Shroud Memento

04/05/2026

Surviving Has Made Me Crazy

by Mark Nepo, USA (1951 - )

I eat flowers now and birds follow me.
I open myself like an inlet
and dolphin energies
swim on through.

Wherever I go, I remain silent
and the silence begins to glow
till one eye in the light
outsees two in the dark.

When asked, I now hesitate
for there are so many ways
to love the earth.

I water things now constantly:
water the hearts of dead friends with light,
the sores of the living with anything warm,
water the skies with a thousand affections
and follow the voices of animals
into grasses that move like ocean.

I eat flowers now and birds come.
I eat care and things to love arrive.
I eat time and as I age
whatever I swallow grows timeless.

I eat and un-die
and water my doubts
with silence
and birds come.

Image of The Young Bather by Gustave Courbet.

17/04/2026

This morning I looked out onto the garden and saw three stunning bromeliad flowers which has prompted this post.

In October 2014, one of my brothers ended his life. As a talented and creative soul, he had a love for bromeliads and other sculptural plants. Years before, he had given a bromeliad to the mother of his partner. The plant stayed in her garden for years without ever flowering. The day after we were notified of his death, the bromeliad he had gifted his partner's mother flowered for the first time. Her instant reaction to this was, 'There's Matthew, showing himself to us in another form.'

Humans are good at creating narratives around wonders of the world and other events. Innately we attach a meaning to phenomena in an attempt to understand something bigger than us, something beyond our mortal boundaries.

When I heard that the bromeliad had flowered after Matthew's death, I too believed that it was Matthew showing himself to us. I also had a similar experience with a friend's father who grew Dahlias. I had associated the flower with Pat, a keen gardener. A few years before his death I had planted Dahlia tubers that had never flowered. When he died, they flowered. Is it Pat showing himself to me or just chance?

Immediately after my father took his last breath in October 2008, I looked out the window of the room he was in and saw a very large monitor lizard that I had not seen in the ground of the hospital before until that moment. It looked up at me at the same time I looked out the window and then walked off slowly. My father's spirit, or a monitor who happened to be there at that time?

As a person who notices what's happening around me more so than the average person, I recognise my response to events rather than impose a meaning.

Does it matter what we believe about events that we cannot prove or explain?

What we hold in our heart and mind is a person's business. I only hope what is held is not harmful to a person.

Today in my garden, I looked out at 3 magnificent bromeliad centurions, and of course I thought of Matthew, and that's a good thing. Nature lives on in various forms; that's science. Our loved ones live on in various forms; that's nature.

Please share a story you have to contribute to this post.

05/03/2026

Shroud work is a great receptor for an outpouring of creativity. There will be other areas in your life, too, that you can pour creativity into such as gardening, other mediums of art, writing, travelling, cooking, meditation, playing music, singing, and many other creative acts that are right for you. We create in many different ways and it may not always be obvious that creating is what you're doing.

Please share with the community of Shroud Memento what you did with your creative outpouring during grief.

The Red Hand Files
ISSUE #356 / MARCH 2026

Nick, I’m writing songs again. They’re fu***ng pouring out of me. It’s been 8 years since I wrote songs. But here’s the thing. I’m struggling to write about the passing of my son, Mac. I want to, bless him. But something feels off when I turn my mind to the idea… Maybe it’s pressure for it to be perfect or to protect him. Maybe I’m not really ready yet… It’s so tender, as you know. But I want to try. How do you approach these moments?

NATHAN, FOLKESTONE, UK

Dear Nathan,

Through The Red Hand Files I have made some rather sketchy attempts to express the nature of consciousness, as I perceive it or have experienced it — the feeling that consciousness exists both within us and outside us. I have described it as a form of intelligent energy present in all things, both living and non-living, and on both atomic and cosmic scales. I have also suggested, based entirely on my own intuition, that this force is moral in nature, inherently good and fundamentally creative. Within this immanent vitality exist all the future ideas of the world — all our art, music, words, and so forth.

Nathan, sometimes our grief can serve as a gateway into this creative flow. Many people have written in describing the shocking surge of creativity that unexpectedly follows a crisis — losing a loved one, hitting rock-bottom with addiction, a marriage breakdown, physical or mental illness, a scandal or another such life-changing event. They recount feeling moved by a mysterious force that felt external and beyond their own design. Both Susie and I found that after a long period of negotiating our grief a cosmic act of compensation awaited us — a profound creative outpouring — as if we had been plugged into a seemingly unlimited flow of creative energy. As you so colourfully remarked about your own songs, Nathan, it was fu***ng pouring out of us.

This outpouring you are experiencing is a gift from beyond. The songs flowing from you are not entirely of your own making and are, to some extent, beyond your control. While the idea is lovely, I wouldn’t worry too much about writing a song for your son, Mac. It might be counterproductive to try to impose too much influence on this creative stream you're experiencing. I rather believe that Mac, in some strange but very real way I cannot fully explain, is the one actually writing the songs. He is the spiritual exuberance at the centre of this burst of activity. You are always writing about him, even when it seems you are not, as Mac himself becomes a kind of consciousness, an all-pervading condition of being.

I love hearing people speak from within the flow, this healing rush of creative energy. There is an infectious zeal to it. “They’re fu***ng pouring out of me,” are bold and beautiful words, Nathan, but let’s not forget, they are pouring into you too, and your son, dear Mac, is the benevolent wellspring of that flow. Sometimes, there is little we need to do but stand back, bow our heads, and receive this gift of abundance with awe and gratitude.

Love, Nick

Artwork COSMIC OBJECTS (FOR ABE) BY THOMAS HOUSEAGO, 2023

27/02/2026

Met this amazing woman, Lynette Wallworth, years ago at a conference on death in Canberra in 2014 and then saw her around my then neighbourhood where we both lived, in Sydney. Her films are fascinating and amazing.

Listen to this podcast on her speaking about her experience and understanding of death.

Filmmaker Lynette Wallworth on how nearly dying as a little girl set her on a lifelong path to interrogate out-of-body experiences, spirituality and what really happens to us when we die. When Lynette was a little girl, she had a near death experience on her grandparents' property. Her father brough...

14/02/2026

I agree that we believe we know who out parents, family, relatives are, but how can we know that whole person? We may know our relationship to them during certain events or stages of life.

As I understand it, Maori and Timorese culture, (and possibly other cultures), have a ceremony where those who knew the deceased gather together, and in turn, the mourners speak of their relationship to the deceased so everyone gathered learns of a broader understanding of who that person was in life.

A daughter grows up believing she knows her mother because she watched her cook, argue, work, fall ill, and age. Yet when the mother dies, what remains isn’t a full account of a woman’s inner life but a set of memories shaped by childhood need, teenage anger, adult guilt, and love. The difficulty lies here. However close we are to a parent, we only ever hold our version of them, not the life they lived from the inside.

Annie Ernaux wrote A Woman’s Story in 1987 after her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. She had grown up in a working-class family in Normandy, the daughter of café grocery owners, and later entered the educated middle class through schooling and teaching. That shift created pride and distance. It gave her independence her mother never had, and it also planted shame. She felt impatient with her mother’s manners and speech, then later reproached herself for that impatience. Education complicated attachment.

When Ernaux accepts that she can’t fully know her mother’s life, she faces a fact about how memory works. Children cast mothers in roles such as provider, authority and obstacle. As adults, we revise those roles, but we still interpret through our own history of hurt and longing. We remember the criticism that stung. We forget the fear that drove it. We sense sacrifice, yet we rarely grasp the private cost of it. A mother had desires before her child existed. She carried disappointments she never explained and no amount of reflection grants direct access to that interior world.

Simone de Beauvoir confronted a similar limit in A Very Easy Death, her account of her mother’s final illness. For years she had defined herself against her mother’s values, yet at the hospital bedside she realised how much of that woman’s inner life remained sealed. Love and conflict hadn’t given her full knowledge. They had only defined the shape of their bond.

Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, also wrestled with the split between the institution of motherhood and the lived experience of actual mothers. She wrote as both daughter and mother, aware that cultural myths flatten women into roles. That flattening makes it harder to see them as complex individuals with erotic, intellectual, and political lives that exceed the family frame.

Ernaux refuses to turn her mother into a symbol of sacrifice or oppression. She writes about post war France, about shopkeeping, about the hunger for respectability, about the pride her mother took in her daughter’s success. She also admits to embarrassment and anger. The book holds love and resentment together without trying to resolve them. That honesty prevents sentimentality and accusation.

Psychologically, accepting this limit can ease a particular strain of guilt. Many daughters believe they should have understood their mothers better, sooner, more generously. Yet complete understanding was never available. We only ever meet our mothers through the narrow doorway of our relationship. Recognising that boundary makes room for compassion toward them and toward ourselves. We stop demanding a total account of a life that was never ours to inhabit.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

14/02/2026

Here's an idea for a shroud. Pick a colour that has meaning for you. Do some meditative plain stitching in a rectangle shape while thinking of your connection to the shroud recipient.

This idea allows many people to participate and creates an overall beautiful pattern. It's achievable for all ages and skill level. Each coloured rectangle, or square, or circle, represents all the humans in the life that has now transformed into another.

The images attached are of the work of textile artist Claire Wellesley-Smith, based in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She is also a researcher and author. Her work is deeply rooted in the transformative power of textiles.

P.S. I like the threads uncut on this textile as it symbolises, to me, the threads that connect us, the loose threads like tree roots, show movement, a web, tentacles reaching out.

27/01/2026

In position

—- Lauris Edmond, Aotearoa/New Zealand (1924- 28 January, 2000)

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven't got much of it left:
after 60 say, or 70, when you'd think it would

find itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so.

The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing you

every face of your life in a fluid design -
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but by

time itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them - love,
your very life, should they need it - will not

and cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in this

shimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You're alone. And slowly you begin to discern

the q***r outline of what's to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.

Photo: Helen Dunne

23/01/2026

23/01/2026

☣️One thing I want to gently but clearly talk about is green burial after an autopsy, because this is where a lot of confusion comes up.

Natural burial does not mean “no preparation.”

When someone has had an autopsy, the organs are returned inside a red plastic viscera bag placed in the abdomen and often haphazardly whip-stitiched closed. For a green burial, that plastic cannot simply be left in place, it has to be removed. Once that happens, the body still needs proper care so it can be handled respectfully and safely.

That means:
🫟Managing fluids appropriately
🧻Using biodegradable absorbent materials in the abdominal cavity
🪡And suturing the body closed so everything is secure

These are the bare minimum concerns to adhere to basic dignity and safety of the deceased and those caring for them. Without these steps, there is real risk to staff and an increased chance of leakage during handling or burial, which no one wants.

Green burial can absolutely be done post autopsy and without plastic, and it can be done beautifully, but it still requires knowledge, preparation, and professional responsibility.

Please allow your funeral professional to care for autopsied bodies prior to green burial 🌿

04/01/2026

https://philippaperry.substack.com/p/grief-three-years-on?fbclid=IwY2xjawPHCM1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFac250S2kwQ0NnTVRTYnNFc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHn8ph6RfdS2XMYniWLM-kUYI9NqylbSeXyAI70AfEE6M6psGXHM2ksZudiGu_aem_UivteDcWgyvHVB5S6qSYyw

When Coping Catches Up With You