Skipping out: How do you explain you don’t want to attend a close relative’s funeral?
Here is my dilemma: social convention has it that you should attend a close one’s funeral, but what if you don’t want to?
Buying my first home: Guilt, frustration, acceptance, and flamingos
At the age of 30, I purchased my first home. Purchased, as in wrote out possibly the biggest check of my life and took full and complete ownership of an entire, full, big, warts and all, 100 year old house. The last three years have been an intense love/hate relationship with the house. But once I shed the guilt from how I was able to purchase the house, and came to terms with settling in one place for more than a few years, it’s been an amazing experience making the house MINE.
How planning Wonder Woman’s funeral made me plan my own as a gift to my family
As I weighed various personal, cultural, and religious reasons for cremation versus embalming Wonder Woman, it suddenly occurred to me that “don’t spend a lot of money” — my only stipulation for my own funeral and body disposition — was impractical and potentially problematic. No matter how well my family knew me they would still be left guessing about the specifics.
Tackle Box Boys: Honoring those who don’t make it out
In January 1997, I hosted a housewarming at my new place in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood. It was a particularly debaucherous weekend. The house filled with glamorous and skanky people, skateboards lining the long Victorian hall downstairs. One roommate asked me if I would tell my friends to move their boards, and I reported that only one friend had his skateboard there (my semi-boyfriend, John, visiting from Seattle). My roomies and I had a shared moment of realizing the house was full of people we didn’t know. Shortly afterward, someone started smoking crack in the kitchen…
Palliative care, cross-country moves, and whiskey in a Mason jar: Ariel Gore’s “The End of Eve”
Ariel Gore’s memoir, The End of Eve, describes the complicated role of caretaker thrust upon her when her mother Eve is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Their relationship has been fraught with emotional manipulation and abuse since Ariel’s childhood. Now that she’s dying, Ariel has to confront their relationship whether she’s ready to or not — and she has to move across the country to do it.
How a year on the road saved my life and helped me grieve
My fiancé has always loved travel, and was saving up for a year long road trip cross-country to take with his brother after he finished grad school and his brother got out of the army. When his brother passed away in Afghanistan in 2010, our lives were shattered pretty completely. His death impacted everything, and left us in the center of this desolate vortex of grief. Not knowing how else to proceed we kept moving and decided to still take the trip together. So on a hot sweltering day in July, we packed the Volvo and drove off.
I need an urn, but don’t want it to look like an urn
Help! I’m trying to find a suitable urn to keep some of my father’s ashes in, that isn’t, like, totally weird and all: “THIS IS AN URN.” I mean, I guess I could put it in any container, right? But what have other Offbeat Homies done with their urns?
Of mothers and daughters and loudmouths
I look mostly like my father, but I got my mother’s mouth.
The second oldest of four girls, my mother was always one of the loud ones. She talked loud. She sang loud. At her Catholic boarding school, she was always popular among her peers, known for being outgoing and gregarious. She became a hippy and strummed the loudest campfire guitar. She became a midwife and founded a national organization and spoke loudly at international women’s health conferences. For her 50th birthday, she produced an entire CD of her songs, and threw a big party for herself. She started the night by announcing into the microphone, “Everyone, please be quiet and stop talking. It’s time for me to sing.”