This weekend we went to a halloween party in an old church (very Pittsburgh). Four bars, multiple DJs, and hundreds of adults fully outfitted in costumes (including Pennsylvania costume of the year: a spotted lantern fly who danced for a while with a shadow creature and then laid down on the floor smooshed and dead).
It’s exactly the Halloween party I’ve been looking for. Heavy on the 80s music: Ghostbusters, Thriller, She Blinded me with Science. Paired with cocktails with plastic eyeballs, vampire teeth and spiders. It’s the one I’ve had in my head since we rewatched Hocus Pocus last year (how did those parents find such a fun party in the suburbs?!).
We went with friends, danced, ate, drank, and explored the 100+ year-old church dressed as Noah and Emma from The Resort. A delightful way to spend a Halloweekend and a little different than how I’d spent the morning.
About 12 hours earlier, I was in a room with another group of people thinking about death in a very different way. [tw: hospice, death and dying]
I signed up for a hospice workshop at the community college about a month ago to learn more. Hospice was important for my family as my grandmother reached end of life and I have long wondered if being a hospice volunteer is something that I might be suited for.
In the workshop, we learned about some of the fun, celebration, connection, and comfort people can have at the end of life. And what volunteers do—one woman sings to a patient who is non-verbal and it calms her each week, another colors pages with a patient, another makes videos of people’s lives to give to their families, many listen to music together or tell stories.
Then we did a very tender exercise about death and dying—writing the things we love most in categories (physical items, experiences, nature, and people and animals) and responding to prompts from the facilitator to choose what to crumple. It hit us all differently, some people cried, others did not, and we took some deep breaths together before shifting to a conversation about grief and processing.
“What an example of a continued relationship with someone who has passed?” the bereavement coordinator prompted.
There was a pause as I glanced down at my crumpled pile of index cards underneath the desk and the woman in the front blew her nose. In my mind, I thought of the story I’m planning to write in November which is partly a continued relationship with my grandmother.
“Visiting the cemetery,” someone offered.
“Yes,” the coordinator nodded. “Or even baking a cake on the person’s birthday or keeping an item that was important to them. There are a lot of ways we can have a continued relationship.”
When we did the death and dying exercise, it was amazing to me how quickly I reached for the physical items on the index cards to crumple and toss away. But it strikes me as uniquely human that we create these continued relationships seemingly from nowhere. Over centuries, we’ve grounded our relationships with the departed in physical items, in rituals we participate in or create ourselves, from our spiritual or religious traditions. It’s a small kind of magic.
I think it may be one of the most meaningful things we can do in our lifetime: to walk someone home.
Maybe it feels like a harsh 180 to go from a hospice workshop in the morning to a Halloween party in the evening. But I’ve always found that an awareness of the ending makes everything right now so much brighter and sweeter.
Life is exactly as long as it is. And although it may not be considered polite dinner conversation all the time to talk about death and dying…around the end of October and start of November, we take a collective moment to bring conversations and rituals about death into the light. And we might be a little more comfortable holding up our glass and saying, “‘til death do us party!”
What I’m loving right now:
Lupin Part 3: a French series I strongly recommend
Rewatch of Gilmore Girls , I’m open to hot takes
The most comfortable tie-dyed lounge suit I’ve ever owned from Detroit Dye House
Prepping for National Novel Writing Month, please “friend” me over there if you’re joining in this year!
Nicely written!