So she put on some lipstick and blew death a kiss, a pair of angel's wings strapped to her shoulders and a couple of harpists thrown in for celestial good measure.

Wearing an airy sheath of a white dress, white Birkenstocks, a fuzzy halo and those big, white, fluffy wings, Blaine grinned like the Cheshire cat, cheek to cheek, and cackled like Phyllis Diller while greeting the 40 or so friends and relatives who turned out for her living funeral, her dying party.

"I'm dying!" Blaine said repeatedly in a tone that was both plaintive and joyously declarative.

There were smiles and awkward silences, a look of disbelief on some faces, sadness on others and a glance from those who knew her plucky personality that said: "This party is so Gladys."

"I'm so sorry to leave you all," Blaine rasped.

What could have been just a long, drawn-out death - a quiet fade to black - Blaine transformed into what was likely to be her last celebration. By orchestrating her own memorial, and then actively participating in it, she turned the solemn rituals we usually associate with death upside down.

There are about as many rituals to mark the death of a person as there are ways to die. Some are personal and intimate, others communal and bawdy. Some rituals take place long before a person dies, some years later. In the context of wailing Irish wakes, loose-lipped New Orleans jazz funerals and James Brown's daughter getting on the good foot at his concert-memorial, Blaine's flight of predeath fancy doesn't seem all that eccentric.

When it comes right down to it, ceremonies and special moments are as crucial to dying as they are to births and youthful rites-of-passage. Being a part of them matters. The intensity of our involvement is a way of showing how much we care.

Slowly, with the rise of personalized, less rigidly formal funerals and an embrace of alternatives to traditional burials, such as cremation and the spreading of ashes, the mystique around death is lifting.

Still, we cringe a little. Death remains a topic that we shudder to think about, and scarcely discuss.

"We live in a culture that has an almost superstitious fear of death," says Paul Elvig, retiring general manager of Evergreen-Washelli Funeral Home and Cemetery in North Seattle. We have a terror, rooted in Medieval religious teachings, he says, of even addressing the subject of dying. Elvig points to gravestones from the 1700s and 1800s, with their ominous skeletal engravings meant to scare away spirits, as evidence of this lasting dread.

Somehow we got off track.

American society may be merging from its "dark age of fearing death," Elvig says, but we continue to be a "death denial crowd." Even he and his brothers fell into the grim-faced trap when his mother was near death last fall. "We were all trying to pretend it wasn't happening," Elvig recalled. "We were denying her the chance to celebrate." A year after her death and traditional burial, "I'm still mad about it."

Blaine took the other route, refusing to let the opportunity to celebrate her last days slip away.

Rituals

The grief that loved ones feel - the sense of loss - is as certain as death.

Rituals serve as a way of working through that pain, of channeling the sadness toward something positive, healing or cleansing. Ostensibly for the dead and dying, the visitations, the prayers, the stopping of the clocks and the laying of flowers on corpses all wind up serving the living just as much.

Every little thing a loved one does, when considered in the context of death, takes on much greater magnitude and symbolism.

Death rituals are not only personal events but social occasions, ones that ground whole groups of people, preserving their history, heritage and common experiences.

Mexican tradition

Perhaps nowhere else does death literally taste so sweet, or hold such high community regard, as in Mexico, and by extension, Mexican immigrant communities in the United States, where Dia de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead, happens each year on Nov. 2.

Where children and grown-ups in the United States try to scare the wits out of each other with ghoulish depictions of death at Halloween, Mexicans live it up with their spirits, joking around and mocking them like old running buddies, picnicking on their graves and erecting altars full of offerings in their homes.

"In Mexico, we are not afraid of death; we play with death," says Flor Alarcon, a native of the Oaxaca region and owner of the Mexican arts-and-crafts gallery Frida in Burien.

In this belief system, you don't necessarily die. You live on in the form of a spirit. And on the Day of the Dead, you return home to visit with relatives and friends, who lay paths of flower petals through the house to the altar to guide your way. Each altar is topped with an arch of marigold blossoms symbolizing renewal.

Goodbye, Part II

Gladys Blaine has designated a very specific farewell for her death, too. The goodbye party in May was the public event, Part 1. Part 2 involves being cremated and flown back home to Southern California.

A half-dozen or so close friends will guard her ashes at a five-star hotel until the big day, the spreading of her ashes at sea.

"We hired a yacht, a big yacht," for the proceedings, Blaine told the crowd at her party.

Blaine smiled and scanned the crowd, the face of eager anticipation in a room filled with people who'd come to say goodbye but didn't really want to let go. She had one last question:

"Aren't you sorry you're not going?"

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