Annual Meeting and Events

2009 Annual Meeting

April 26, 2009 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Jefferson Area Board for Aging (JABA), 674 Hillsdale Drive, Charlottesville, VA

The annual membership meeting begins with an hour presentation & discussion for the public. Following a short break, the meeting concludes with a session conducting the business of the society.

Previous annual meetings

2008

Gravestones, Deathscapes, and Funerals in Virginia's Piedmont

Dr Lynn Rainville has studied historic American cemeteries for two decades. Since moving to Virginia (in 2001), she has focused on historic African-American burial grounds, including slave cemeteries. In this illustrated talk she reviewed two hundred years of mortuary commemoration and funerals in the Piedmont. During this period, the changing gravestone inscriptions and styles provide a window into family networks, gender relations, attitudes towards death, and religious beliefs. Gravestones transitioned from announcing the "death" of the deceased (often accompanied by skeletal symbolism) to 19th Century, romanticized inscriptions that suggested the deceased was "sleeping" or "resting," to the 20th Century "denial of death" and the creation of "memorial parks" (in lieu of the earlier term "graveyard"). Examples were taken from local mortuary landscapes and markers to illustrate the suggestion that these cemeteries function as open-air museums which display ideas about death and dying. 

 

Website on African American Cemeteries in Albemarle & Amherst Counties

Dr. Lynn Rainville’s CV

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2007

Six Feet Under? Exploring Burial Options Inside & Outside the Box

Thinking about a simple burial on your family property? In your town cemetery? What should an informed consumer know about cemetery regulations and contracts? Fascinated by green burial, a movement “encouraging ethical and sustainable practices in the deathcare industry and the use of the burial process as a means of facilitating ecological restoration and landscape-level conservation”?

 

Isabel Berney, one of two citizen members appointed to the Virginia State Cemetery Board and a past president of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of the Virginia Blue Ridge, provided information and insight on burial options and cemetery regulations (or lack thereof) in Virginia.

 

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2006
Writing Obituaries

How do you want people to remember you? Your parents? The obituary placed in the newspaper notifies friends of a death, but it is also an intimate history of a life. Can you do it justice?

 

Don Fry, an independent writing coach, spoke about conveying the fullness of someone’s life in the context of an obituary. The one hour session included discussion of a handout designed to facilitate the writing process. Currently an independent writing coach living in Charlottesville, Don headed the writing and ethics faculties at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, and edited the Institute's series Best Newspaper Writing. The 1987 volume included an interview with Jim Nicholson, the greatest American obituary writer.

 

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2005

Ethical Wills

Stephen Pfleiderer, author of Legacy Story Writing--a Step-by-Step Organizing and Writing Guide,

addressed the concept of ethical wills.

Meg Heath, funeral director and former hospice and hospital chaplain,

spoke about the Cremation and Burial Society of Virginia.