Grief Ceremony/Ritual of Memory

November 2, 2025—Grief Ceremony/Ritual of Memory

“The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love [. . .] We live in a perpetually burning building; and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”—Tennessee Williams

Opening Words and Call to Celebration

Today, we rest in the challenge of transmuting pain into grief through mourning. We all suffer when we lose loved ones to death—whether we miss the departed desperately, whether we regret the way relationships ended or the lives that could not be,  whether we could not forgive or reconcile. And we cannot sustain our own lives without finding a way for that pain to be integrated, for pain to become grief. And it is through shared rituals of mourning, not once and done but enacted when needed and especially within a compassionate community, that we find a way for live with our sorrow, one feeling, one state of being along side some many others in our rich and varied lives. And so through readings, music, and ceremony, we seek together to transmute pain to sorrow, to transform suffering to healing.

Hear now these words from the poet Barbara Crooker, “Reel”
Maybe night is about to come
calling, but right now
the sun is still high in the sky.
It’s half-past October, the woods
are on fire, blue skies stretch
all the way to heaven. Of course,
we know that winter is coming, its thin
winding sheets and its hard narrow bed.
But right now, the season’s fermented
to fullness, so slip into something
light, like your skeleton; while these old
bones are still working, my darling[s],
let’s dance.

Come, let us celebrate life, all of it, together.

Reflection from Colleen Good
One summer I went to a Baptist church camp with my friend Karen. For a reserved Anglican raised girl, it was an intense experience with constant pressure of campers to achieve true salvation by opening one’s heart to Jesus and then sharing this in front of the whole camp community – which, I did despite niggling discomfort.

When I came home, I told my parents about the amazing experience I had had and began reading the bible daily. After a week of watching me engage in this ritual, perhaps with some waning enthusiasm on my part, dad pulled me aside and said – you know, Colleen. If you went somewhere where all that the people ate were bananas, you might think that bananas were the only fruit that you should eat. Now, there’s nothing wrong with bananas but there is a whole fruit platter to enjoy in this life…

I don’t know if dad knew that he was planting the first seed of Unitarian Universalism that summer.

My dad, Dr. Brian Good, passed away on the morning of September 5th in the emergency department of the Pembroke Regional General Hospital that night. Normally, a bustling, overcrowded rural emerg, he was the only patient there that night. It felt like a generous act of the universe to have him pass surrounded by health care professionals some of whom may have worked alongside him in the hospital where he had delivered babies, provided anesthesia served up with jokes for the patients who drifted into unconsciousness and the staff who stayed alert operating on them and served as Chief of Staff for many years shepherding in the changes of the time and handling conflicts in his humble, practical, and collaborative way.

It was even more special that my brothers and sister in laws were by his side and I was on the phone letting him know it was okay to go, to reunite with mom, his best friend and love of his life – and that we would all be okay because he had been such a good man and a good father.

Shortly afterwards, a poem about loss and pain landed in my lap in the early days of grieving my father’s death and it resonated deeply with me – so I’d like to share with you.

The Holding – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The way the shore holds the pond,
that is how I want to hold
the pain in my heart, honoring
how vital it is. How it is home
to things with hard shells and sharp
claws and also to beings with gossamer wings.
To drain it would be to lose my aliveness. To become barren, cracked, dry. I can’t say I love
the spider-like skaters that streak across the top, nor the thick gray muck that lines the bottom.
But I love the green rushes that rim the edges, the red-stemmed willows, the wild iris. It is no easy thing to hold pain, but I look how vibrant the pond shore is.
This alive is how I want to live.

My dad was an incredible community member, nature lover, a devoted Anglican and dedicated choir member – and most of all, he was my biggest fan. He cheered me on in cold skating rinks around the Ottawa Valley for years and was always there when I needed anything – and that was sometimes just a quiet presence, a hand to hold or a warm hug provided at just the right time.
I hold my grief gingerly right now – I feel sadness, gratitude, numbness, and respect for the man who loved me, our family and community deeply… and also he was human.
He held close to his heart losses that he took personal responsibility for in a field where death will always, eventually win. He witnessed traumas seen at the bedside and roadside which I believe manifested in unrecognized mental health issues and ongoing and intermittent alcoholism.
When I let myself, I can feel the edges of anger, frustration, resentment, guilt and other feelings that I don’t love so much to acknowledge.
In time, I will hold all the feelings – no matter what they are because I know that the pain I hold and the muck I stand in is surrounded by red willow twigs that he planted; wildflowers that grew from seeds he and mom spread years ago… and I am have lived a blessed life with sunsets by the campfire and morning loon calls at Lake Dore with people I loved and who loved me as best we could.
Looking back at his life I see UU principles lived out in his life – in the kind and humble man he was, in the many ways he served his community and how he wanted the world to be – a better place for all.

Reading
Hear now these words from To Bless the Space Between Us by Irish mystic John O’Donohue:
The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held and integrated into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven. Eternal life is eternal memory; therefore, it becomes possible to imagine a realm beyond endings where all that has unfolded is not canceled or lost, but where the spirit-depths of it are already arriving home.

Prayer/Reflection
I invite us now into a time of reflection and meditation.
Settle into your mind and your body as it is in this moment. . .
Close your eyes or simply soften your gaze. . .
Bring joyful awareness to the sources of delight and gratitude you feel . . .
Bring gentle awareness to those parts of you that hurt. . .
Follow your breath, knowing you are not alone in your pain,
no matter its nature. . .
We breathe together into this time of witness and compassion. . .
Open your heart to the spirit of connection. . .

Hear now these words from poet Roque Dalton, “Like You”:
Like you I love love, life,
the sweet smell of things,
the sky-blue landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life,
love, little things, landscape and bread, the poetry of everyone.

Reflection from Rev. Rita
Last month, I attended a public lecture presented by one of my professors from seminar. Mike Hogue was my theology professor; I took more courses from him than from anyone, and his thinking profoundly influenced my own theological understanding. Where he once wrote about social movements to mitigate and respond to the decline of democracy and to the climate crisis, he now writes about loss. And he writes in a more personal vein, sharing about his mother’s shifting into dementia and all that means to him, all that it does to affect his world view and his theology.

One of the experiences Mike described was that of becoming something other than a son to his mother, something other than a child to a parent. He was her caregiver, down to changing her diapers and helping her to eat. Their conversations shifted. And he felt intense gratitude to give his mother the loving care that he had always known her to give, both what he felt directly from her and what he had witnessed her give to others, people not her family or her children. And yet, perhaps of course, he described a profound sense of loss as he experienced this shift from son to stranger, a loss that is specific and personal and yet also familiar. Any of us who have had a parent, a close relative, a spouse succumb to dementia knows something of what this experience is like, as the person you love forgets who you are, forgets who they are.

As I listened to Mike so warmly describe these shifting feelings and perspective, as he described so eloquently his sense of loss and what it entailed, I felt profound envy. Mike described the depth of his loss, as he became something other than his mother’s son. As my own mother recedes into dementia, my loss is so incredibly different. As my mother lives with her dementia, she primarily and intensely repeats the loss she experiences since my father died nearly five years ago. This is the primary preoccupation of her life and her mind—the intense pain she continues to experience, unhealed, unprocessed pain. Pain not transmuted to grief with the aid of communal acts of mourning. Whatever else goes on in my mother’s mind, her pain at my father’s death is all that passes her lips. She has not acknowledged that I am a daughter who has lost a father, that I am, also now, losing a mother.

And that is not really so strange, I have come to realize in this slow-motion unraveling of relationship and mind. For it has been many, many years since I experienced my mother as a mother, behaving in what I would call a motherly way toward me. In some sense, I have grown unsure that she ever did. She herself had not been properly mothered, and it’s likely my grandmother was not properly mothered either. Mom’s relationship as wife to my father has always superseded all else. And so, as I live watching as dementia shifts my mother, I return to what is probably previous trauma and disfunction that I have long-since passed from and reconciled with. Thank the stars for therapists! Those prior, original losses can’t be made up and so compound into new and strange loss.

My mother has moved to assisted living, just two weeks ago now. Friday, she was talking to me, but briefly thought I was present with her and my sister in her new dining hall. She sounded confused and stressed, tired, but I know that is part of the adjustment she is necessarily going through. She will begin to forget that she lived anywhere else. Unlike what many other people with dementia experience, my mother does not return to memories of earlier times, experiences of long ago while forgetting what she did an hour ago, even 10 minutes ago. But, really, she never did. She was never one to reminisce about “the good old days.” The only good days are literally the presence of my father, and that lack now gives nothing but pain. It is incredibly sad. I have devoted my life to building communities of learning and sharing and growth, places, among other things, to transmute pain into sorrow into healing. I’ve needed such community, because I did not grow up with it.

But who can you suffer a loss of what you never had? I miss a mother I never had and never will. Shalom, my mother. Hello and Goodbye. And so, I reconcile, over and over, to the mother I do have. Not a mother who mothered me, but a model of behavior—strong, relentless, proud, resourceful. This woman remains in me, shaped me as she was shaped, without mothers, a long line of women who had to mother themselves without models, as best they could. Who bore children in such a lack and still managed. I don’t pretend that this was ever enough for me, but certainly it was not nothing. A fierce woman. Not a protector, but a trainer. Not tender but relentless. Broken, but who among us is not broken in some way, much less than perfect. Broken and thus open to the possibilities for relationship, for community, for healing, when vulnerability is finally understood as a strength. Nothing lost. Only changed. Shalom, my mother. Hello and Goodbye. Peace be with you. And with me.

Reading
Hear now these words of poet Kelli Russell Agondon, “Dementia is a New Way to Be Buddhist”:

Today my mum said she doesn’t remember arriving at my house with a dishcloth,
doesn’t remember me telling her my kitten stayed overnight at the vet,
that I’d be coming over to help with bills.
What she remembers is now.
She knows her memory is a ship leaving port without permission,
her memory is a cloud she can’t hold.
When she asks, Why is everything so hard?
I say, I don’t think you’re the only one asking that.
When I say, I have trouble with loss, she says, We are all leaving.
She adds: I know I won’t be around much longer.
So I ask her what she’ll come back as?
A pig, she says, then laughs.
I tell her I can’t imagine seeing a pig and having to say, Oh, there’s my mom!
She smiles and says, Then maybe I’ll return as a hummingbird.
Another conversation in the present.
Another conversation I will remember alone.

Ritual
As we feel our grief privately, sometimes it is written on our faces, in the way we hold our bodies. Others see and sense our emotions. Sometimes no one would suspect the pain we carry, especially if we find it too difficult or too frightening to put into words.

Now we offer this ritual, so you can express your sorrow, so that you can transmute your pain into a grief that can be healed, if only for a little while. Healing is a process, and ritual is a part of it.

Whatever grief you are feeling, whatever pain for which you need healing, enter this ritual as a member of a community which is not afraid to witness each other as our fully human selves, with even difficult emotions. We offer symbols to mark our grief in whatever ways are best for you: fallen leaves, clippings of thyme and rosemary, of cedar, smooth stones and rough stones, feathers. Choose any of these symbols that appeal to you and bring them forward to the table here. Place them in the glass cylinder. When you have made your offering to memory and morning, partake of a sip and a bite. If you wish to rest for now in the bitter, take a sip of salt water, take a bit of bitter chocolate. If you wish to rest for now in the sweet, take a sip of sweet water, take a bit of peppermint.

Please come forward now, to lay down your sorrow and to witness others laying down their sorrow.

Closing Words
These words from Gwen Flowers
“I had my own notion of grief.
I thought it was the sad time That followed the death of someone you love.
And you had to push through it To get to the other side.

But I’m learning there is no other side.
There is no pushing through.
But rather, There is absorption. Adjustment. Acceptance.

And grief is not something you complete, But rather, you endure.
Grief is not a task to finish And move on,
But an element of yourself, An alteration of your being.
A new way of seeing. A new definition of self.”

“We live in a perpetually burning building; and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” Whether held in memory jars or in memory, whether nature soothes the bitter into sweet, we are our most human when we bring our awareness to the pain that can be healed only through sharing. “We are saved only by love.” May this community always be a place of compassionate witness, our need for it never-ending and always renewed. May it always be so, and Amen.