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Death as I knew it was kept behind closed doors, made separate.
Funeral services were obligatory, governed by formalities, scarcely representative of the animate character that was my relational understanding of a person and their gifts. Predefined, generic.
And that was it... they were gone. A simple and resounding blankness, contrasted with the memory of all they taught me and the privacy of my enduring love for them.
I became fascinated with cultures that revered the dead, integrating them into celebrations of active remembrance.
Surrounded by cemeteries in small-town Massachusetts, I walked the hills studded with gravestones that offered tiny windows into abstract lives once flushed with purpose.
These poems, marked in stone, offered meditative windows for me before I was old enough to comprehend them.
But still they weren’t enough...
...thus began a life-long curiosity and passion for death.
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We remember how a person made us feel. The intangible qualities of their singular human soul.
But do we ever truly know a person? Do we ever fully understand what they endured to arrive at the structure of their observable life?
We each have something untouchable about us. When we die, everything we touched is surrendered.
I believe that death invites us to participate in the story of a lifetime, the hidden mysteries of a soul, with all its brilliant shapes and shadows.
So that is what we do here. We make from death a parting gift.
We consider how to share the secrets of our living and turn our legacy into something relational, something of transferable Beauty; we decide how our energy is eventually liberated and exchanged.
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This work is primarily for those who are cognizant enough to access their imagination.
It can also be completed by friends and family on behalf of a dying person.
Return anytime.
Live life conscious of the weight it carries, now and forward, for all our relations.