Local girl makes good

Former Cafe contributor Susan Daughtry Fawcett is featured in Sunday’s Washington Post. The subject is funerals. Yours.

Planning your last affairs is not necessarily a happy task to think about, but sometimes circumstances throw your mortality into sharp relief. In the summer of 2004, Susan Daughtry Fawcett, then 23, was working as a chaplain in the emergency ward of Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg. It was a hard summer punctuated by tragedies, despair and the grace required to work through both. Because of that experience, she sat down and planned her funeral, picked hymns and readings, and left a list of songs that should be put on CDs for close friends. Now she regularly sees her parishioners dealing with the loose ends that unfurl upon a loved one’s death.

“Having thought about these things ahead of time is incredibly helpful,” says Fawcett, an Episcopal priest in Vienna. “It’s a huge gift to your family.” More important, she says, we all might benefit from a little more understanding of our own mortality, since the idea of death is normally confined to hospital rooms and nursing homes.

Read it.

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