When The Going Comes

Fare

Is an old word that comes from the Old English faran: to travel, to go, to get on. It's still alive in the way we ask about someone. How did you fare? Meaning how did you manage, how did you come through it, what did it take out of you. So faring is the going and the getting through, both at once.

Well

Then there's well, and it isn't a promise that things will be easy, or free of grief. To fare well means meeting whatever comes with as much honesty and care as the circumstances allow. Well doesn't describe the outcome. It describes the manner.

The two words together might be what you say to someone at a door. It’s been collapsed into goodbye, and something may have got lost in that compression, because a farewell was a blessing for the going long before it was a word for the parting. It faced forward. I wanted the older meaning and the new, with the hyphen sitting there to hold the two halves slightly apart so you can see them both.

A blessing and a goodbye.

Co.

Is the part people might assume is business dressing. It’s not:

Co. is for continuity/continuation, of the support people need throughout the entire arc of end-of-life, not just part of it, but also in what carries on afterwards; the memories, the stories, the legacy.

Co. is for coordination, the logistics and administrative side of it all, constant and heavier than it looks from the outside. Some deaths ask for the same level of coordination a wedding does. Similar decisions, high emotions, minus the joy carrying through. Nobody grieving should have to become an event planner, or an executor, alone if they aren’t able to.

Co. is for collective, because nobody can do it all, so I work alongside the professionals, families, and the neighbours dropping off food; never in place of any of them.

Co. is for community, which is the part least like a business and most like a reason to try and contribute to a place I love so much.

Death and grief literacy across North America is low, and Islanders are no exception, though that's not a criticism. We're great at showing up. Food appears on the doorstep. Someone puts a hand on your shoulder in the co-op parking lot two weeks later, after everyone else has returned to ordinary life. The part that goes quiet is what happens before: the planning, the conversations nobody wants to begin. So families end up making enormous decisions inside a funeral home at nine in the morning, running on no sleep, with almost no information.

I want to help those conversations start earlier, while there's still time and choice left in them. I want words like dying, death, and legacy to become sayable around a kitchen table on an ordinary Tuesday, in the same voice people use to talk about fixing the roof or arguing over whose meat pie recipe is best. I offer that up close, in conversations with individual families, in workshops for teams and volunteer groups, and through the free tools I've built for people who'd rather find their own way.

All of the above is what Fare-Well Co. means to me. Not because I work with endings, but because I care about how we go - through illness, through caregiving, through grief, through love, through life itself. So that when the going comes, as it will for all of us eventually, everyone fares well.