This has been a potent year of remembrance – the 10-year anniversary of Marcy’s death last spring and a decade since the 500-person daylong event we called Death OK: Let’s Talk About It.
We honored Marcy as we do at least once a year, by having a picnic up at her gravesite. I wrote about that tradition, and the other community-building underwritten by how Marcy died, in a blog post for Natural Transitions Institute. (NTI is the new home for the Celebrancy training program that changed the course of my life in 2010, around the same time Marcy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.)
In Marcy’s Community Deathcare Legacy: The Benefits of Being Burdened I recounted how Marcy – community organizer to her core – had wanted others to learn from her approach to her mortality.
“Death is not my friend but it is no longer my enemy. It is our collective reality and I may get to model walking into it first. I hope that the way I walk there, protected and emboldened by a cape made up of your love, will better prepare you for your own journeys.” ~ Marcy Westerling
As I noted when we gathered at her grave this spring, I have since told her story to thousands of people. And I brought her along this fall, when I returned to the campus where we’d held Death:OK, ten years to the day from that epic event.
I had considered organizing a commemoration of Death:OK to reflect on the 10-year anniversary but decided that the work of this moment required all of my attention. As it turned out, that freed me up to say yes to an invitation to create a space for grief and remembrance at a conference of several hundred social justice activists.
With a colleague I built a Grief & Remembrance Altar and hosted a Grief & Remembrance Café. Throughout the three-day event, participants spent quiet time solo or in community reflecting on what they were grieving, who they were remembering, and what was giving rise to gratitude.
In the center of the Altar was a drawing of Marcy, joyful on her bike.
“I have kept Marcy close. She’s with me every time I arise for another day of this sacred work. Knowing that when we walk with others toward death, when we show up for grief and practice remembrance, it asks a lot of us. And it gives us so much more.”