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  • Tex-Mex Chain’s “Big Burrito Challenge” Offers Chance to Win a Burial PlotPromotion warns that consuming the massive creation may induce a “food coma”

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    Mitch Lobrovich

    Tex-Mex Chain’s “Big Burrito Challenge” Offers Chance to Win a Burial Plot
    Promotion warns that consuming the massive creation may induce a “food coma”

  • A Prairie for Emily
    A grieving father restores a prairie habitat in memory of a dead daughter

    Lush prairie grasses sway in the breeze and the golden crowns of black-eyed Susans turn towards the summer sun. Emily’s Prairie runs along Salt Creek, behind the Rolling Meadows High School in the suburban town of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Once this land was a muddle of invasive plants while Emily was a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old. Though…

    Julie Gesin

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  • Monday Hearts for Madalene
    Page Hodel creates the most beautiful hearts in an ongoing celebration of love

    St Patty’s Day Spring With Love It’s an honor for SevenPonds to share with our readers the story of the Monday Hearts for Madalene project, a true account of the power of love in the midst of death. The project’s origins take us to 2005: the moment Page Hodel encountered Madalene Rodriguez and fell “instantly, dizzyingly in love with…

    Zoë Byrne

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  • Turn Me into Dirt and Flowers
    Seattle-based architect, Katrina Spade, hopes that her Urban Death Project will provide communities with a meaningful and ecological option for their bodies after death

    Growing up in a family whose idea of a vacation was constructing a chicken coop or putting shingles on a house, it’s no surprise that Katrina Spade chose architecture as a career. Her collaboration with Jamie Corn has produced playful and elegant designs in private homes as well as public spaces around Seattle, Washington, as…

    Julie Gesin

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  • Our Weekly Tip: Expressing and Healing from Your Grief Through ArtworkCreating artwork can greatly help those struggling to cope with and heal from the grieving process after a loved one’s death

    Our Weekly Tip: Expressing and Healing from Your Grief Through Artwork
    Creating artwork can greatly help those struggling to cope with and heal from the grieving process after a loved one’s death

    Our Tip of the Week: Sometimes words escape us when we are trying to express ourselves during our grieving process after a loss. That is why creating art — whether by yourself or with the help of an art therapist — could be the perfect medium to get those difficult and confusing feelings out into…

    Zoë Byrne

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  • What is a Balloon Release? (Interview)
    In part one of a two-part interview, Reverend Lucinda Martin of Graceful Mournings describes what inspired her to become a celebrant, what a balloon release entails from the eyes of a celebrant and how meaningfully planned ceremonies can help in the grief and healing processes

    Today SevenPonds speaks with Reverend Lucinda Martin, founder of the Association of Interfaith Ministers, Vows and Kisses and Graceful Mournings. Based in Northern California, Reverend Lucinda Martin became an Ordained Interfaith Minister through One Spirit Seminary in New York, New York. As a “non-religious” spiritual minister, she embraces all spiritual traditions and symbolic rituals and…

    Zoë Byrne

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  • Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical ExaminerJudy Melinek shares how her career as a pathologist has colored her understanding of life and death

    Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
    Judy Melinek shares how her career as a pathologist has colored her understanding of life and death

    Judy Melinek’s Working Stiff is the kind of memoir that reads like a season of the TV show “CSI”. In her book, she writes how her experience as a forensic pathologist has led her to uncover murder plots, medical accidents and everything in between. But her life, as remarkable as it is, is not a…

    Kimberly Lane

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  • “I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn’t bother to wipe its boots.”
    – Tom Robbins

    Greer Barker

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  • African Baby Names that Ward Off Death
    How some Nigerian parents prevent infant mortality through ritualized naming ceremonies

    Chances are good you’ve known someone who was named after a relative. You might even know someone who shares a name with his father, grandfather and great-grandfather — a John Doe IV. Have you ever known someone who was named because his parents wanted to ward off death? It’s not an uncommon practice. Thousands of…

    Marissa Abruzzini

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  • Would You Undergo Genetic Testing for Early-Onset Familial Alzheimer’s When There’s a Good Chance You’ll Test Positive?
    One 39 year-old woman’s decision — in a situation eerily similar to the film Still Alice — to find out whether or not she will get this type of Alzheimer’s by the time she’s 65

    Prior to catching the wonderful and emotionally raw film, Still Alice, I stumbled upon a recent physical copy of a People article about a real-life woman named Daisy Duarte, who has been taking care of her early-onset familial Alzheimer’s-stricken mom, Sonia Cardona, for almost four years, and her personal decision to get tested. For the…

    Zoë Byrne

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