• Home
  • Family
  • Pickleball, Memorials, and the Strange Gift of Gathering Around Grief

Pickleball, Memorials, and the Strange Gift of Gathering Around Grief

Posted by: RealEfforts Posted on: June 1, 2026

The itinerary for a memorial gathering is a strange document. It contains things like “pickleball tournament” and “dinner at the Pearl Street Airbnb” alongside “memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church.” Life and death, side by side on the same schedule.

There’s something deeply human about that juxtaposition. When people come together around the loss of someone they loved, they don’t spend every moment in formal grief. They play pickleball in the morning and cry in the afternoon and laugh over dinner that night at a story someone tells about the person they’re missing. All of it is real. All of it is part of what it means to grieve in community.

I’ve come to believe that the activities around the edges of a memorial — the games, the shared meals, the walks in the neighborhood, the impromptu late-night conversations — are not distractions from the grief. They are part of how we process it. We need to move our bodies. We need to laugh. We need to feel that life is still happening, that the person we lost would not want us to be only sad.

There’s also something important about the gathering itself, separate from the formal service. Twenty-one people from different parts of the country, different branches of a family, different stages of life — all in the same house, around the same table, sharing the same loss. That proximity matters. Grief felt alone is a very different thing from grief felt together.

The service provides the ceremony, the words, the formal acknowledgment of what has happened. But the days around it — the arrivals, the dinners, the slow mornings — provide something else: the chance to remember together, to tell the stories that only certain people know, to sit with someone who understood exactly what this person meant to you.

Pickleball the day before a memorial is not disrespectful. It’s a family saying: we are still here, still alive, still connected. We are going to grieve and we are going to play and we are going to hold both things at once.

That’s what love looks like when it doesn’t know what else to do. It gathers. It moves. It stays.

RealEfforts

My name is Martin Fenton III. I created Real Efforts because I've reached a point in life where I find myself spending less time asking, "What's next?" and more time asking, "What did it all mean?" Like most people, my life has been filled with chapters I never could have predicted. I've lived overseas, built businesses, worked for large companies, raised children, fallen in love, made mistakes, started over more than once, lost people I loved, and discovered that many of the things I was certain about at thirty look very different at sixty. For many years I focused on building a career and supporting a family. Today, I find myself increasingly interested in understanding the lessons hidden inside those experiences. Real Efforts is my attempt to do that. This isn't a business website. It's not a memoir. It's not a collection of answers. It's a collection of observations, stories, questions, lessons, and reflections gathered over a lifetime of trying to figure things out. Some of these thoughts are about family. Some are about work. Some are about friendship, purpose, aging, reinvention, and the strange ways life unfolds despite our plans. Many of them are simply attempts to make sense of experiences that felt confusing while I was living them. The older I get, the more I realize that life is less about arriving somewhere and more about paying attention while you're traveling. I've learned that relationships matter more than accomplishments. That starting over is never as easy as people pretend. That success and happiness are not always the same thing. And that some of the most important lessons don't become visible until years after the experience itself. I originally created this site for my children. I wanted them to have more than photographs and dates. I wanted them to understand how I thought, what I struggled with, what I learned, and what I hoped for them. Over time, I realized these thoughts might be useful to others as well. So this site became something larger. A place to collect life chapters. A place to preserve family stories. A place to explore purpose. A place to ask questions that don't always have answers. Most of all, it's a place to leave behind a little context. Because someday, when we're all gone, the stories disappear unless someone takes the time to tell them. This is my effort to tell them.

What Makes Your Life Easier?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.