Bellingham’s Marie Eaton may be best known to locals from her 40 years at Western Washington University as the chair, then associate dean of Woodring College, the acting VP for student affairs, and the dean of Fairhaven College.
She’s been in the news lately because of her involvement in palliative care.
“I first became passionate about this field when I was teaching Death and Dying at Fairhaven College,” Eaton, 77, said. “Knowing that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, I took over the class and was a co-learner with my students for 15 years of teaching it.”
That focus, she said, became community-wide as a group of faculty at Western began to collaborate with practitioners in the field of palliative and serious illness care to mount community events to challenge the cultural fear of talking about death.
That collaboration led to the formation of the Palliative Care Institute at Western, and Eaton was its first director. Now, after her retirement, she volunteers, assisting in sponsoring education and conversation opportunities around serious illness and end-of-life care in our community. She will participate in a round-table discussion to celebrate some of the successful palliative care initiatives on Wednesday, Nov. 1 at the Bellingham Senior Activity Center.
Eaton is also a musician and poet
Eaton said she wrote some poems in college and the years after, but songwriting was her primary creative outlet.
Raised in Tacoma, Eaton said music has been central to her life since childhood. Her two brothers and her mother sang as a quartet, mostly at church, but they sang all the time at home, “doing the dishes, riding in the car, sitting around a campfire,” she said.
She got her first guitar as a teenager in the middle of the folk music revival, and made some of the money to fund her graduate education by being the lead singer in a country-western band, Doc Marie and the GoodTimes.
She started writing songs in her 20s, and in 1980 she met three other female musicians and they formed the band Motherlode. Motherlode has been performing and organizing music events together since, with eight albums and a couple of solo ones as well.
Early in the pandemic, Eaton said, Oregon poet Kate Gray reached out to a small group of friends and writers to offer the sanctuary of a daily writing group, and Eaton counted herself fortunate to be among them.
About 10 people gathered online each morning, beginning with Gray’s offering of a guided meditation, which Eaton said was typically grounded in a line from a poem, which then became their writing prompt for the day.
At the end of the 20-minute session, Gray invited the group to set down their pens or close their laptops and listen to the poem from which she borrowed the line.
Then, Eaton said, “As we expressed our gratitude to Kate in a chorus of overlapping goodbyes, we all hung up our phones and stumbled back into our COVID-limited lives.”
These morning sessions became a lifeline for Eaton, a “touchpoint” to begin the day.
“I sat in silence in my chair facing a window overlooking Bellingham Bay and found solace in those 20 minutes, opening to whatever words began to tumble across the page,” she said.
Although raised in a traditional Methodist Church, Eaton said these days her spiritual life leans more into an active practice of being present in each moment. It’s hard to do, she said, but worth the effort. And her daily writing is part of that practice.
Eaton is a past recipient of the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest Walk Award and has published in Whatcom Watch. Her poems were included in the Empty Bowl Press 2021 collection “Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia” and in Red Wheelbarrow Writers’ 2023 anthology, “Spring and All.”
She will read from her latest collection of poetry, “Be Here Now,” Sunday, Oct. 29 at Village Books in Fairhaven.
In these poems, Eaton considers the physical and emotional landscape of aging, its moments of revelation, both heartwarming and melancholy. The 1971 book by Ram Dass, “Be Here Now,” is Eaton’s poetic guide to how to live fully in the moment.
Eaton said many memories of her childhood are of late summer evening games on the street with other kids, clamming and beach-combing at Delano Bay the last two weeks of August, and picking blackberries.
She said she was miserable in school, “kind of a nerdy kid, nose in a book, and always the last picked for any playground game because I was awkward and plump.”
In fifth grade, her parents sent her to Annie Wright School, a private girl’s school. She flourished there, she said, because she was encouraged to be both curious and smart. The teachers also nurtured her love of language.
Several of her poems in “Be Here Now” are about loss, particularly of family members.
“I love both my brothers,” she said, “but Wayne, my younger brother and I were very close … Although he was four years younger than I am, he was often the one I called when I needed to puzzle through some problem.”
Wayne Dodge died in 2021.
With two children, a partner of almost 50 years and seven grandchildren, Eaton said she looks for inspiration and metaphors in her garden, while cooking and with her family.
“For me, often the writing prompt (during the pandemic) led to reflections on the meaning of family, especially during the sharp initial grief after my brother’s death, and to thoughts about my own aging process,” Eaton said.
Marie Eaton will read from “Be Here Now,” at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 29 at Village Books, 1200 11th St. Please register in advance at villagebooks.com.
