Blog Posts

Death Without Religion?

4/29/2016

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.

Funeral for a Fish

4/13/2016

When I arrived to take my nine year-old niece to school yesterday, she had a job for me. "Emerald died," Josie reported. "We have to bury him."

Emerald was a beta fish. She told me that his once-splendid tail had fallen apart and that the other fish in the tank had been attacking him. She had already laid him out in an Altoids tin and had a grave marker ready (recycled from the burial of Saski, her very first fish).

Her dad tried to give me an out - he knew I'd had a full load of family, friend, and client funeral services in recent weeks. But Josie already had me by the arm and said conspiratorially, "After all, Aunt Holly, it's what you're good at."

We dug a shovel out of the garage. Josie was pleased we'd found the yellow handled one; they'd used a trowel for Saski's burial and she had yet another tool in mind for whichever burial would come next. The idea of every one of their garden implements being employed in gravedigging seemed important to her.

She led me to a spot underneath a rhododendron bush where Saski had returned to the earth. We dug the grave, trying not to bisect any earthworms. Josie picked up each of the worms that wriggled to escape, comparing their lengths. After placing Emerald's casket in the ground we gathered petals to decorate it. She told me stories about Emerald and told Emerald stories about Saski, so that they might find each other in the spirit world.

But there was something missing. The ancient Egyptians sent their dead along with something from their lives so they wouldn't feel lost, she told me. She ran off to get a few pieces of gravel from Emerald's tank.

After those were placed I asked if she had a song for Emerald. She gave it some thought and then began a soft song of love and farewell. I joined her for a few final rounds. We covered the grave, placed the marker and some flowers, and went inside for breakfast.

Coming Full Circle

3/30/2016

The Spring Equinox offers an experience of coming full-circle, of the life that is fed by death, new growth emerging from the fallow times.

I spent the first part of the first day of Spring at Portland Nursery, leading a discussion on springtime rituals and making a spray that would grace my father-in-law's grave when we buried him later in the week.

I went from the nursery to Forest Park where I led a ceremony honoring a baby who had died before her birth.

On Friday we gathered to mourn and celebrate my spouse's father Dean, a deeply decent man. That night, we gathered with our larger circle to mourn and celebrate our much-missed friend Marcy on the anniversary of her birth.

Then, a few days of retreat in a sacred place in the Columbia River Gorge. We were sent with prayer flags sewn at a kitchen table by women whose hands followed the stitching of untold generations of women before them. We released the flags into the mists of a wind-gnarled oak grove, returning the next day to find them perfectly framing a view of a freshly snow-laden Mt Hood.

What rituals of remembrance do you employ?

This month on the Death Talk Project blog, I'm starting to share stories from my archive. You can find them all on this site, of course, but here's a sample of just three, on the theme of "ashes to ashes".

In Praise of the Vernal

3/19/2016

I live in a temperate rain forest where trees and shrubs bloom seemingly year round. Our January sidewalks are dusted with cherry blossom petals instead of snow. In place of curtains, our windows are shaded by bough upon bough of camellia flowers.

It wasn't always so. I grew up in New England where it was winter until it was spring. Some of my favorite childhood memories relate to the rituals practiced by my mother to coax spring into our home.

She brought branches of forsythia and pussy willow indoors to force their blooms weeks ahead of their outdoor schedule. We pricked the ends of eggs with a pin, blowing the contents out into a bowl, then dying the shells. A drop of melted wax affixed a thread to the decorated eggs which she then hung from the blooming branches.

There was Easter sunrise service, up on East Rock, then home for hot cross buns and a treasure hunt for the Easter baskets my mother had hidden.

These days I mark the change of the seasons by heading to Portland Nursery to lead a class where we reflect on the personal, familial, and cultural traditions that tether us to the turning of the great wheel of life. This weekend we'll forage from the garden grounds to gather bits to tuck into a spring altar swag.

As we admire each other's creations, we'll offer this simple blessing for the vernal equinox: May the seeds of your intentions be well tended.

Each leaf,
each blade of grass
vies for attention.
Even weeds
carry tiny blossoms
to astonish us.
~ Marianne Poloskey
Sunday in Spring

Quoth the Raven...

3/13/2016

Photo: Chuck Nakell, Portland Audubon

There are few sounds that pierce the heart like the sound of grief - a sound seldom heard in our otherwise cacophonous contemporary culture. I wrote about that silence last year in my account of a Dagara grief ritual led by Sobonfu Some.

Last week, the sound of grief ruptured the quiet of our Sunday morning: my spouse Amber reacting to the call from the hospice house. Her Dad had just died.

The days leading up to and following his last exhale were punctuated by so many clear notes of grace. One of those came in the form of a glossy, black bird.

On Wednesday morning, at the time Dean's body was being cremated, Amber and I entered the wet green womb of the Portland Audubon Sanctuary, where Dean had volunteered for 17 years. On this rain-soaked weekday, we had the place to ourselves, it seemed. As we stepped down the slick trail among the old-growth conifers, descending to the rush of Balch Creek, we noticed a large enclosure. A sign told us it was the home of Aristophanes, the resident raven. But Aristophanes was nowhere to be seen.

We reached the creek and took shelter in a grove of giant trees, pausing to speak aloud some words to Dean. After a while we found ourselves drawn down the path to a small pond bordered by a wooden pavilion. As we entered the open-sided structure, facing the pond, we became aware of a slender man with waist-length braids, behind us, bending to the ground just off the deck. On his heavily gloved arm was a large blue-black bird: Aristophanes.

This long-time Audubon volunteer who spends every Wednesday visiting with the eight year-old rescue bird was gathering wet leaves to tidy up the large glops Aristophanes had left on the floorboards. Unaware of the reason for our visit, he began to weave a gentle spell that held us there for story after story about this remarkable bird.

Edward S. Curtis photo of a Nunivak Cup'ig man with raven maskette

In cultures throughout history Raven has been seen as a mediator between life and death. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss theorized it was this attribute that propelled both Raven and Coyote to mythic status. A quick tour of Wikipedia finds Raven featured in important stories of the Greeks and Romans; in the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, and among medieval Christians; among Nordic and Celtic cultures; in Siberia, North Asian, and South Asian lands (where the Raven still serves as the national bird of Bhutan); and among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

As a symbol of death in European cultures, Raven has become associated with sadness, a bad omen. But in Africa, Raven is seen as a guide. In China and Japan, Raven is a messenger of the gods representing the light of the sun. Unlike the modern West which dichotomizes life and death into mutually exclusive realms, several indigenous cultures' creation stories depict Raven as both creator and trickster.

Our Audubon guide focused instead on his wonder at the intelligence of this bird, its neocortex proportionately thicker than a chimpanzee's. The raven not only uses tools, it makes them. Their communication skills, we're learning, are remarkably complex.

During his keeper's narrative, Aristophanes kept up a steady litany of gurgles, clucks (sounds like "tock!"), and croaks. This unexpected cross-species duo, showing up in this place of ancient beauty, on this most sacred of mornings, provided a glimpse of the power of the mythic imagination to connect us to worlds outside the limits of our physical existence.

Over the past week, as my father-in-law entered his dying time, I prepared to introduce the Death Talk Project, with its logo (seemingly coincidentally) the sociable raven.

As the life-force began to ebb from this deeply decent, loyal man, I was reminded with my every breath how each grief touches the ones that came before. With me in the room with Dean: my own father, whose brain cancer showed up 16 years ago this month. My dear friend Marcy, whose birthday we'll mark on March 25th without her. The other beloveds, mine, and those of the clients I serve. And beyond them, the names we'll never know, the generations of life in all its forms whose deaths made my existence possible.

All of them here, as memories, as felt presence, in the molecules we breath and the food we eat and the ground we stand on. In what John O'Donohue calls the space between us. I created the Death Talk Project to serve and support that space between us. Please let me know what you think.

The Facts of Death

2/28/2016

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.

Happy Lupercalia!

2/14/2016

"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.

Celebrating Silas

1/28/2016

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

The Peace Militia

1/23/2016

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

If God is Love...

1/13/2016

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.

David with 1-day-old Malcolm

Lynda contacted a professional calligrapher, a friend of her sister-in-law and her partner who had met David during a visit to Portland. Having her use a lettering style developed by a Welsh calligrapher was a happy surprise since David's family has Welsh roots. Lynda says, “It feels like a cherry on top.”

As to how it turned out: “The end result was more beautiful that I had imagined.” But the effect was more than aesthetic – the piece has great powers of evocation.

“Having it on wood was also not in the original picture, but so very David,” Lynda says. “He loved to make things out of wood. He made the bed we slept in together, and now I sleep in alone. He made the desk that I work on. At our old house it was a double desk; we worked side by side. Now it's just for one. The first thing he did when we began to be serious about one another was to build a table: in the landing of the group house where he lived, using two wooden horses to brace the table, cutting the wood with a hand-held power saw and inlaying a strip of mahogany with a wobbly router. That's how I knew he was courting me. He made bookshelves and an end table for my mother, a cabinet for our son; one of the last projects was a set of kitchen benches for our daughter Lindsay and her husband Eric. So having the calligraphy on wood is very meaningful.”

More than art, more than memory, the piece has another purpose. Lynda explains: “The most important part for me is for other people to see the calligraphy. I wanted it to declare for me that David lived; that I loved him; and that he is in this house and always remembered.

"I have made a place for David, and told the world something important about him."

“I have David's ashes in the house, but no one can tell what they are. They just see a lovely hand-thrown jar. Now there is a public spot for David here, where I live. I have made a place for David, and told the world - the world that comes to my front door - something important about him. This gives me great ease. I feel more congruent. I used to feel that there was a rupture; life without David had been torn from life with David. Now it's all one piece, I am all one piece. When grief flows, I don't feel lonely.”

I had the honor of serving as a sounding board for Lynda as she considered the installation of the calligraphed plaque. It was placed in a simple family ceremony just before Christmas. She says, “David’s sister and her partner brought little statuettes of a skier and a bicycle, both very much part of David's identity. Our daughter Lindsay and son-in-law Eric added a sprig of flowering rosemary. Our son Daniel put up the mounts for the plaque. There is a pine cone placed below for each member of the family. The installation is truly comforting.”

In the few weeks since then, no visitor has mentioned it. “I would have thought that someone would say ‘that's beautiful’ or ‘how interesting,” Lynda says. “But not so far. I wonder about that. But I love coming to the front porch and seeing it. For me, the calligraphy is tremendously healing.

Lynda with Malcolm

Lynda’s mother died seven weeks before David, in Washington, DC, while David was in the hospital here in Portland. Lynda plans to honor the flow of grief and the continuity of connection with her mother by installing a Little Library in the front yard, dedicated to her.

“My mother loved books and she loved children reading books. I imagine a painted memorial on it: To Pauline Martin, who lived to be 101 and always loved a good story,” Lynda says. "I'm thinking of splashing a little Jack Daniels over it as part of the inaugural ceremony. Maybe some milk and cookies for kids in the neighborhood. My mother wasn't a big drinker at all, but in her senility (in the nursing home) she used to ask for a coke 'with a stick in it,' meaning some bourbon. Makes me smile.

“I just want people here around me, my friends and neighbors, to know who I came from, and to know something about these two people I loved who are gone.”

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