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.

I use their clothing, their scarves or baby blankets, their jewelry, even ribbons from their hair, and I try to make the death just a little bit easier for the family by making a cozy vessel for their son, or their grandmother or their baby to rest in.

I will be buried in a fabric casket that I have already made for myself. I will lie in the natural burial section of Oakwood, and my body will be recycled by the earth. I'll have a pink dogwood tree planted over me, and someday the roots will reach down and take the nutrients that used to be my body and the branches will grow and reach for the sun, and the blossoms will be my smile every spring.

Death is not a grim ogre to be run away from, death is just a moment in the cycle of life. I think it should be met with a cozy casket laid in soil like a soft warm bed. A cemetery is a place of summer sun and quiet snow and peace on the breeze.

Thank you, Oakwood, for being that place for so many; thank you for being that place for me.

Julie Moore