Honoring the Grief of Our Lives & These Times: Cultivating the Skill of Heartbrokenness As it happened, the day before Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave her searing testimony in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing, I gave a… Read More
A mother orca’s devotion to her dead calf raises questions about how we humans carry our dead The internet has been abuzz with news of a mother whale who for a week now, “has been carrying her dead… Read More
Death, according to the New York Times, is “having a moment in the sun.” Good news, or troubling? The June 22 article, “The Positive Death Movement Comes to Life” is one of the most-forwarded links to hit my… Read More
How we approach death and the dying, how or whether we remember or care for the dead – these questions are inextricably bound up with how we age, or don’t, in the dominant culture of the West –… Read More
Watch Staring Down Fate, an important new documentary about mortality and the state of our planet When Chris Lucash was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 53, he and his wife Alisa and their three young children… Read More
What’s your take on the popular BBC “IMHO” video? My first thought was that Dr Kathryn Mannix is a Mr Rogers for the dying: who wouldn’t want her warm and normalizing bedside manner at the deathbed? I appreciate… Read More
Spaces are filling fast for the workshop that will introduce this option to Portland While I try to avoid euphemisms, I’ve yet to find an elegant way to refer what to do with a dead body. Straightforward terms… Read More
One year after my friend Marcy learned she would die decades sooner than she would have liked, she wrote a letter to the core group of women she called her Sisterhood. “Death is not my friend but it… Read More
Our approach to ancestral burial sites may say more about us than them I often begin my discussions with community groups asking, “How many of you grew up going to funerals? How many have bathed the body of… Read More
Check out Oregon Funeral Resources & Education and The Funeral Partnership for other states.
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Last Updated: September 1, 2018 by hollyjpruett
The Muscle of Remembrance
On the Eve of an Ancestral Pilgrimage We gathered around a table strewn with flower petals, each of us holding a sprig of cedar. Cedar, known by some in this part of the country as the First Ancestor…. Read More