Marcy’s Community Deathcare Legacy: The Benefits of Being Burdened

On the one-year cancerversary of her Stage 4 diagnosis, Marcy wrote to her closest friends, “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.”

She had no idea how many people she would help befriend their own mortality.

Marcy chronicled her five years with incurable ovarian cancer in a blog she called “Livingly Dying.” She rode her bike to chemo treatments with a “cancer on board” flag streaming behind her, wore an elegant “Fuck Cancer” tattoo on her wrist, and recruited patients from waiting rooms to join her for tea. Her stubborn insistence that the world see her affected everyone who crossed her path.

Perhaps even more affecting was the way she gave everyone a job to do. A nationally renowned community organizer, she had an instinct for the function that community-based deathcare and bereavement has played throughout time. It strengthens community. It builds a shared culture of connection, meaning, and care.

In Marcy’s letter to her chosen “sisterhood,” she conveyed her vision for how we would come together at the time of her death. “I would like you to be the team that deals with my body when I die,” she wrote. “I would prefer not to be left alone. I would also prefer that you be the ones to prepare my body for burial, not strangers. You'll know if you are up for that or if you should take on other burial tasks – trust your instincts and know how much I support your decisions. Wash me, dress me for comfort. Tuck in a few favorite items. Laugh, cry, and remember.”

She also noted, “Luckily, Holly will be an expert in local green burial options by then.”

I had enrolled in training to become a Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant the year Marcy was diagnosed. An interest in natural burial was one of the stepping stones that led me on that path. So was the fact that my first big initiation into deathcare – my father’s death nine years earlier – had occurred without a funeral or memorial of any kind.

The path onward from my certification opened up in unanticipated directions. I enrolled in professional training as a Home Funeral Guide and later as a Death Doula, and traveled for 10 years to Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School. I organized one of the largest Death Cafés in that worldwide conversation movement for eight years and led a three-year run of monthly death-related movie nights. I partnered with a rural conservation burial ground and an historic urban cemetery to offer annual educational seminars. I produced a 500-person 10-hour day of programming called “DeathOK: Let’s Talk About It.” This led to the co-creation of two public information websites that democratize access to state-specific information on funeral rights and rites.

During that time, I’ve officiated hundreds of funerals. I’ve partnered with families and community organizations to find a path forward after traumatic death. I’ve offered individual support to people preparing for death. And I’ve delivered countless community educational presentations including my signature six-part “Befriending Mortality” class series.

Every one of my clients, every conversational engagement, teaches me something. But perhaps no one has taught me more than Marcy.

As grief veteran Megan Devine puts it, “Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” Which invites the question, How can we carry, together, what’s too heavy to bear alone?

Marcy never once said, “I don’t want to be a burden.” Instead she said, “I know I am asking a lot. But I believe that this process may also give back. I hope so.”

On the ten-year anniversary of Marcy’s death earlier this summer, her sisterhood gathered once again, alongside her husband and the young adults who’d been children during Marcy’s illness. We spread picnic blankets around her gravesite and revisited the words she’d charged us with when she’d envisioned her burial plot.

“Visit often. Make it a place where you problem-solve dilemmas, process new adventures, keen and celebrate the many transitions in your own life. Come alone. Bring others. Young people, scared people, irreverent people. Keep me as present as you can. I truly believe that I will feel and treasure this.”

I’ve told Marcy’s story to thousands of people. How she asked her sister to create her burial shroud and her brother to craft her lowering board from a tree on his property. How we had to stop the cemetery from placing a lowering device into her grave so we could lower her by hand. How the nondescript white cemetery van was festooned with colorful ribbons thanks to the kids. How we’d listened when she said she didn’t want her life summed up in a 45 minute memorial service, and instead celebrated and mourned her with 15 eulogists, a sit-down dinner, and a dance party.

Parker Palmer wisely observed, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, exactly as it is.” 

I’m tremendously indebted to the professional certification and education programs that exposed me to knowledge I hadn’t been privy to, growing up. Information and skills are important in a culture that’s largely death- and grief-illiterate. But I’ve found in my nearly 15 years as a Life-Cycle Celebrant and community death educator that mostly what’s needed is for us to witness each other in our pain and grief and beauty, to help each other be more fully human in times that shut us down.

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.

by Holly J. Pruett

Holly J. Pruett is a Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant (class of 2011), Community Death Educator, Home Funeral Guide, and Death Doula who co-created the non-commercial public information website Oregon Funeral Resources & Education. She holds two Proficiency Badges from the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance and certification in Thanatology from the Association for Death Education & Counseling. 

Photo: Friends of Marcy gather regularly at her gravesite which features an illustration commissioned by Yes Magazine for her 2014 article, “What I Learned About Living From Dying of Cancer.”

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