The memory of a lost child inspires a lifetime of giving
EmilyJane Mockett’s daughter, Julia, lived just 20 days. In the twenty years that followed, EmilyJane and her husband set aside everything they would have spent on birthday gifts, college tuition, and all the other celebrations, lessons, and care that carry a child into adulthood. In August of 2022, when the account had grown to the point where it could sustain a lifetime of philanthropy, leaving them “with nothing but pockets full of love,” they began to give in her honor.
“[Julia’s death] was the most profound shattering, shattering me into a thousand pieces, innumerable, innumerable pieces,” says EmilyJane. “I don’t like to use the word destroy, but it did break me. But it broke me open. And I had a choice. I had a choice of just staying shattered or building something beautiful. And that’s really the work, the grief work… It’s never done.”
Every August, from the 8th to the 28th, for each of the twenty days of Julia’s life, EmilyJane presents a gift to one or more nonprofits. She makes her gifts in person out of a desire to “touch” the process, writing the check by hand, walking it in, talking to a staff member to learn more about the mission and work. An ordained interfaith minister, poet, and artist, EmilyJane also writes a prayer or poem for the recipient. “To belong in a space/That asks nothing of you/Yet to be here now, To rest/From what the world asks of you,” begins her poem to HRB.
This practice, says EmilyJane, “embodies the gift of what [Julia] has taught me about living and loving deeply in this life’s impermanence. She was the biggest, most beautiful thing I could have been gifted from nature, and then I had to give her back to the universe and to the earth…The inspired gifting piece is extending that gift of light and love to as many places as I can.”
The nonprofits that EmilyJane supports change from one year to the next, and she hopes to keep amplifying her giving and inspire others to give in their own way. But there has been consistency. Her selections reflect a prioritization of nonprofits that help meet basic needs. (HRB has been included since the fund launched, and she recently enrolled in the monthly giving program.) And she gives in amounts that include the number 8. Julia was born 8/8 and died 8/28 at 8:08 in the morning, and 8 is the symbol for infinity.
As a retired nurse, EmilyJane understands that housing is healthcare, as well as a means of building our capacity to participate in and contribute to our community. She was born and raised in Seattle but spent much of her adulthood in the Bay Area where she witnessed the destructive effects of the housing crisis. She saw families displaced, and she could envision the same for her own. She could not imagine that her children would ever be able to afford homes in the Bay Area where they grew up, nor could she see her husband and herself able to afford to retire there, so they moved to their cabin in the Sierras as a kind of family experiment. About ten years ago, after her father’s sudden death, EmilyJane returned to the Puget Sound region to care for her mother who was living with Alzheimer’s. They were drawn to Bainbridge for its balance of urban access and natural beauty, and they were drawn to HRB for its mission and visible progress.
EmilyJane calls Julia her butterfly, a symbol of her fleeting life and the ways “a small being, a small act, a small moment of love” can touch so many lives. She gifted a butterfly bench in her memory to a park in the community where she once lived and today, has such a bench in her garden. In that vein, every August 8, on her daughter’s birthday, EmilyJane gathers a bouquet of flowers and paddles out to sea where she releases them. This acceptance of impermanence and her spiritual relationship with Julia are grounded by her practice of giving, a ritual of remembrance enacted over twenty days, a period of intense observance, reflection, and appreciation for a life that left so much love and light behind.