The Embers That Light Our Way
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Stories of Impact from Abundance
MARCH 2026
In this Issue:
Stories of Impact & Abundance:
A Welcome from Emberlight's Development Team
There is a kind of fire that doesn't roar.
It doesn't leap or crackle or announce itself with sparks against the night sky. It glows. It persists. It warms the darkness with a patience that outlasts every flame—the quiet, inexhaustible presence we call an ember.
At Emberlight, we often speak about embers—the quiet, steady sources of warmth and light that endure long after the fire has changed shape. They are not flashy. They don’t demand attention. And yet, without them, nothing lasting is possible.
We live by them. We tend them. We honor them. Each gift made to Emberlight in 2025 was one of those embers.
Welcome to Embers That Light Our Way, a new writing series born from gratitude and illuminated by you. Pull back the veil on how your support transforms into actual, tangible care for a growing community that needs what we offer—desperately, beautifully, right now.
Your generosity—whether large or small, recent or sustained—strengthens a community responsibility that is too often carried alone by weary family members. In our community, we hold a shared belief that care is an expression of a compassionate and healthy society.
You may never meet them, the people whose lives your generosity touches. You may never walk these halls or sit in these rooms or hear the music played at a bedside or see the way a family's shoulders drop when they realize they're not alone.
But hear this truth, clear as a bell in winter air:
Your giving matters.
It steadies the work when the work grows heavy.It sustains the care when the care never stops.It lights the way when the path grows dark.
You are the ember beneath everything we do. The quiet heat that makes it all possible. With hands full of gratitude and hearts warmed by your light this series will offer you a peek into Emberlight: a space for reflection, story, and gratitude. Here, we’ll share moments from our work, answer common questions, and glimpses of the ways care takes shape—in quiet rooms, at bedsides, through volunteers’ hands, and in the hearts of families who feel less alone because you chose to give. In short - how you are directly supporting the essential needs of our growing community.
With gratitude,
Courtney Smith & Chelsea Trinka
The Emberlight Abundance Dynamic Duo
(Because even fundraising needs a little magic.)
The Weaving of Light Between Families
In the heart of December, when darkness claims its longest hours and the world draws inward, Emberlight kindles its annual Remembrance Ceremony. Here, in the hushed Light House, grief wears no mask, and candles dance their amber-soft ballet. Families arrive carrying their tender weight—stories polished smooth by retelling, laughter caught in throats like unshed tears, memories that glow brighter than any flame.
The volunteers in our Sanctuary Suites cultivate spaces where the veil grows gossamer-thin. Where breath becomes a whisper, becomes silence, becomes air. And in those quiet and tender moments the universe sometimes reveals its hidden threads—the invisible filaments connecting us all.
This is the story of six souls, woven together by a loom no human hand could work.
First, the thread unfurls: Jake arrives at Emberlight after being lovingly cared for by family while his lung cancer worsened. Volunteers in the Suites immediately warmed to his smile, his hearty laugh, and his love of sweets & games. For several months, he thrived and glowed with the love surrounding him.
The thread doubles back: Binah, one of seven children, comes to visit her father Allan, who joined us in October. Walking down the walkway to the Suites, she startles with recognition seeing Jake's family, her neighbors. On the other side of the county, she has stumbled into another shared space with them. They’d had a bumpy patch over a common property line, as neighbors sometimes do, but as Binah’s father weakened, their conviction gave way to compassion as they both experienced the grief of watching a loved one fade away.
The thread spirals outward: In Pittsboro, Jake's older sister Bev wanders through the Death Faire—a weekend celebration where mortality sheds fear and dons wonder instead. Across from Emberlight's booth, voices rise in performance on the main stage: Aditi, Jay, Joel, and Scott’s haunting melodies and harmonies, coax the ineffable into being. Bev's eye catches something luminous—an etched glass piece offered at auction, its proceeds destined to carry a woman from the Triangle to Emberlight's threshold. I am so drawn to this, something whispers in her heart. She bids. She wins.
The thread loops: When Bev next visits Jake, she brings her treasure to show him. There, in the common room, a game spread across a table, sits Mandolyn—the young artist whose hands had transformed glass into light, the very woman whose journey the auction funded. Their eyes meet across the space between chance and destiny.
The thread hums around the coil: Andy moves next into the Suites with only days left of life. His son Michael achingly carrying his mandolin, the instrument's wooden voice filling his father's fading hours with music. Not just any music—Andy had spent a lifetime not only playing but collecting these teardrop-shaped bearers of song.
And ties a love knot: Binah returns to Emberlight for the Remembrance Ceremony and learns about Jake’s death. She stands and shares how she and her neighbors, Jake's family, healed their grievances through the shared liminal space that death offers. She says she would reach out when she returned home or take them a meal to comfort their grieving hearts, as they offer kindness to her as a grieving daughter.
Six lives. Mandolin. Mandolyn. Two families connected by a fence line. An auction. An artist. An instrument. A collector. All spiraling into the same sacred space where love tends the dying.
In the deathcare space, the supernatural is simply the pattern revealing itself—the universe whispering that nothing, nothing is random. That we are held in an infinite web of connection, and sometimes, in the candlelit December dark, we are granted the grace to see it.
The volunteers in the Sanctuary Suites remember them all. And in remembering, we keep the weaving going.
The Ember Elizabeth Left Behind
As one season closes and another begins, we pause in the stillness between—grateful for what became possible when care moved through our community like light through water, reaching into every corner where it was needed most.
A December to Remember
Elizabeth Preyer was a resident in the Sanctuary Suites in 2025. Her husband Morris, daughter Melanie, and her two sisters Jill and Sally shared her story in a our blog and The Preyer Family Foundation offered a gift in her honor —a $30,000 Pay-It-Forward donation and an invitation to others to support Emberlight in honor of someone they love during our end-of-year campaign.
Others stepped through that doorway: $187,000 in matching funds, gifts large and small, each one a yes to the question: Will someone be there when I need them?
Together, we raised over $237,000 during December in individual contributions, family foundations and grants. This momentum rose from strong ground. In the fall, a $100,000 matching donor sparked $60,000 in community giving, building the base that would carry us through winter's demands: volunteer training, resident care, and grief that doesn't wait for spring.
What Your Generosity Makes Possible
Because you said yes:
We closed the nearly $300K budget deficit in 2025.
Our cash reserves are enough to sustain us until our first major fundraiser of the year in April.
The Sanctuary Suites remain open, fully staffed, fully present.
Volunteers are trained, supported, held.
Families receive full-spectrum, holistic end-of-life care—without cost, without fear, without ever being turned away, and that care continues for the family for a year.
This is what it means to carry each other. This is community as covenant.
Looking Toward the Light of 2026
Your generosity has given Emberlight something rare and essential: steadiness.
You have gifted us with the ability to plan with intention. To strengthen what holds us. To meet the growing needs of elders and families across Western North Carolina with the kind of care that doesn't rush, doesn't turn away, doesn't count the cost. Most importantly, it ensures that when someone reaches out in their most vulnerable moment, a community will be ready—present, prepared, and whole.
If you didn’t get a chance to contribute to our year-end campaign and you are inspired to become an active contributor to the community-deathcare movement there are several ways you can join us.
Donate here to fan the embers of our 2026 fundraising efforts and help us launch our first quarter of the year with support.
Consider becoming a member through conscious giving. You can read all about what that means and the benefits here.
Blowing the Bellows on Your Embers...
In this season of winter, and political uncertainty, and global tragedies, how are you finding grounding? The Texas monks, who just finished their 2300 Walk for Peace suggest writing a note to yourself every morning, “Today is my Peaceful Day.” How are you staying focused on what matters most in your life - YOU?
This is a gentle nudge to select one of the options below that would make a difference in your own sense of inner peace. Give it a try. See what happens
Begin your morning with the Monk’s mantra - “Today is my Peaceful day.” Imagine how your day will unfold so that as you climb into bed, you can say, “yes it was!”
Write a mantra that inspires you or reminds you to live your life fully and post on your bathroom mirror
Take inspiration from the Preyer Foundation and “pay it forward” - an act of kindness toward a stranger, volunteering in your community, or donating to a charity that aligns with your values.
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