(radio tuning) - Art is everywhere.

It might be a dance with your favorite partner or the dance of a butterfly's wings.

It might be a delicate fragrance or a delicate orb made of glass.

It might be something you've never even imagined because art is incorporated into almost everything, and we're excited to share that everything with you.

Welcome to Art Inc. - [Announcer] If you want to know what's going on.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (static glitching) (upbeat music) The Art of Remembering.

(discordant clanging) - When I'm at a new gathering and people are always, "Oh, what do you do?"

I have a small stone carving shop with a small team of carvers and, "Oh, so you make sculptures, you make, you know, like Michelangelo?"

And I say, "Well, no," I almost never come right out with, "Oh, you know, we make gravestones.

(hammer clanging) And then I'll somehow weave in there, it's the art of remembering.

(gentle music) It is the art of remembering.

It is so that when that person has died, we have a place to go and we can read their name aloud.

Because the love doesn't end, the stories become even more precious because you don't have new stories.

(gentle music) The inspiration for each design comes from sitting with the family.

So I'll ask them, "Tell me about your daughter, tell me about your son, tell me about your wife."

Very often when I'm sitting with someone, they're telling me about their spouse, and they're telling me about how they met, and they're showing me photos of the travels they've done together, I am hearing the most beautiful love story.

(gentle music) And at some point in the meeting they'll pause and they'll say, I'll hear it again and again, I thought this was gonna be really hard and really difficult, and as much as it is hard and difficult, I'm really enjoying sitting with you and telling you about our daughter, and thank you for listening, and thank you for asking to see her picture.

(gentle music) When we've lost someone to death, all we really wanna do is talk about them or we wanna hear somebody else tell us a story about them, and so we must speak of the dead to the living.

(gentle music) The process for drawing and designing is really a solo act.

The family has gone home, I will light a candle again.

(gentle music) And I will just sit and wait.

(gentle music) I will look at the photograph of the person we're remembering, and I'll have a conversation with them.

What do you want?

Even if we're just gonna carve your mother's name and her birth year and death year, I'll try never to just do a dash, that gap in between is your life, so we'll create an icon of something.

(gentle music) The artwork is hand drawn, we're being inspired by photographs or going out into nature to find exactly what does that butternut leaf look like?

But then it's drawn by hand and then that's transferred onto the stone by hand, and then it's carved by hand with a mallet and a chisel.

And I like to say and remind each person that our most important tool is our heart.

(gentle music) So Block Island was a safe place for me as a child, and when I needed to return to someplace safe and try to figure it out, I felt that was the place.

And sure enough, it held me and really instructed the quiet self that I have today.

(gentle music) And it was there that in meeting my kid's dad, I fell in love with my father-in-law, who was just a quiet soul, a beautiful man.

And when he died in 1996, I had only been carving stone for a little while, had been carving wood for many years, I had a very clear leading to carve his gravestone.

And I asked my mother-in-law, I said, "I really want to carve this stone for Fran, I wanna do it in slate, I want it to look like something from the 18th century."

And she said, yes.

In memory of Major Francis Clyde Sprague, he departed this life, May 8th, 1996, aged 69 years, five months, 15 days, a quiet and gentle spirit.

(gentle music) The Providence Journal did an article about this woman that's hand carving this stone.

And from that article, I got four more commissions.

And when the phone rang, I'd say to them, "You do know that's the only stone I've ever carved aside from a pet stone that I had done for a friend."

(gentle music) The work that we have is a little bit different, it's quite creative, it looks like it's always been here.

(gentle music) This piece here, it's very different, it's an organic piece of granite where I took the family up to the quarry at the Granite Quarry in the Berkshires.

I said, you know, I can imagine having it cut all the way through.

You and I cannot fit through this passageway in our physical form, but upon losing this body, I'd like to think the spirit could move freely through here.

An arch is a symbol of strength, but it's also a metaphor for passageways.

There's the before and there's the after, there's the now, there's the journey, and then there's the other side.

What is the other side?

I don't know, I'll meet you there.

(gentle music) The families that call and trust us to do their final memorials is just very powerful for me.

(gentle music) I think to myself, how did I get to do this?

This is it, this is the work I've always, I didn't ever imagine it, just one day at a time, it evolved, it evolved, and I kept saying, yes, (gentle music) I haven't designed my own stone yet, no, I don't know what that's gonna be, but I've always thought the epitaph on there might be, she was a passionate woman.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Singing through the threshold.

(choir chanting) - As Western culture, especially in the Northeast, we think of death as this horrible thing, and we pretend like it's not happening, when really it can be just a beautiful, peaceful transition.

♪ Lay down your burden, let it go ♪ ♪ Lay down your burden, let it go ♪ ♪ You're pure love now ♪ ♪ You are pure grace ♪ ♪ Lay down ♪ - I am a classical musician, and I have been working as such for close to 25 years, and have always sung at funerals.

There must be some way to support people before you get to say a celebration of life or a funeral.

A threshold choir is a group of volunteers who learn a very specific kind of repertoire to sing at bedside for those who have entered palliative care or perhaps hospice care.

It's a secular organization that helps people who are transitioning at the end of their life.

And it supports not only the patient in the bed, but those who are supporting that person at bedside, as well as celebrating the life once they have fully transitioned.

Threshold Choir was started by a really amazing woman named Kate Munger, and it was born out of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

She was caring for friends who were transitioning, and she discovered after the cooking and cleaning was done and you went to go sit by bedside and hold someone's hand, she really didn't know what to do, and so she started singing.

- I've been a singer in choirs all my life at church and in the course of Westerly, I have done it naturally.

When someone's been on the threshold, I just go to their bedside and sing on my own, I didn't know there was an organized way of doing it.

It's such a gift, and it's a gift for the singer and for the recipient.

- We each get into our Threshold Choir chair and offer ourselves up to be that vulnerable, and then feel uplifted by the songs that we sing.

- There's one song we sing, I always think of the people in Ukraine when we sing it, it's called "Weight of the World."

♪ When the weight of the world gets heavy ♪ ♪ And trouble flows in like the tide ♪ ♪ May we stand up and help each other ♪ ♪ Find comfort when love abides ♪ - The first time we sang it, it brought tears to my eyes, all of us will cry during rehearsal because they're just so moving.

♪ Heavy, and trouble ♪ - The art of being together, choirs kind of have this secret about them, that it's a place where 100 different agendas, 100 different days, 100 different tomorrows can all rest in the same room.

And we all take a corporate breath and we sing the same notes and the same words and can reach a common understanding.

Threshold Choir distills that down to a single page, and it gives you the space to just be together and go, "Yeah, that's really tough, but it's worthwhile."

And the grief that you feel, even when it's painful, can be a very beautiful thing.

♪ Find comfort when love abides ♪ Thank you.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] One Last Wave.

(water rushing) - I've always connected deeply to the ocean.

I think there's something innately therapeutic about it.

We come from the ocean, we're made of water, we have a life dependency on water, and in a way the oceans connect us all, no matter where we are.

(gentle music) I find the same thing is with grief, in that grief is a connector in many ways.

As a surfer, I see that very much, that the ocean for me is this giant fluid canvas where it allows you to carve in whatever way you want.

You can take any wave, you can go in any direction you want, whether it's carving back or going down the line.

And for me, it's sort of that big canvas that allows you to express yourself and express your emotions as people do with art.

I grew up in a family of artists really.

My dad was an architect and a self-taught musician and my mom was an artist, and my sister and I had a huge focus on that growing up.

One weekend we decided as we sort of moved into this new house, that we wanted to make it a little bit more of our own and show our own expression that way.

So everyone got to pick a wall in the basement downstairs and create a mural about who they saw themselves as.

And my father was always a very brave, very determined, resilient man who was able to really do anything.

He was very much a dreamer and whatever it is he wanted to accomplish, he did.

And that was my role model growing up.

(gentle music) In 2019, my father passed away from pancreatic cancer.

To see him deteriorate over eight years, again in waves of it, there was times where it felt like he was coming back and being stronger and then it would dip again.

And I never imagined I would see him in the state that he ended up in, which just broke me to pieces to see that.

And about half a year later, my dog, my best friend of 15 years passed away as well.

(upbeat music) So after my father had passed, I was looking for ways to reconnect to him.

So much of our relationship revolved around adventure, so I just decided to write his name down on one of my surfboards, because I had turned to surfing and the ocean as therapy, and I thought it'd be great to bring him back there so that the two of us could go on sort of one final adventure in a way.

So I sat out there in the waves and it was a beautiful day and he was free again.

Here's my offer to you guys.

And then I went right to my car and grabbed my phone and recorded a video.

Maybe you lost someone who just loves being outdoors.

And just put it out to the world.

Comment on this video with their name and a bit of their story, and I'll put their name on my board here, just like I've done with my dad up front, and I'll take them out in the ocean for you, okay?

When you're going through that grief and you feel the isolation, you feel it's only happening to you, right?

You're looking for ways to connect to other people, you're looking for community.

But I didn't think that people would have the vulnerability and the courage to share that as well, because it was really difficult for me.

But I found that as I did that and I was vulnerable, it brought other people into the project as well, and the names started trickling in overnight and that first board filled up within five days, with 1500 names on it, from all around the world.

(upbeat music) So when the first few names started to roll in, I started to take the board out to the ocean every day just to sit by it in order to be able to write those first 100 names on the board.

(gentle music) It was important for me to feel connected, and it was very emotional because I read every single submission that comes in and to understand the beauty of the lives of every person that's on the board.

It was an important part of the process for me and for the families as well.

I wanted to make sure that each board was a unique piece of art.

So the first board, I did myself as a way of expressing how I was feeling, and then when I opened the project sort of up to the world I wanted to have different shapers and locations that had a connectiona to the project in some way and would allow people in different parts of the world to experience it.

And then we have the sixth board that's gonna be released in Santa Cruz.

What's special about the area too is it's sort of where surfing was introduced by the Hawaiians to the mainland.

Ryan Lynch, who's the shaper of this board takes fallen redwood trees, and the whole process of shaping them into a piece of art really is just extraordinary.

You have 804 names about halfway through the board, should be about 1600 total.

It's probably about 35 hours in total to get them all on there.

It's very similar, I find, to actually being out in the water, you have that singular focus and try to put all your energy into catching that wave and being in touch with the ocean.

And when I'm here, it's being connected to everyone who's going on the board and giving them that moment.

This piece that I find is very much like a river coming through the side of the board here, because the ink sinks in so quickly into the wood that you can't make any mistakes into it.

So there's a lot of attention paid to making sure everyone's name is written on there correctly, and the time taken to do that, and just understanding that as you go.

But it makes it exciting at the same time.

And then I'll be able to go over there and we'll surf it in Santa Cruz and be able to share that with everyone who's gonna be there for the launch.

The ocean itself, it's so vast and limitless that we don't really know what's out there.

We don't really know the direction the next wave of grief is gonna take us.

(gentle music) It's the uncertainty of grief that connects us to the ocean because people often come there as a way to explore what they're feeling, to feel not so alone in the vastness of it all.

(gentle music) I'm Dan Fischer, I'm the founder of The One Last Wave Project, I'm a father and a surfer and an artist, I guess.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on "Art Inc." (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Watch more "Art Inc," a Rhode Island PBS original series now streaming at ripbs.org/artinc.