalities, to elevate the energy vibration to a frequency favorable for clarity, harmony, and transformational change.

J. reports, "As the three of us walked from room to room, Dannielle inquired as to how we used the room and what experience we had with that room. Each had its own story and she used each room's unique energy and purpose to clear it and bless it."

Going forward, Dannielle invited J. and her husband to be intentional as they step through the door to their home. She coached them to take a moment to affirm their choice to recommit to their marriage, remember what they love and admire about each other, and enter with an open heart and mind. Their home is now humming with possibilities.   

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Many thanks to Dannielle for sharing her clients' story, with their permission. Read more about Dannielle's healing rituals here. 

This spring I used gifted feng shui consultant Anezka Drazil to help me redesign my insanely cluttered home office to better support my Celebrancy work. Now I'm tackling nearly 20 years of flotsam and jetsam in my basement! 

What do you do to clear your home of bad energy and distractions?

At the end of my recent Final Passages home funeral guide training, we were given two parting gifts designed to remind us that joy, humor, and resiliency are intimately bound together with death and loss. The first gift was a goofy flashing toy ; the second, a stress management kit.

The stress management kit contained a world of wisdom slipped into a Chinese money envelope no bigger than a credit card. An enclosed card provided a key to the contents:

• An eraser… so you can make all your mistakes disappear. 
• A coin… so you will never have to say “I’m broke.” 
• A marble… in case someone says, “You’ve lost all your marbles.” 
• A rubberband… to stretch yourself beyond your limits. 
• A string… to tie things together when everything seems to fall apart. 
• A button… for your lips, so you’ll have time to think before you speak. 
• A knot… so when you reach the end of your rope you’ll have something to hang on to. 
• A hug and a kiss… to remind you that someone, somewhere cares about you. 

Cute, yes. Simplistic, maybe. But this dear little packet was also sweetly symbolic of the caring support extended by Jerrigrace Lyons and her husband Mark towards each of their training program graduates. And it was a potent representation of the power of symbols to sustain us in times of trouble.

I recently composed a ceremony-on-the-spot to support dear friends facing a life-changing crisis. I knew they considered sage a source of purification, so we began by burning some, wafting the smoke into every corner of their apartment. Then I folded a long strip of card stock, accordion style, and had them take turns writing their private responses, fold by fold, to the statement, “May we be supported, strengthened, or blessed by….” 

As they sat together on the couch I read their words back to them, revealing a lovely synchronicity between what each had written independently. We paused to let these prayers sink in, then bound their folded intentions with a soft red string.

After offering them John O’Donohue’s Blessing for Courage, we lit Flying Wish Papers to focus on what they needed to release. One round was definitely not enough! We did another, capturing the ash bodies of the papers and letting them go, out the window, into the night air.

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What symbols and rituals do you draw upon in times of trouble?