Join us for a rich day of celebration and remembrance! This event is an actual fair….an attempt at changing our culture around death, dying, and ultimately living well.
There’s a little something for everyone! Workshops. Vendors. DED Talks. Kid’s Activities. Interactive Altar. Meditation. Fire Spinning. Live music. Food trucks. Cash Bar. Candles everywhere. Music. Dance and celebrate. This does not have to be a deep dive into the darkest corners of your soul. But if you want to go there, we welcome you! Come curious. Leave with peace of mind.
Tix Available Now
$10 until October 15
$15 October 15 – November 2
Kids 12 and Under $5
Join the event! Sign up HERE as a volunteer, vendor or sponsor!
ANNOUNCING: Help us make this amazing Faire happen!
In order to make Death Faire accessible by all, we are raising money to match a $5000 grant. You can chip in up to $100 (no more!) and F4DC will match it! Thank you for making this an event for the community by the community!
Please help us meet our matching grant from Fund for Democratic Communities!
Dexter Romweber is from Chapel Hill, NC. He is an icon of the American music underground. Pioneering the template for guitar/drums duo format in the world famous psycho-surf-rockabilly-garage-punk combo Flat Duo Jets—often emulated, rarely duplicated. The Dex Romweber Duo was a potent combo with his sister Sara on drums. The album Is That You In Blue? will make your skeleton move with the beat and your heart race and break, with the fierce excitement of music. Dex is magical. All he needs is his guitar, his fingers and his brain to blow you away with beautiful pure Rock n Roll. At Death Faire, Dave Schmitt, will be the beats of the drums. Time: 7:00-8:00
Shady Darling and the Velvet Curtain is a female fronted soul funk cabaret band out of Durham, NC. This songstress of southern soul sings tales of murderess madames and deathly seduction laced with speakeasy jazz and mournful blues. Her shape shifting musical associates were discovered in the dusty corners of burlesque lounges and the shadowy flaps of circus tents. With roots from Louisiana to Appalachia, this band of misfits is sure to tempt and tease the senses with rich original compositions and odes to the musical inspirations of decades past. Time: 5:30-6:30
The Appalucians play music from the mountains of Western North Carolina, featuring spirited songwriting, sublime harmonies, and a layered interplay between dobro, guitars, harmonica and banjo. The band is the musical union of two couples Jay Brown & Aditi Sethi and Angie Heimann & Cas Sochacki. They met at their kids’ preschool, gradually realized their seemingly cosmic musical alignment, and decided to start a band. Their debut album “Bright Hills,” released in early summer 2018, has flavors of mountain folk, 70’s folk-rock and barroom twang. Time: 2:30-3:30
All are welcome to join us as we cultivate an environment to remember our loved ones, honor our ancestors, and heal our lineage through movement and dance. We will begin with a guided grounding meditation and cleansing movement to prepare ourselves for connecting with our beloved dead. This ecstatic dance wave will provide a platform for embodying our experience. Come celebrate life as we embrace death. Hosted by the Living Arts Collective (LAC).
Aubrey Griffith-Zill
Creator, healer, community facilitator, embodiment coach and dancer.
Founder/Curator of the Living Arts Collective
Bruce Rozeboom
Firekeeper, shadow worker, death guide and perpetual fool.
Custodian of the Living Arts Collective
WORKSHOPS:
Time: 12-1pm / Location: Abundance HQ
Experience a heart2heart hands on healing with live sacred music. Integrative Intuitive Therapist andClinical Director Cathy Brooksie Edwards will guide you through a short meditation and then do light touch and energy work as sacred musicians Amy Durso and John Westmoreland provide their instrumental and vocal sound scape.
Time: 12:30-1:15PM / Location: Cidery / Jason Matthis
Participants will learn the four activities that end-of-life care recipients report as being most meaningful following a terminal diagnosis. Participants will be asked to consider their own end-of-life expectations, and then have the opportunity to document a piece of their own personal legacies.
Time: 1-2PM / Location: Building 3
Original poems performed by Eve Olive with lyre music by Joanna Carey.
Eve Olive is an architect, eurythmist, poet and storyteller who has participated in every Death Faire. She is a co-founder of the Emerson Waldorf School in Chapel Hill and editor of the book Cosmic Child: Inspired Writings from the Threshold of Birth.
Time: 1:30-2:15 / Location: Cidery
Come and learn about using music for comfort for travelers and their families and caregivers. You’ll have a chance to experience being surrounded by healing song. We will share stories and sing together and for each other. Everyone is welcome, no vocal experience necessary!
Threshold Singers of the Triangle honor the ancient tradition of singing at bedsides of people on the thresholds of life, whom we call “travelers.” Our core mission is singing for people at end of life, on hospice care, or with terminal diagnoses at bedside in homes, hospices, hospitals, or assisted living facilities. Our repertoire includes Threshold songs (mostly written by Threshold Choir International members and founder Kate Munger) which are quiet and meditative. We also sing familiar songs – oldies, hymns, folk songs, show tunes, etc. Often family members or caregivers sing with us. If the traveler is alert, she will sometimes sing as well. Anyone who can carry a tune, sing softly with others and wants to offer the healing gift of music is welcome to join Threshold. http://thresholdsingersnc.org/
Time: 1:15-2:30 / Location: Abundance HQ
Participants will be presented with various forms of writing and exercises to help them processes their individual grief. Dori Ann Dupré, Novelist & Author, will give a brief talk and guide you through the writing process.www.DoriAnnDupre.com
Time: 2:15-3PM / Location: Building 3 / Rhea Colmar
“In this brief workshop, we will introduce the practice of contemplation, focusing on phrases that take us deeper into our understanding of our precious human experience and the truth of impermanence.”
The Four Things that Matter MostTime: 2:30-3:30 / Location: Cidery
Rich Gwaltney, from Transitions Lifecare will be leading this workshop based upon a book titled the Four Things That Matter Most by Dr. Ira Byock. Through more than 25 years of caring for gravely ill patients and their families, Ira Byock, M.D., has discovered the life-transforming power of four simple phrases: “Please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “Thank you,” and ”I love you.” In this presentation you can learn how these honest and heartfelt words can serve to heal emotional wounds, strengthen connections, and bring lasting peace of mind daily as well as at the end of life.
Rich Gwaltney serves as the Community Engagement Representative for Transitions LifeCare (founded as Hospice of Wake County in 1979). He has over twenty-six years of experience serving in non-profit organizations in both education and spiritual care. Rich has graduate degree in Educational Leadership and most recently he and his family returned from a five year adventure in Malaysia where he served as the Spiritual Life Director at an international school. Rich has a lifelong passion to engage people of all ages concerning the issues that matter the most in life.
Time: 2:45-3:45 / Location: Abundance HQ /
Joanne Zerdy, PhD and Will Daddario, PhD, RMT run, Inviting Abundance of Asheville, that helps people create a “Creative Grief Practice.” They came to this work as PhD researchers in the Fine Arts and Humanities who experienced the devastating death of their first son, Finlay. Blending their research, artistic backgrounds, and grief experience, they created their business to help people grieve more purposefully. invitingabundance.net
Gratitude, Grief, and Love: Embracing Life and Death for Open Hearted Joyous Living and Dying
Time: 3:30-4:15 / Location: Building 3
This workshop, lead by Leif Diamant, will present ideas, tools, and experiences to assist in accepting the vulnerability and beauty of living as fully as possibly with gratitude and acceptance for what Life is. Living by embracing the preciousness of your life and death will help you open your heart to the magic mystery of this Life with all that it encompasses. Emphasis will be on experiencing uncertainty and loss as part of living more openly and with thankfulness for what is… while preparing to die whenever that might be. Desired outcome is more intimacy, skill with and benefit from grief and vulnerability while experiencing greater vitality and true happiness in each day.
Leif Robert Diamant, MEd, Licensed Professional Counselor and Ordained Interfaith/Interspiritual Minister, Naturalist and Organic Farmer, taught 10 years Duke University Medical Center Faculty
Time: 4-5PM / Location: Abundance HQ
Anne Weston, from Green Burial Project, will gather people into groups, look over 2 forms: 5 Wishes forms and the NC State forms… . after looking over forms you will share insights, observations, preferences and finish off the workshop with Conversation Kits to start the conversation with your own families.
Green Burial Project is a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit with no product to sell. Its sole aim is to educate the community about the environmental, financial, and spiritual benefits of returning our bodies to the earth in a manner consistent with our values and our heritage.
Cathy Martin owns the Red Canvas in Apex where the walls are covered in portraits. She paints them for just a fraction of families across the country who have lost a child to an opioid addiction.
It’s a feeling of loss she knows all too well. Her son, who battled a drug addiction, died in a car wreck 14 years ago.
Cathy said she gets about 20 painting requests a week. In two years, she’s painted about 100 portraits. Her goal is to paint a clearer picture of this epidemic and get families talking about it with one brush stroke at a time. (text from WTVD-TV)
Cathy will have her work on display at Death Faire in Building 3 Hall.
Location: Building 3 outside
Steve will be bringing Snoopy, the live vulture and 2 Owls.
2018 death faire artist: poster imageThis year’s Death Faire cover art is piece by mythopoetic artist Jacqueline Maloney called We Gave our Death for Fertile Ground. Each of Jacqueline’s paintings are a story woven of myth and wrought with wonder. Below is her inspiration for We Gave ourDeath for Fertile Ground:
I awoke into the dream on the back of a great stag, utterly spent, draped over the creature, at rest. The moon was new, and we were in a forest clearing, dark, dark, dark. I could vaguely make out the treeline forty paces away. A wolf bounded into view out of the dark, and in a single, graceful leap, tore flesh from the stag’s side near my hanging foot.
And another. And another. A pack of wolves, feasting on this deer. I was too tired to lift my feet away from the wolves, and afraid for my life and that of my friend.
“It’s okay. You can rest. I’m here, giving my life to these hungry animals, so you may keep yours.”
My eyes filled with tears of gratitude for the love of this stag. It was not my time to be pulled down by the wild wolves, to return to the dark. Where the flesh tore away into their jaws appeared lacy, delicate, nearly hand-spun and crocheted. Two huge, soft haired hounds pulled me from the skeleton of the deer, and escorted me home.
The soil is fertile now, where the deer stood and bled and fed the forest, and a hawthorn branch sprouts from the spot.
To learn more about Jacqueline, view her work, and purchase prints – visit her website here!
Every sanctuary has one. Every home is filled with them. Children build them in the woods. They appear all around us. End cap displays in the aisles of the grocery store. Photo collages in our social media feeds. Grandma’s vanity, where every keepsake has a specific place and memory attached. Your own bedroom – each family photo lined up to perfection. Every culture has them. Every person makes them, whether they are cognizant of it or not. Little altars are everywhere… informing our daily rituals of living.
The Death Faire Altar is both an interactive exhibit and a tribute to those we have lost. Feel free to adorn it with anything you wish. Ashes. Flowers. Poems. Wishes. Photos of your loved ones. Tokens of remembrance. Your great grandmother’s favorite pie… Anything goes. Commune with your ancestors. Connect with your cultural traditions.
‘BEFORE I DIE…’ WALLBefore I Die is a global art project that invites people to contemplate death and reflect on their lives. Originally created by the artist Candy Chang on an abandoned house in New Orleans after she lost someone she loved, today there are over 2,000 walls around the world.
What’s a Death Faire without a bit of the macabre? Lay back in a beautiful plain pine box by Aldergrove Caskets, grab your bouquet, and play dead….
THE PHONE OF THE WINDThere is beauty in simplicity. The Phone of the Wind is simply a rotary phone… where you may pick up the receiver and recall your loved ones lost. What would you say to them? What memories would you share? Inspired by a phone booth in the town of Otsuchi, Japan – used as a place of remembrance for those lost in the wake of a devastating tsunami. To read more about the story of the The Phone of the Wind, visit here!gt
…come enjoy your kids by coloring a Pepe Caudillo skull, make a mold of their tiny growing hand, get your face painted. ..paint the name of your loved ones dead or alive on a recycled piece of wood…decorate a chalk coffin.. .be creative and share your love and imagination.
VENDORS:
Full Circle Antiques / Piedmont Pine Coffin : Carolina Casket / Rainbowzend / Oak&Moon / Joyful Workings / Oak City Hemp / Sparkle Body Art / Hempsmith / xerrajeros / 13.1 Candle co. / Breadcrumbs / Striking Copper / DyingRight NC
Food Truck that offers Burgers, Sandwiches, Potatoes, Veggie options and more.. . .
“Farm to Table Sourced from Chatham County Farmers”
Mexican Truck that offers Sincronizadas, Sopes, Tostadas, Tortas, Tacos, Burritos, Veggie Plates, Fajitas, Carnitas and more.. . .
