Homework: Memorial Service for Ember

 Note: This was written as school assignment, but I really enjoyed this process. I am keeping the theological grounding present in the script, as part of my ongoing articulation of these concepts.

A piano version Rhythm of the Night by Corona plays quietly as people gather, setting an atmosphere of wonder, gentle nostalgia, and sacred presence. 

Opening and Welcome

Theological grounding: This welcome names the sacredness of gathering and affirms that the community is not merely attending, but co-creating a space of memory, reverence, and connection. Rooted in Unitarian Universalist theology, it affirms the inherent worth and dignity of each life and acknowledges that love is stronger than death. It draws from pagan ritual’s deep sense of communal intention and elemental balance, recognizing that sacred space is made through action, attention, and relational presence. Informed by Daoist teachings, the welcome emphasizes simplicity and flow, allowing what is already unfolding to be received without judgment. It also reflects trauma-informed spiritual care by signaling safety and inviting multiple ways of participation. Coloring pages and sensory tools serve as theological affirmations that every body is welcome. The welcome does not try to control or direct emotion, but instead opens the door to a shared sacred space where grief, joy, stillness, and movement are all equally valid expressions of presence.

The sanctuary glows with warm light, gathering around wood, cloth, and offerings placed with loving hands. Coloring sheets and baskets of bright fidget tools invite restless fingers and open hearts alike, welcoming every way of being present. Along the south wall, a loom of ribbons and threads begins to grow. On the other side of the room, a branch sits on an altar and stretches toward the ceiling, bearing prayers tied with red ribbons, hope fluttering like leaves in unseen wind. Around the room, there are photos of Ember, alongside prints of their poems. As the music fades, the speaker steps forward.

Speaker:

Beloveds, we are gathered here because a life mattered. A vibrant, complex, sometimes difficult, often extraordinary life that touched us in ways both large and small. Ember, who could sometimes be a lot, and gloriously so, made their mark on the world by gathering people, weaving beloved communities where none had existed before, kindling fires of hope, creativity, and fierce care.

We come not just to speak of loss, but to honor what love looks like across a lifetime. We come to celebrate the intensity and tenderness that Ember embodied, the ways they showed up, even when it was hard, and to bear witness to the ripples they created, ripples that continue through each of us.

Welcome, friends. You are part of the living circle that Ember tended. Today we offer our memories, our movement, our music, our prayers, and our breath to that circle. May we celebrate. May we mourn. And above all, may we love, stubbornly, fiercely, imperfectly, beautifully, just as Ember did.

Chalice Lighting:

(The lighting of the chalice is a central ritual in Unitarian Universalist worship. It signifies the gathering of community, the setting aside of ordinary time, and the beginning of sacred attention. In this context, the chalice flame is more than a symbol. It is an embodied act of remembering and a call to spiritual presence. This ritual draws from pagan understandings of fire as transformative and sustaining, and from trauma-informed ritual design which honors the need for grounding, choice, and emotional safety. By naming Ember and invoking the story they leave behind, this chalice lighting becomes both blessing and invitation.)

Speaker:

We light this chalice for those
whose light burns strange and bright,
who teach us that love is a kind of resistance,
and that tenderness is a kind of strength.

We light this chalice
to honor a life lived honestly and imperfectly,
a life that touched others in fierce and quiet ways,
a life still echoing through all we do today.

May this flame
be a beacon of presence,
a reminder that grief is love that has nowhere to go,
and that memory is a holy act.

As this flame burns,
so too may our hearts remain open,
our hands ready to carry Ember’s work forward,
our spirits lit by the stubborn radiance they left behind.

Invocation:

This invocation calls the gathered community into sacred presence through breath, sensory awareness, and connection to the natural elements. It draws from Unitarian Universalist theology, which affirms that the holy is present in our embodied lives, in the moment we inhabit together, and in the interdependence of all existence. It is also shaped by pagan and animist traditions that honor the elemental world as sacred and relational, and by Daoist understandings of stillness, flow, and balance as a form of spiritual attentiveness. From trauma-informed spiritual care, this invocation reflects the importance of grounding and agency in ritual. Participants are invited into presence without pressure or performance. The elements are not symbolic abstractions, but active invitations to connect to body, earth, breath, memory, and community. This invocation holds space for the complexity of grief and love, and it recognizes that presence itself can be a healing and transformative act.

Speaker:

Before we move forward, I invite us to pause.
To feel our breath moving through our bodies.
To notice the weight of our feet against the floor, the steadiness of the chair beneath us, the warmth of light in this room, the nearness of one another.
Let us breathe together.

Let us welcome Air, the element of breath and voice, of language and listening.
Let us feel the currents that pass between us, stirring ribbons, lifting song, and carrying the quiet.
Air is the space in which story travels, the space where grief and joy can speak without needing to agree.
May the breath we share in this moment soften us, connect us, and remind us that we are held in more than silence.

We call on Fire, the steady heat at the heart of all transformation.
Fire is the warmth of Ember’s spirit, the fierce love that shaped their living.
Let us remember the fire Ember carried: their wild joy, their sacred refusal to give up on the world.
May this flame find its place in us, and may we tend it well.

We welcome Water, the element of tears, of tides, of change.
Water is the grief that moves through us, gentle or sudden, never asking permission.
Let us feel what needs to be felt, let us cry if we need to, let us hold one another without shame.
May Water bless us with softness, and may that softness be strong enough to carry the weight of goodbye.

We ground ourselves now in Earth, the solid truth beneath all things.
Earth is the ground that bore Ember’s steps, the soil where their roots once reached, the body that held them in both struggle and joy.
Let us feel our connection to what is ancient, to what lasts, to what cannot be undone.
May we place our sorrow gently on the ground, and know that it will be held.

Spirit returns us to the breath we took at the beginning, and the breath we will take again.
Spirit is the thread through every element, the light in the room, the pulse of the ritual, the reason we are still here.
Let this gathering be a threshold.
Let it hold grief and celebration side by side.
Let it be a place where memory deepens, where love expands, and where the blessing we create now continues far beyond these walls.
Let us become, for one another, the sacred that remains.

Hymn: "Song of the Soul" by Cris Williamson

Theological grounding: Celebrating music as sacred communion, affirming the inherent radiance and resilience of every soul, and inviting embodied participation as a form of collective prayer, rooted in Unitarian Universalism and process theology. The speaker invites the community to rise in body or spirit and join in singing.

Reading

Theological grounding: This reading affirms the necessity of mutual recognition and the sacred task of bearing witness to one another’s lives. In Unitarian Universalist theology, truth is not static but is revealed in relationship and dialogue. Stafford’s poem reminds us that when we fail to recognize one another’s humanity, we risk becoming lost in patterns that do not serve life.

Speaker:

We turn now to a reading that speaks to the truth Ember lived: that our lives are intertwined, and that how we move through the world matters.

I share with you "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" by William Stafford.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,

but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider–

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Eulogy

Theological grounding: The eulogy serves not just as biography, but as theological witness to a life lived with courage, contradiction, and care. In Unitarian Universalist theology, the story of a single life holds sacred significance. Telling the truth of that life, in all its complexity, becomes an act of reverence. Pagan and animist traditions remind us that the person is never isolated from the wider web of relationships, and so the eulogy also honors community, struggle, love, and transformation. Daoist teachings encourage us to resist fixed categories and instead speak to the flow of a person’s presence in the world. This eulogy is also shaped by trauma-informed practice, particularly in its refusal to flatten or idealize Ember’s life. It invites honesty without shame, celebration without denial. The eulogy becomes a space where memory breathes, where grief is welcomed, and where storytelling becomes an act of love. It reminds us that to remember is to honor not only what was, but what continues to live in us.

Speaker:

Ember was born on the Summer Solstice of 1985, on the longest day of the year, after a difficult and stubborn birth. It was as if even their arrival insisted on being marked by contrast: light stretched to its furthest reach, labor unfolding slowly and with force. But we are not here to dwell on the details of that birth. Do not worry about their birthday, or the name they were given at the time, or the pronouns that came before they became themselves. That earlier self, shaped more by expectation than by truth, died a long time ago. We are here to honor the person who lived fully, who claimed their name and their voice, and who met the world with a spirit that refused to disappear. From the very beginning, Ember carried the wild, tenacious energy of the earth in their small body, a combination of rootedness and restlessness that would come to define so much of their path. The world, though often uncertain of how to receive them, was already more alive for their arrival.

They lived their first years in Hillsboro, followed by time in a more rural corner of Oregon, and then a series of suburban rentals. Their parents, both public school teachers, eventually bought a home in Oregon City, where Ember spent most of their adolescence. Early life was marked by movement: between towns, between homes, between ways of being. Ember learned to adapt quickly. They found anchoring in story, in sensation, in the temporary sanctuaries of library stacks and moss-covered woods. They formed attachments to trees, to the hush of creek water, to household pets and small creatures in the garden. They knew how to be alone, and they knew how to pay attention.

Though they graduated from Oregon City High School in 2003, Ember’s deeper education happened elsewhere. They studied in the makeshift classrooms of queer youth centers in Southeast Portland, in long conversations on sidewalks and city buses, and in the quiet, fierce communities of street kids, outcasts, and dreamers who taught them that survival is a kind of sacred knowledge. These were not abstract lessons. They were hard-won truths. Ember came to understand that care is not something you wait to be offered. It is something you build, over time, with patience and intention, often with what little you have.

After high school, Ember worked in Portland’s nonprofit world, doing everything from administrative support to street outreach. They never fit neatly into titles. They were the person who stayed after meetings to walk someone to the bus stop, who remembered birthdays, who made meals for others out of scraps and still made it feel like celebration. They moved north to Seattle in their mid-twenties, eventually settling in Everett. Between the two cities, they spent nearly fifteen years working in natural grocery stores. These jobs paid the bills, but even in those fluorescent aisles and behind cash registers, Ember never stopped being a minister-in-waiting. They offered quiet counsel in the supplement aisle, remembered the favorite teas of customers going through chemo, and slipped nourishing food into the hands of unhoused regulars. Volunteering for mental health advocacy, crisis response teams, and food justice coalitions, they were always weaving strands of care into the fabric of their communities. Service was never a side project. 

In 2017, Ember made a life-altering decision. After leaving an abusive relationship that had required them to let go of nearly everything they had built, they chose not to retreat, but to begin again. They returned to school, studying cultural anthropology with a focus on sociolinguistics. It was the degree they had always longed for but never felt allowed to claim. Education, for Ember, was never about prestige. It was about learning how to serve more fiercely, more humbly, more faithfully. That path eventually revealed a deeper calling, one that had been with them for years in whispers and fragments: the call to ministry. Ember began seminary with a kind of holy defiance, carving out space in a world that often has little patience for nuance, softness, or slowness. They completed Clinical Pastoral Education at Legacy Emanuel Hospital, the same hospital where they had been born decades earlier, stepping into the sacred work of chaplaincy, advocacy, and accompaniment.

But Ember was never just the milestones of their life. They were energy, a current running through every space they entered. They moved like a whirlwind of projects, ideas, music, and dreams. They were proud and joyful in their fae gender identity, a gender made up of soft fabric and sharp edges, part fairy princess, part swamp witch, part chaos spirit. Their queerness was expansive, not only in sexuality and gender, but in spirit. They lived as a sex-positive Asexual, speaking boldly and tenderly about the sanctity of bodies, choices, and loves that are often erased or misunderstood. They championed disability justice, not as a concept, but as lived practice, and carried the hard-earned wisdom that trauma does not disqualify a person from leadership, intimacy, or love.

Those who loved Ember knew the beauty of their contradictions. They were fierce and tender, stubborn and generous. They were often running late, juggling more than one project at a time, but somehow always present when it mattered. They could command a room with intensity or sit in silence and coax a nervous animal into trust. They loved their cats, their succession of beloved guinea pigs, and every stray creature that wandered into their orbit. They found joy in the ordinary: the way steam rises from tea, the scent of damp earth, the magic of growing mushrooms in a darkened corner. They loved the rain. They loved music and words. They believed that art, cooking, and friendship were not hobbies but sacred acts of survival and resistance.

If you opened Ember’s freezer, you would find homemade broth in recycled jars, saved for when someone fell ill. If you lingered in their home, you would notice a shelf of small altars: stones, photographs, worn prayer cards, feathers, and poems. Nothing in their space was without story. They made meaning everywhere they went, sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply by the way they noticed things others passed by. They paid attention to grief, not to fix it, but to witness it. They paid attention to joy in the same way. Fully. Without irony. With their whole body.

At the heart of Ember’s life was a single, stubborn belief: that no one should have to walk alone. They knew that beloved community was messy, complicated, often painful. They built it anyway. In potluck suppers and street vigils, in support groups and Sunday worship, in long phone calls and text check-ins, they showed up again and again. They believed in healing, not as a destination, but as an ongoing act of courage. They believed in the sacredness of showing up when it is uncomfortable, of choosing connection over isolation, of asking better questions when answers fall short.

They knew the cost of silence and still, they kept speaking. They knew the risk of love and still, they kept loving. They loved with a fierceness that refused to be extinguished. They believed in the power of tenderness, not as a softness that shrinks, but as a strength that expands. They chose kindness, not because life had been kind, but because they knew it was the only thing that could mend what had been broken.

They carried joy and sorrow together, never pretending one could erase the other. They laughed with their whole body. They wept without shame. They danced, not because life was simple, but because life was sacred.

If you remember Ember, remember the meals they cooked without measuring, just by instinct and care. Remember the way they offered tissues without words when tears came. Remember their deep belief in second chances. Remember the wild glitter on their altar, the songs they sang under their breath, the way they loved even the things that frightened them. Remember that they lived with the edges showing and still chose to make beauty with what they had.

May we carry Ember’s spirit forward, not as an echo, but as an invitation. In every song we dare to sing, in every meal we share around tables crowded with story, in every act of tenderness we offer to a world that still forgets how much it needs it, may we live not as perfect imitations, but as faithful continuations of the fierce, radiant love that Ember wove into the world.

Ember’s story will go unfinished. But it will never be untold. It is carried now in each of us, in every small act of courage, in every stubborn act of joy, in every choice to love anyway. It lives in the weaving, in the ribbons, in the hush after a hymn. It lives in breath, in memory, and in the beauty of presence that asks nothing more than that we show up, with truth, with care, and with each other.

(The speaker pauses, allowing silence to hold the fullness of what has been shared.)

Musical Interlude: A piano reimagining of Rock My Heart by Haddaway

Homily:

(This homily reflects a theology of memory, mortality, and meaning-making rooted in the living experiences of those who gather to remember. In Unitarian Universalist tradition, there is no single answer to what happens after death, but there is deep reverence for the integrity of each life and the sacred responsibility of the living to carry stories forward. Ember’s beliefs about death, energy, and release draw from a blend of pagan spirituality, Daoist philosophy, and a trauma-aware understanding of embodiment. This homily does not seek to resolve the mystery of death. Instead, it invites us to honor its finality while resisting the forgetting that can follow. It holds space for contradiction, recognizing that grief and humor, peace and protest, can all belong in the same ritual moment. It also affirms that remembrance is not passive. It is a living practice. This theology values story as sacred, names as powerful, and ritual as a way to resist erasure. The homily does not try to give Ember back to us. It invites us to carry Ember forward.)

Speaker:

We are here today, not to save Ember from death, but to save each other from forgetting.

Ember believed that memorials are not for the dead. They are for the living. They would say, usually with a raised eyebrow and a shrug, “I’m not gonna be around to care, so do what you need to do.” And here we are, doing what we need to do. Gathering. Weeping. Laughing. Remembering. Doing what humans do. Making ritual. Telling stories. Stitching the edges of a life into the fabric of our own.

Ember believed that memorials are a custom, a shared response to loss that helps us hold what cannot be held alone. They saw ritual not as performance, but as pattern. A way to mark the sacred by moving our bodies, lifting our voices, lighting candles, tying ribbons, passing plates of food. For them, it was never about perfection. It was always about presence.

And still, they would have hated this, at least a little. Not because they didn’t want to be remembered, but because being the center of attention was never easy. They would have watched every moment carefully, making sure it was accessible, sensory-considerate, meaningful, and above all, not trite. Ember had a well-developed allergy to sentimentality. But they also knew that ritual helps us carry what is too heavy to carry alone. So we gather here in good faith, because this is what we do. Because they mattered. Because their story shaped ours. Because we love them.

Ember believed in death. Not just as a biological event, but as a kind of release. As someone who moved through the world Autistic, chronically ill, and profoundly sensitive, Ember found existence fairly uncomfortable. Life was often too much. Too loud. Too fast. Too disjointed. They found wonder in the smallest details, but even beauty could be overwhelming. Their body was a place of tenderness and resistance both. So they did not fear death, not really. They saw it as a return. Not necessarily to a god or a place, but to something larger. A quiet slipping into the universe. A bow taken after a long, strange performance.

They joked, often with dark humor, about what might come next. “Maybe I’ll become moss,” they’d say. Or, “Maybe I’ll haunt people who use bad disability theology.” But beneath the laughter was a sense of peace. Ember believed that when they died, they would be done here. That whatever energy had animated them would return to the stars and the soil, to the tangled and mysterious currents of the cosmos. Maybe, they said, there is literal reincarnation. Maybe they would exist in the smiles of children, or in the clouds above us, or in the fragment of a hymn someone hums without knowing why. “Blah blah blah,” they’d say, rolling their eyes at themselves. And then they would fall quiet for a moment. Still. As if listening for what they knew could never be explained.

They believed in ghosts, but not as a system of belief. More as metaphor than map. They believed in ancestors. In the energy that lingers around well-loved things. In the story that outlives the storyteller. But they also believed in endings. That death, in its honest form, is final.

And so in the face of that belief, knowing Ember's commitment to disruption, we are collectively engaging in a small act of rebellion. Ember may be at peace from their body. Let that be so. But may we never give them the peace of erasure. Let us not grant them the second death: the one that comes when names are no longer spoken, when memories fade, and when no one recalls how they laughed or how they listened without judgment or how they held your hand when you thought you were alone.

We are not here to summon Ember back. We are here to refuse the idea that they are gone. Let them rest from pain. Let them be free from the body that asked too much of them. But let them live on in every act of radical care. Let them live in every poem written at midnight. In every meal made for someone who didn’t ask. In every bit of glitter swept up after a protest. In every time we speak with tenderness even when we are tired. Let them live on in every refusal to abandon beauty in a world that so often forgets how much it matters.

They asked to be remembered with honesty. That is what we do today. We remember the contradictions. We remember the love. The fire. The sacred unruliness of a life that did not conform and did not apologize for it. Let us speak their name when it matters. Let us hold their memory not as a relic, but as an offering. Let us live, not only in mourning, but in motion. Let us continue the work they began, not to imitate them, but to become more ourselves because they lived.

Ember believed that memorials are for the living. So let this one do its work. Let it open something in us. Let it deepen our love and sharpen our care. Let it carry us toward what is true. And let it remind us that every act of remembering is a sacred refusal to forget.

Hymn: "Give Yourself to Love" By Kate Wolf

Theological grounding: affirming love as a courageous, embodied choice, honoring vulnerability as sacred strength, and celebrating communal resilience through shared song, rooted in Unitarian Universalism and theologies of beloved community.

Benediction

The speaker steps forward one last time. Theological grounding: gratitude, beloved community, the resilience of love, the truth of impermanence, and the hope found in continuing the work.

Speaker:

Today we have woven together stories, songs, silence, and prayer.

We have celebrated a life bright and fierce, tender and real.

We have named our grief and lifted our gratitude.

We have honored the truth that love does not end with death. It endures. It transforms. It carries forward through us.

As we leave this space, let us carry Ember’s spirit not only in memory but in action. Let us love more wildly. Build community more stubbornly. Create more fearlessly. Be a little more tender with ourselves, and with each other.

May you go with hearts open to beauty, even knowing it is fleeting.

May you go with hands ready to weave, and voices ready to sing.

May you go wrapped in the fierce, imperfect, radiant love that Ember gave so freely.

And may that love be your companion, your calling, and your blessing, now and always.

Postlude

A piano medley of La Bouche’s 2nd LP plays softly as people begin to depart