I am restless today. There is much calling for my attention in my home, and yet I just can’t seem to settle into anything for more than a few minutes. I keep looking outside.

Nathanial Hawthorne said, “ I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”

So I’m going to go for a long walk, and then sit on my porch and just be. No more reading, no more computer. I can wrap up to ward off the chill and simply enjoy the glory of this sunshiny autumn day.

The tagline on my Celebrant logo says ” Every Life is Worth Remembering”. I believe that absolutely and fervently. Creating a meaningful service is heart-work. It need not be fancy or expensive and can be held pretty much anywhere. The intention and content are what count.

My ex-husband died in May of 2000. He was only 63, and we had been divorced for almost two decades. There was no service planned for him, so I flew to Spokane where our two daughters lived, and the three of us plus his son from a previous marriage  had a little informal memorial service for him in my daughter’s living room. We told stories and laughed and cried. I gave each of them a matchbox car from his collection. Reconciliation and healing began in that living room.

My sister and I have lost our parents recently. Our mother died of Alzheimer’s in January of 2003, and our father followed in March of 2004. Not at all religious, and quite unsentimental, my parents didn’t want any fuss made when they died. And they specified cremation. We found a wonderful Celebrant to help us plan the services and officiate them. My mother’s service was sweet and fitting to her. We played some of the old hymns she remembered her mother singing when she was a little girl, and my sister read a lovely piece my mother had written when on a plane flight to Britain many years prior. The Celebrant presented a eulogy created from the many stories we told him at our family meeting. At the conclusion, in unison, all of us gathered there cheered “Bye Vi”! It was perfect! My dad’s service was held in the lounge of his golf club, a place he visited right up to the weeks before he died. He would meet a bunch of his old friends for drinks, and so as people arrived for the service, they were offered a glass of wine. There was much laughter and some great stories as well as some contemplative moments and tears. We celebrated his life exactly where and how he would have liked! Our acceptance of our parents’ deaths, and our healing process would have been delayed if we had not had these services.

Every life is indeed worth remembering…and every service can be a treasured tribute to that life.  This is why I am called to do this work as a Funeral Celebrant.

An email from Lisa, for whom I conducted a Memorial Service for her dog, Molly. It was such a sweet time, concluding with a tree planting over Molly’s ashes.

“It was so wonderful. Perfect, and sincere, and loving, and humourous. Thank you for your attention to detail, and really understanding the essence of Molly and my relationship with her (and Missy’s too!) Thank you again for giving me and Missy, and all of Molly’s fairy dogmothers a wonderful way to say a happy goodbye to her.”

Thank you, Lisa!

After telling folks that I am a Funeral Celebrant, and explaining just what that is, I am often asked why and how I chose this profession.

It’s still a work in progress for me to answer that question, easily and succinctly. In many ways, this profession chose me. So here is a little synopsis of the seemingly unrelated events and circumstances that occurred over a period of a decade, that led me to the wonderful training offered by Doug Manning and Glenda Stansbury in June of 2007.

As a licensed Spiritual Practitioner or counselor, trained at Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, I became co-facilitator of a bereavement group, primarily working with those who had lost a precious animal companion. This allowed me to open my heart to companioning those in grief, which I still do today by co-facilitating a monthly Bereavement Circle here in Seattle.

I attended many Memorial Services at Agape, and became used to the concept of celebrating a person’s life with stories, well-chosen music, sometimes video tributes, and highly individualized ceremonies. This is simply the way it’s done at Agape. Some services were for celebrities that attended Agape, but whether the deceased was a celebrity or simply a beloved and valued congregant, the love shown the family, and the service itself, was always uplifting and healing. I always left those services feeling sad, yes, for the loss, but also full…of hope, of wonder, of such appreciation for the life celebrated, and for the life we are all given.

I’ll continue this in another post.

Just a note to begin this adventure. More to be revealed!