A Ceremony’s Real Meaning Is Found in Our Hearts : Art: The Fullerton exhibit evokes a writer’s memories of how she and her family faced a most painful rite of passage--death.

For me, “Rites of Passage” at the Fullerton Museum was not just another exhibition. Coming from a somewhat eccentric, proudly tradition-free family that had to be persuaded to celebrate Thanksgiving, I had always shrugged off rites and rituals as so much claptrap.

But last winter, I discovered that there is something to be said, after all, for such ceremonies, so long as they allow true feelings to be shared and voiced.

After going to a hospital in San Francisco to treat one of several types of cancer that had dogged her during her adult life, my mother suddenly fell into in a coma before anyone had a chance to say goodby.

During the days and hours before her death, her body was tethered to life-giving equipment in the emergency ward. For a few moments each day, family members stood at her bedside--numbed by some intensely personal combination of anguish and guilt--while implacable machines sighed and hummed, and a wavering graph charted her breathing.

When there was no more hope and we tearfully made the decision to take Mom off life support, the hospital’s counselor approached my father to ask about funeral arrangements. My father said he didn’t want some guy with a collar talking about my mother, so there would be no funeral.

Still, we wondered aloud about what to do with the ashes after my mother was cremated, according to her wish. We agreed that it was gruesome to keep them in a jar on somebody’s mantle. But it seemed ghastly just to fling them out with the trash. The bizarre humor that consorts so easily with grief bubbled up in the tiny white-walled hospital “quiet room” we had commandeered.

Finally, we learned that her ashes would be strewn at sea the following week by the company that would perform the cremation. My father said he wouldn’t be there.

“I can cry just as well at home,” he said. Nor did he warm to the idea of dedicating some bench or stone to her memory.

But my youngest brother was troubled. We had to do something , he said. Why not agree to return to San Francisco in the spring and voice our thoughts about Mom in the secluded Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park?

Despite unexpectedly chilly weather that made us hug ourselves and stamp our feet when we weren’t crying or laughing, it turned out to be a wonderful idea--as suited to our strengths and tensions as a family as to the extraordinarily subtle and private woman few of us felt we ever really knew.

The three of us siblings who write for a living each read essays that turned out to spotlight radically different aspects of Mom.

My black-sheep brother cracked loving but awkwardly inappropriate jokes. My uncle reminisced wryly about the long-ago day he taught his little sister to swim. One of my sisters burst out with an impromptu emotional message, at once loving and accusatory. My father poignantly addressed my mother as if she were still alive and able to recall their poor-but-happy early years and harmonious middle age right along with him.

And then we spent hours drinking wine and eating the Lucullan feast prepared by my other sister--who had protested at the ceremony that she was a cook, not a writer, and had nothing to say.