Lindsay Luise Abromaitis-Smith
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Published in November 2025
Lindsay Luise Abromaitis-Smith, Advocate and Artist of Ritual, Beauty, and Fierce Love, XXXX
Lindsay Luise Abromaitis-Smith – artist, puppeteer, herbalist, writer, lover, and pleasure activist – died on November 1, 2025, at her home in Quakertown, New Jersey. She was forty-four. She lived with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) for 13 years and ultimately chose to end her life on her terms through Compassionate Endings- New Jersey’s Medical Aid in Dying. True to her spirit, Lindsay met her death with a roaring celebration – a costume-clad festival of love, ritual, and release that she designed herself.
In the months before her death, she wrote to her friends and family to invite them to what she called her “epic goodbye party,” a weekend of “feasting and much riotous revelry” to be held over Samhain and Halloween. “There are going to be some truly phenomenal performances and dancing,” she promised, urging her loved ones to bring costumes, children, dogs, and joy. “What kind of Lindsay party would it be without howling into the universe?”
It was a fitting farewell for a woman whose life was a continual act of creative transformation — a blending of art, spirit, body, and myth.
Born in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1981 – and sprung forth from the mountains – Lindsay grew up in Maryland, where she began dancing and performing as a child, studying the Graham technique with Primary Movers and throwing herself into theater. She attended Rolling Terrace Elementary in Takoma Park and St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Bethesda for Middle and High School. Her early roles — Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — revealed a performer already drawn to mischief, magic, and the liminal spaces between worlds.
She discovered puppetry while studying storytelling at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, where she fell in love with what she called “the breath of the puppet.” A summer in Paris, studying under Alain Recoing at Le Théâtre aux Mains Nues, sealed her devotion. “That summer changed my life,” she later wrote. “I knew I would always be in service to the life of the puppets — giving them breath through my hands and the stories they were telling.”
In New York City, Lindsay became a fixture of the downtown performance world, collaborating with Basil Twist, Mabou Mines, Lee Breuer, and countless others. Her own works — including Epyllion, Mental Hygiene (What Makes Brains Dirty and How to Get Them Clean), and Bloom, She Is Descending — wove puppetry, dance, poetry, and ritual into acts of ecstatic inquiry.
She was a recipient of a Jim Henson Foundation project grant for her original work, which explored the intersection of myth, movement, and the sacred. Her performances were featured at renowned venues including St. Ann’s Warehouse, La MaMa, Dixon Place and HERE Arts Center, where she was an artist in residence, known for creating visually stunning, emotionally resonant pieces that blended poetry, ritual, and puppetry into immersive storytelling. She also became certified as a Massage Therapist through the Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences. Those lucky enough to experience a Lindsay massage know that she viewed massage as both a form of healing and a way to touch the deeper stories we have locked away in our bodies.
On the night before her ALS diagnosis, she dreamed of “a goddess made entirely of flowers and plants who told me I had to learn how to physically manifest differently.” That dream became her life’s art and mission — a blooming through constraint, an exploration of embodiment as both surrender and rebellion.
When ALS eventually stilled her hands Lindsay began painting and drawing with her feet, creating luminous, tender works that were later exhibited by ArtLifting and celebrated by UNIMA-USA. “Being differently abled,” she wrote, “can be pleasureful and powerful while also being an act of acceptance and surrender.”
She lived and worked at the Toshiko Takaezu Studio in Quakertown, New Jersey, surrounded by land, friends, and the rhythms of ritual. Her studio smelled of herbs and earth; her table was always set for tea. She made medicines, tinctures, and altars, and taught others to listen to plants, to ancestors, to silence. She believed in reciprocity with the earth and in honoring what she called “the ancient ones, the elements, the plants, and the fae.”
Lindsay’s mother, Karin, with whom she shared a bond of deep devotion, was her constant companion and intrepid caregiver through the long arc of illness and creativity. Around them gathered a chosen family — artists, healers, poets, and friends who adored her. She was a magical presence, equal parts mischief and tenderness, known for her piercing honesty, sense of justice, and radiant infectious laugh.
She released her first book of poetry and prose, After the Bloom, in 2025.
She was a member of the Hunterdon County Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Her sermon can be found by clicking HERE.
At the end of her life, Lindsay orchestrated a living ritual of beauty and defiance. “I will be everywhere and anywhere,” she told her friends. “Once my soul is free.”
Mother of two small and fierce tigers, Chicken and Litha Lu were her feline soulmates.
She is survived by her mother, Karin, father, Dexter, step-mom, Lisie, half sister, Shay, and her beloved community of family, friends, and the many lives she changed through her art, herbal medicine, and unflinching joy.
“The nature of this flower is to bloom,” wrote Alice Walker, a line Lindsay often quoted. “Rebellious. Living. Against the elemental crush.” Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith, ever the embodiment of a Revolutionary Petunia, most certainly did. Gloriously. Fearlessly.
Spirit Signature: “If you find a piece of glitter somewhere strange on your body and it doesn’t want to be removed, that is me kissing you.” -Lindsay
A natural graveside life celebration ceremony will take place at 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 2, 2025, at Moravian High Acres Cemetery, Pennsylvania 447 & Dutch Hill Road, Canadensis, PA, under the care and direction of Wright & Ford Family Funeral Home and Cremation services, 38 States Highway 31, Flemington, NJ.
All are welcome and there is a very important request from Lindsay to everyone attending: “I would like to encircle my grave with special rocks from you. So please please please bring a rock or two you find beauty and good energy in with you that we can gather around me and I will feel your love and where you are in the world!”
Should you arrive at the cemetery early, please do NOT enter the cemetery but rather wait outside until the main funeral procession arrives. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.
You are encouraged to visit Lindsay’s permanent life celebration site at www.wrightfamily.com to leave messages of condolence, share words of comfort and recollection, and post photographs of her life.
Memorial contributions in her honor and memory may be made to the following organization that has helped Lindsay and all those she loved during her journey:
Compassionate Care ALS (CCALS) via Chris Curtin or Brenda Fox