Imperfectly Perfect.
On letting go, letting people in, and the celebration Lee deserves
We never had a solid plan for after.
We had agreed, at some point in a long marriage, that we wanted to be cremated. There were vague discussions of strewing our ashes somewhere pretty. And while we were both raised in the church, formal religion hadn’t held a place for us in our life together.
But we were spiritual. We had — finally, after all the years of searching without quite knowing what we were searching for — experienced unconditional love. Acceptance. Forgiveness. With each other, and because of each other. There was no straightforward rational explanation for it. We just were.
What is more spiritual than that?
After the years of caregiving, after witnessing Lee’s long fall to Alzheimer’s, I wasn’t prepared to think about a service. Not at first. Total emotional exhaustion, coupled with the fierce finality of the end — and it is fierce, in a way that takes time to move through — drove me to push the topic near the bottom of a very long list.
And then several friends asked.
When would the service be held? Would there be a reception? A Celebration of Life?
Lee — the person we all knew and loved — had been gone for some time. But here they were, wanting a chance to say goodbye.
And that got me thinking.
The Inextricable Human Connection
Brené Brown writes in Braving the Wilderness about belonging — and about the place we find ourselves in - she calls this “the wilderness” - when we break free from what external voices are telling us to feel or do, and embrace our truest beliefs instead. She writes that our belief in an inextricable human connection is one of our most renewable sources of courage. That when we don’t believe in that unbreakable connection, the isolation of the wilderness becomes too daunting — and we stay in our factions, our echo chambers, our carefully managed solitude.
That unbreakable connection is the magic that binds us to our spouses, our families, our dearest friends. It is what makes us show up for each other — in joy and in grief, in celebration and in loss.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal lately, because I’ve been watching it happen in real time.
When we go to a concert, a play, a game — we are sharing in moments of joy that last long after the event has ended. I recently attended a Brit Floyd concert with a friend for whom live music is a deep and abiding passion. Sharing that concert, sharing her enthusiasm, bonded us in ways that were unspoken and lasting. We’ve all had that feeling.
Shared moments of pain work the same way. Sandy Hook. The Challenger explosion. September 11th. My parents remembered exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated. I know precisely where I was when the towers fell on 9/11. These are collective wounds that draw us together — that remind us, in the most painful way, that we are not separate from each other.
Personal tragedies — death, serious illness, loss of any kind — should not be experienced alone either. As comfortable as the wilderness can feel, as much as grief can make solitude seem like the only option, it is crucial to reach out for support. To accept it when it comes.
And equally — when someone we love has died, the community they belonged to deserves a chance to celebrate the life that was lived and shared. To say goodbye. To gather around the space where that person existed and acknowledge, together, what has been lost.
Where It All Began
So I am curating a service and a Celebration of Life for Lee.
He will be laid to rest with his parents in his hometown, at the Odd Fellows Cemetery, witnessed by family and a few close friends. It will be quiet. It will be right.
The Celebration of Life will be held where it all began — in the town we loved and lived in, in the place where we met and got married and marked the milestones of anniversaries, birthdays, and long friendships. The place that holds the shape of our life together.
Something unexpected has happened in the planning of it. Life gets smaller as we get older — that’s simply true. But in death, Lee’s world has opened up again. People have emerged from different chapters of his life, all wanting — all deserving — to participate in this celebration. To share memories. To reconnect with old friends they haven’t seen in years. To stand together in a room and say: we knew him, and we are grateful.
It turns out grief, when you let it be communal, has a way of doing that. Of expanding rather than contracting. Of pulling people back toward each other rather than pushing them apart.
We’re going to celebrate Lee’s life in a few weeks. We’re going to tell the stories and raise a glass and remember who he was before the disease, and during it, and all the years before any of us knew what was coming.
He was an imperfect man. I am an imperfect woman. And together — we were perfect.
We’re going to celebrate our inextricable human connections.
We’re going to have a great party.
Have you planned a Celebration of Life after a long caregiving journey? I'd love to hear what it meant to you — and what surprised you about it. Share in the comments below.