May 13, 2018

To my dear friends at Oakwood Cemetery,

When I was two years old, after weeks of illness, my appendix burst, and in the midst of emergency surgery, I died.

I had to be resuscitated three times. The third time I was dead for six minutes. The experience I had during those six minutes has colored the way I think for my whole life. The vividness of what I saw and what I learned was more intense than any dream, it was more real than life on earth; it was beyond explanation, beyond description, and I remember that I didn't want to come back.

I learned, in those minutes, that death is wonderful! It isn't the enemy to be resisted and delayed at all cost. It's a relief, a reward, a beginning. I learned that death is the natural progression from one form of existence to another. I've been given, not faith, but knowledge of what comes after death, so I don't shy away when faced with it.

I have a calling to help others with death, to make it a little more peaceful, to make it a little more beautiful with my artwork. I make fabric caskets, shrouds and urns, and I make them specifically for each person that will occupy them. I make fabric vessels that will hold a body and represent a life by using fabric from that life.

Sometimes I get to know the dying person. I get to make their vessel just that way they want it. We talk frankly about their coming death and I like to think that I help them meet it a little more gently. Sometimes I'm called by a family after death; I ask them to tell me about their child, or husband, or sister that has died and I make a vessel that will remind the family of who that person was.