Today when I woke up, Facebook reminded me that it's my step-brother Joseph's birthday. It also reminded me that my friend Donna Parson is dead. Of course, that's not what the Facebook notification said. It told me only that it's Donna's birthday. Donna died last December from complications following heart surgery. 

The year before, she had accompanied me and other members of the Karuna Foundation board of directors to Bhutan. Traveling there had been on her bucket list, but aside from scratching that itch, her presence on the trip added depth to our understanding and warmth to our group dynamics.

While I'd only known Donna a bit more than a year before she died, she deeply influenced many of those who've had a deep influence on me. I miss her. I miss the opportunity to get to know her better, to learn from her, laugh with her, read her novel about her Estonian ancestors.

I appreciated Facebook for stirring the longings that connect me to Donna's life - but I also cringed. Would there be posts on her page from people oblivious to the fact that Donna could no longer read their birthday greetings? Facebook has been much in the news for the modern dilemmas of on-line memorialization.

I clicked over to her page and found perhaps a few of those, but mainly lovely messages of remembrance. People visiting her page much as once we visited a gravesite.

Donna's daughter Joanna offered a lively list of ways to celebrate Donna today. May we all be remembered so well.

When I went to the grief altar, I thought I was ready. But there was one aspect of what happened there for which I was entirely unprepared.

A grief altar - this in and of itself was a foreign concept - literally. A tradition of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa, brought to the grief-illiterate West by Sobunfu Some. Sobonfu's name means "keeper of the rituals". For the past twenty years she has shared the spiritual wisdom of her people with the West, through writings and rituals such as the one I attended at Breitenbush Hot Springs earlier this month.

Sixty of us gathered in the main lodge after dinner on Friday. In one large circle, in a space skillfully held by Sobonfu and her helpers, we began to voice something of the griefs that had brought us there. Suicide, war, life-changing tragedies, terminal illness, addiction, betrayal, abandonment. So many ways we'd been hurt, hurt others; so much pain and sorrow; such longing for reconciliation, redemption, relief. The first breaking of the silence.

The next morning after she shared her framework of beliefs around the types and stages of grief, we met in small groups to share a bit more of our stories. Sobunfu was clear: this was less about what we needed to learn about each other, and more about our grief finding its voice.

Then we rolled up the rugs, cleared the room, and worked in teams to prepare the altars. The forgiveness altar, draped in greens and blues on one side of the room, and the red- and yellow-swathed ancestors' altar on the other held items we'd brought from home, along with color coordinated flowers and candles. The grief altar at the base of the room was constructed out of fresh fir boughs: a three-sided teepee open to the front, a row of white candles standing sentinel across the opening; inside, a vase of white flowers, a white candle, a square of black cloth on the ground.

Sobunfu had instructed us in how to prepare a bundle containing objects that represented each of our griefs, along with something that could stand in for the unexpected griefs that might arise. With each object, we were to speak out loud, with great specificity, the dimensions of that particular grief. She had modeled several examples. "The grief of a friend dying from cancer?" I asked. She spun out a dozen sentences, all precisely accurate articulations of the inchoate pain I've been carrying for the five years since Marcy's diagnosis. After finding these words we were to wrap the objects in a cloth tied with string.

With our bundles prepared, we would enter the heart of the ritual. Sobonfu and her helpers maintained a drum line at the back of the room. For the next nearly 24 hours each of us, as we were moved, would go to the forgiveness altar, the ancestors' altar, or the grief altar. If not at one of the altars, we were supporting those at the grief altar through sitting behind another (each griever had one or more "followers" whose role was to witness but not sooth or stop the flow of grief) or by joining the drummers in a continuously sung song that vocalized the promise of carrying each other.

Sobonfu had warned that the ritual would begin as soon as we registered for it. Indeed, by the time we walked single-file down the center of the room to toss our bundle onto the black cloth in the center of the grief altar, I felt ready. Ancestral grief, grief I absorbed in my mothers womb, grief I'd carried more than 50 years along with the grief of losing my father again and again, the grief of my own actions I've lived to regret, the grief of others in my community or whom I've served - it was ready. 

Yet as I lowered myself to a cushion in front of the grief altar, a "follower" behind me ready to offer support, I was entirely unprepared for what was happening around me. Other mourners had begun to wail, to shriek, to scream and curse. It came to me as one of the unexpected griefs Sobonfu had predicted: the grief that in my life, in my family, grief has always been so silent. So. Silent.

In that space in that lodge before the grief altar I was pierced by the memory of the two times I'd heard the sound of grief growing up, two times my mother issued the unedited primal scream of a wounded animal. The first time, she was alone in our basement. The second time, in bed with us, her grade-school daughters, on the night my father finally left for good.

Those moments broke the intergenerational family code. I feel, even now, writing about it, a quickened pulse, a freezing in my chest. Don't feel. We don't know what to do with these feelings. Stay quiet. Don't make trouble.

I went to the grief altar again and again over that weekend. I sobbed, I spoke a few words aloud that needed to be said. I experienced the grace of being held, having my hair stroked, having another literally have my back, getting everything I needed from this ephemeral village of support as I named and felt and released these griefs. And I experienced the grace of witnessing and supporting others in their grief - loud, messy, frightening grief - without having to fix it. 

I spent a lot of time at the forgiveness altar, too. I'm still trying to make friends with the child pictured here, the one who was trying to give voice to the grief all around her without a village that knew how to listen. 

This week, while my friend Marcy Westerling lay in a California hospital recovering from her latest foray to the far frontiers of medical research, I received a package in the mail containing two signed copies of a book that features Marcy's Yes Magazine essay on Livingly Dying. 

At Marcy's request I too submitted an essay for the anthology, I Am With You, Love Letters to Cancer Patients. Reading my piece now, on advocating for a friend, I think it contains plenty of good advice which I hope will empower others to step up. 

But it also reminds me of how much doing helps me cope with the anxiety, confusion, and grief of having a dear friend receive her death sentence. Being with that reality, being a friend first and foremost, is often much harder than executing a list of practical tasks. 

As a coda to the essay I was asked for a short list of "what gets me through the angst of cancer." I wrote:

1. Being active: doing what I can to ease the suffering of those living with cancer.
2. Remembering well: honoring the memory and legacy of those who’ve died, keeping them alive in the world through valuing all that their life and death nourished.
3. Getting ready: learning everything I can about living with and dying of cancer, and how to grieve the sickness and death of loved ones, to become more skillful at living with a heart broken open by it all.

Becoming more skillful at living with a heart broken open by it all - that is a work in progress.