Feb 8, 2019 | Remembering, Ritual
Hundreds of people headed to the Exhibition Buildings on Monday evening this week. Ten years on the Victorian Government was holding a ceremony to honour the victims and survivors of the 2009 bushfires. I took away three lessons for a great ceremony. Yes, as with the...
Dec 13, 2017 | Love projects, Remembering
In October this year, we had an anniversary. It was a Libran birthday, my mother Mary’s. Marking the anniversary was a first for our family, even though her death was many many years’ ago. It wasn’t that we forgot, we just weren’t that good at talking about it. She...
Sep 6, 2016 | Having a vigil and laying out the body, Memorial, Remembering
by Jennifer Downs I spent a week with Jennifer Downs in Baltimore, Maryland in 2012. I was attending ‘home funeral’ training with Final Passages. An acupuncturist, Steiner educator and political activist, Jennifer’s tagline is ‘Wake up to your...
Apr 11, 2016 | Funeral options, Memorial, Remembering
All the sadness in love and loss. We can only experience it. And yet there’s also a pull to make sense of it. The journey to make loss meaningful can be painfully long. Somehow memorials play a role in this. Then as time passes, there’s something left, something to...
Feb 13, 2015 | Green funeral, Having a vigil and laying out the body, Home funeral, Remembering
In this post I use the word vigil, but not in a religious sense. I’ve made vigil the topic for the Sustainable Funeral event at this year’s Sustainable Living Festival (SLF) event. I think of a vigil as a continuous, intimate thread of care. Some want to...
Jul 11, 2014 | Memorial, Remembering
I recently spent time at Brunswick Heads, a little NSW town with beachside streets, and a wonderful breakwater. Bruns for short. Bruns is a place people are fond of. and you see that in memorials placed at ground and eye level. A few memorials At the gate of the...
