by Holly J. Pruett, Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant

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Ceremonies that Re-member Us

“Our elders say ceremonies are the way we remember to remember.”

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Remembering can bring to mind or heart an experience from the past, a person or a pet no longer living. It can be a form of time-travel, bringing what was then and there, into the present.

Remembering can also serve to re-member us. To establish or repair a connection. To reawaken the security of belonging that can too easily become severed or forgotten.

Cultures throughout time have practiced ceremony as a way of reviving the stories, meaning, and experience of kinship that are the fabric of an intact culture – a fabric that has unraveled in our modern times.

It is this birthright of belonging – to a place, to a people, to all of creation – that Francis Weller, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, distills into a quote attributed to T.S. Eliot: “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.”

Altar of Grief & Remembrance, available to participants throughout a recent three-day activist conference (photo by author).

Altar of Grief & Remembrance

Quotes from Francis Weller, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sobonfu Somé, and Martín Prechtel were among a dozen I placed on the wooden crates that formed the scaffolding for an Altar of Grief & Remembrance at a recent conference of racial and social justice activists. Throughout the three-day event, participants could wander down to a room at the far end of a corridor to spend quiet time, solo or in community, reflecting on what they were grieving, who they needed to remember, and what was giving rise to gratitude.

The cards which they inscribed, and flowers from the altar, were later offered into a Remembrance Day fire at White Eagle Memorial Preserve, a conservation burial ground. Thus the community that visited the conference Altar, and the community of those remembered and mourned there, was joined to another community of souls above and below ground amidst the mighty Ponderosa pines.

The benefit of holding a community space for grief ripples out beyond those who walk through the doors. Just seeing a listing in the conference calendar may have stirred something for many who didn’t participate. It might prompt other meetings, conferences, and gatherings to incorporate remembrance. It reminds us that alongside the urgency of our tasks at hand, time in ceremony renews us for the hard work of staying human in dehumanizing times, and is a resource to connect with others who have lost the tether of belonging.

Participant cards were burned in a Remembrance Day fire at White Eagle Memorial Preserve (photo courtesy of White Eagle).

A Library of Possibilities

Telling the stories of ceremonies in a ceremonially-impoverished time can do as much to re-member us to this way of being human as participating in the ceremonies themselves. Since the early days of my Celebrancy practice I’ve shared examples on my blogs, of ceremonies I’ve had the honor of co-creating and leading, and those I’ve heard about or attended. It’s a library of possibilities, of “new ways to walk through old portals,” as a friend described the work of a contemporary Celebrant.

It’s an honor to co-create with those who find their way to ceremony without having any examples to follow. Those whose ancestral practices for marking milestones and aligning with the great wheel of life have been lost through generations of migration and modernization. I was one of them.

As a longtime community organizer, it’s been especially heartening to help with ceremonies in the public sphere that attend to more than individual joys and sorrows. Over the years, these have included:

• The globally-watched Celebration of Life for Packy, the oldest Asian male elephant in North America
• A Reinterment Ceremony for the remains of nine individuals who had died over 100 years ago in the county Poor Farm
• A Rededication Ceremony honoring cultural survival, for two newly restored Totem Poles installed at a public zoo
• Officiating the first Same-Sex Wedding Ceremonies in a public venue following full legalization (the Mayor then asked to borrow my script!)
• Supporting our queer community center in the design of a vigil following the political killing of an anti-racist LGBTQ activist
• Updating and for 12 years leading an annual holiday Children’s Memorial service at an historic cemetery
• Helping a family business throw a community farewell party on the sale of an iconic building
• Offering seasonal reflection rituals in conjunction with botanical craft projects through a local nursery
• Creating and presenting “Marking Milestones: Ritual & Ceremony in Modern Life” in venues from libraries and churches to a mental health clinic and Grange hall

Objects of veneration mingled with words, flowers, and tears on the Altar of Grief & Remembrance (photo by author).

Communal Grief & The Future of Our World

“I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle our grief.”

~ Sobonfu Somé

I’ve also been called to support organizations and workplaces with discreet ceremonial responses:

• A prominent philanthropic foundation anticipating the empty chair at the next board meeting after the death of a director
• A global high tech firm and a regional public agency, both wanting to honor staff members who died suddenly, without a chance to say goodbye
• A funeral home that needed a physical and energetic reset their workspace after the violent death of one of their coworkers

There are also the joyous and celebratory occasions, both private and public, that are elevated by well-done ceremonies. These too, are well-loved treasures in the library of possibilities. Lest we bifurcate grief and joy into separate compartments, I have seen that no matter how hard the circumstance, ceremonies that hold space for grief and reconnect us to the practice of mourning in community can be ceremonies of joy. 

The full range of human experience is engaged by skillful ceremonial practice. “The full catastrophe,” as proclaimed by Zorba the Greek and further popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Re-membering ourselves to a life that’s wider than one person and deeper than the present moment – this is how grief understood as a skill, as a renewer of culture, as a communal function, is a gift to the wellbeing of the world.

About the Author

Holly J. Pruett is a Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant (class of 2011), Community Death Educator, Home Funeral Guide, and Death Doula who co-created the non-commercial public information website Oregon Funeral Resources & Education. She holds two Proficiency Badges from the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance and certification in Thanatology from the Association for Death Education & Counseling.