Kelley Edwards 
Spring cleaning has become almost a biological ritual. The winter has gone, the windows are open and we suddenly want to give the house a freshening up. We wash, we dust, we sort. Some things are tossed or re-homed. But what if we cleaned, not with the birth of a new season in mind, but use our own death as motivation instead.
There is a good chance that you know someone who is facing the imminent holiday with impending dread. It’s hard to know what to say to a friend who is grieving, and the holidays can be a particularly difficult time to face. There are ways to help (or not!) but the main rule is to follow the lead of the person who is grieving.
When Charmaine Haddad’s parents were both gone, the family still had items and clothing that had belonged to their mom and dad. Charmaine’s sister, Charlotte, took her mother’s fur coat and her father’s suede one and commissioned a local craftsperson to create Christmas heirlooms. The result was a combination of Santas that the family can … Read more
If you had told me a few years ago that thinking and talking about death would make my life better, well, I might have just died from shock.
Death certainly teaches us to not waste our time, the God-given time we have here on Earth. We need to give a lot of love to those that are important to us in our lives, especially to our family, to our close friends, to give all that we can. —Andre Roupp
It’s not unusual to fear death. It is the great unknown, after all. It brings the ultimate sadness and enormous loss. But to carry that fear always, obsessively, makes it a phobia. And that phobia has a name: Thanatophobia.
With COVID-19 very much a part of our lives, we have collective feelings of being uncomfortable or out of sorts. This feeling can be attributed to a global grief, and the antidote is being tender with ourselves – and others. Stressed out has become the new normal, and, clearly, it’s not healthy.
Grief can be an isolating experience, but as the world adapts to life in a pandemic, we are forced to redesign how we grieve as communities in isolation. And when a community is unable to physically come together in tragedy, they find ways to be together, apart.
No matter how organized a person, there are still things to be handled after someone dies. Items accumulated in a lifetime have to go somewhere, and family members left behind are given the task of cleaning and clearing out the home of someone they’ve lost.
In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, nineteen people were executed for practicing the “devil’s work,” or, in other words, being witches. Fourteen were women, five were men. In 2019, at the end of October, also in Salem, Massachusetts, modern day witches celebrate the Festival of the Dead.
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