In 2002 I began making memory quilts due to the death of my young nephew. I took his clothes and created quilts for his siblings and mother. Soon after another mother who lost her 2 year old gave me his clothes to make one about her son. This little boy I knew not at all.
As I cut up the little clothes, the small jeans, the t-shirts and as I read the words that I had each write, I felt connected to the little boys. It was like they came to help me, to guide me to comfort the ones they left behind. It was an intriguing and very moving experience that perhaps opened me up to what some call the Creative Genius.
It was my intention at the time of each quilt to capture the boy’s essence, to hold a bit of them here on earth.
The finished quilt seemed to hold magic powers besides having something to hold on to.
Around the same time, I was asked to create coffin drapes. Hard to describe here, but if you can think back to an open coffin, they are really only half open. The closed part then has a drape that conceals the leg or lower half of you as you lay in there.
I made quite a few and had them in two different funeral homes. They displayed them on coffins in the Casket Display Room. When I seen the room with colorful quilts adorning those boxes, it seemed I was on the right path.
However, after a few months, one funeral home had me come and collect them, saying they were for the Ego not for Spirit. I was puzzled to say the least, but left with them in my arms.
The second funeral home did sell one. One I had made with fabric of birds. A woman who passed loved birds and her family thought it a perfect way to personalize her coffin.
As I worked on these both in the creation and then with the funeral homes, I was learning more about how we say good -bye and how we celebrate or mourn the loss.
The Coffin Drapes then led me to make teeny tiny quilts that would fit into small coffins that a baby would be buried in. It was then that I was asked to go to a Baby Grief Group and present this idea.
This group of grieving parents was working on projects to help the next set of parents who suffered the loss of child, have access to things that can help at this sad time. A basket that holds many things you would never even think about, but need to.
I began to see how we seldom think of the process of death until we are right in the middle of it and then make decisions in a high emotional state, and most often are a bobble-head just nodding as the funeral director gives us options.
As I look back on that time in my life, I now see it as the first lessons in Body and Spirit, to see and work with those who deal with bodies and with the grieving who are holding on to Spirit.
Imagine now the many ways we deal with death? The many different religions and traditions that are used to dispose of the body, how there are rules even in this, and not to mention the expense, the guilt and the shame if you don’t put your loved one in a perfect box.
Today as I sit here all that seems so foreign to me, that we are so concerned of a body after the Spirit has left it. It seems to me an empty container. My first close encounter with the funeral business left me feeling cold.
At first I saw it as a wonderful service to help those who lost their loved ones, to help them through this transition. A deeper look had me reeling.
It almost seems that we as a society have been hoodwinked.
There are businesses that make a living on empty bodies.
If we separate ourselves and can see that the body is the vehicle we use while alive, it does beg to ask why we spend so much time and effort yet again on the container?
The body while alive is a truly amazing thing, it is a finely tuned instrument that we use to experience life on earth, to gain awareness and consciousness and it houses the soul. But once the breath leaves, once the soul exits, then what? It seems in nature it is cycled back into the system effortlessly, yet we struggle to maintain it, and preserve it. Why?
Why do we try to hold on, to keep it unchanging, to not allow it to cycle back, to return to the ash of its beginning.
Is this even possible to stop the decay the natural process?
Who is resisting?
Who fears the ending?
Who wants to preserve a dead body?
Who suffers the most when it dies?
Death is a great teacher of living.
Live like you were dying, isn’t it impossible not to?
If we look at life as fleeting, as precious with the ending unknown, perhaps we would live differently. Some how we feel that we have time at our disposal always, another day, another year, another hour, but do we?
Would it not be better to speak of death, to anticipate it, to face it fearlessly. And perhaps when we find peace in dying we can really live.
Nickleback sings a song “If today was your last day” and a few words caught my attention. No rewind button.
