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My Life on the Road

Page 26

by Gloria Steinem


  Dancers spiraled around the huge bonfire, the innermost circle barely moving and the outermost one increasing in speed like a whip until only the young and strong could keep up. Charlie invited me to join with him, and it was daunting, like trying to get on a moving train. Once inside, I realized that the dancers were not so much stomping as caressing the earth with each sliding step. So many together made a deep whooshing sound. We formed a curved line, like a huge living nautilus shell, with women elders at its heart around the fire. I knew from Wilma that their heavy leggings were sewn with small tortoise shells, and each shell was filled with tiny pebbles, so as their feet and rattling shells hit the ground, there was a sound I’d never heard before, yet it was right and familiar. Women elders were keeping the rhythm of life.

  I knew that Wilma should be dancing with these women elders at the center near the fire. But could she?

  I sat with her at the outer edge of the firelight as she prepared for a ritual that has survived centuries of land loss, warfare, lethal epidemics, outlawed languages and spiritual practices, and other attempts to take away home, culture, pride, family, and life itself. I watched as Wilma wrapped thick strips of cloth from knee to ankle, covering the steel brace that she could not walk without, adding the weight of tortoise shells and stones by her own choice. She moved out of the dark, past the dancers at the speeding end of the spiral, into the inner circle of women moving around the fire.

  And then she danced.

  —

  IT’S A FEW YEARS LATER, and I know that Wilma still has health problems. Lately, she has had a series of tests for fatigue and back pains. But I assume she will overcome these obstacles because she always has. I have been with her through dialysis because of kidney disease inherited from her father, a kidney transplant, cancer brought on by immune suppressants to maintain the transplant, chemotherapy and a second transplant, then a second bout with cancer.

  For a long time, we’ve wanted to write a book together. Now we’ve made plans to set aside the month of May 2010 to spread out our notes and research on her kitchen table and start writing about traditional practices in original cultures that modern ones could learn from. She has even less time for writing than I do, so we’re excited about it. Also, if we have one more start-up left in us, it will be a school for organizers. Wilma can pass on her gift for creating independence; I can explain why stories and listening are part of change that comes from the bottom up. Organizers from this and other countries can come to teach and brainstorm solutions to one another’s problems.

  In March I’m at a conference at my own college, where I always imagine my former self on campus, a little scared and out of place. Yet now I’m about to be seventy-six and planning to live to a hundred. I’m doing work I love, with friends I love. What could be better than that?

  Then I get an unusual message from Wilma: Can I come now instead of waiting for May?

  I know what this means. I cancel conference and birthday plans. On the phone with Charlie, I learn that Wilma has been diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It is one of the least curable and most painful forms.

  Two plane flights and a long drive later, I arrive at Wilma and Charlie’s house on Mankiller Flats. Her caregiving team is assembling. Besides Charlie, there are Gina and Felicia, her two daughters, who come and go from their nearby homes; Dr. Gloria Grim, a young physician who heads the Cherokee Rural Health Clinics that Wilma started; also two of Wilma’s longtime women friends, one a nurse. They have had a lifetime pact to come and stay whenever one of Wilma’s many health crises seems likely to be her last.

  Wilma herself is lying in a hospital bed next to the big four-poster she shares with Charlie, so they will still be in the same room. She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body. She can tell I haven’t accepted any of this yet. As if to comfort me, she says most Americans want to die at home, but many spend their last weeks in a hospital without friends and family. I ask her if she’s now organizing a campaign for the right to die at home. This makes her laugh, and I buy some time.

  All I can think of is her description of her near-death experience after the head-on car crash years earlier. She told me it felt as if she were flying through space, faster than any living thing could fly, feeling warm and loved in every pore of her being, as if she were one with the universe, then realizing: This is the purpose of life! Only the thought of her two young daughters made her turn back.

  I’ve always remembered that and hoped other people I love would share this last feeling. One day I hope I will, too. But I can’t think about such a moment for Wilma now. I can’t wish it for her, because then she will be gone. She shows me a statement she is making about her illness, explaining that she is “mentally and spiritually prepared for the journey.” She’s definitely more ready than I am.

  That night I’m bolted awake by hearing Wilma cry out in pain. I find Charlie warming blankets on a potbellied stove. As a traditional healer, he not only knows the uses of herbs but has an instinct for the untried. He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain. This terrifying sequence is repeated several times.

  The next day I ask the young Dr. Grim, who could not be more different from her name, what can be done about the pain. She says Wilma knows that morphine and other opiates would help, but taking enough to cut the pain would also dull her consciousness. She wants to be fully present for as long as she can.

  In the next few days, relatives, friends, and colleagues come from miles around to pay their respects. They sit near her, reminisce about the past, argue politics for the future, and bring pies, cakes, and casseroles for ever-increasing numbers of visitors. Children bring flowers, or sing a song from church or school, or just watch television. Some stare at Wilma and their parents in a way that says they will never forget. As some of the older visitors leave, they say, “I’ll see you on the other side of the mountain.”

  I’ve never seen such honesty about dying.

  People closest to the family do the small and continuous tasks: laundry, bringing in firewood, feeding Wilma’s indoor dog and outdoor cats. Soon, they include our mutual friends of many years, Kristina Kiehl and Bob Friedman, who fly in from San Francisco. Kristina invents a way of washing Wilma’s hair in bed since she can no longer stand in the shower. Bob takes over the continual task of washing dishes for the many people who gather in the big kitchen, talking softly.

  At night Wilma calls out in pain. Then it begins during the day, too. I can’t bear it. I go into full research mode and phone every physician I know. I learn that there are several kinds of drastic nerve blocks that could diminish her pain and leave her mind clear. But such procedures can be done only in a hospital.

  Wilma’s caregiving team has a conference with Dr. Grim, who says a local ambulance could take her to and from the hospital—more than two hours or so each way. We talk to Wilma. She thinks about it. The ambulance comes and parks in the yard just in case. She decides she might die in transit, or become too hooked to tubes to leave the hospital, and she wants to be at home in Indian Country. She thanks us for giving her a choice. To me, she says with some of her old humor, “You’re an organizer to the end.”

  It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts. From that moment on, I accept Wilma’s wisdom.

  Seeing that I need a task, Wilma’s daughters assign me the duty of making sure each visitor’s contribution is recorded on a list in the kitchen. I write names down next to rhubarb and peach pies, vats of sweet iced tea, and trays of cornbread. A high school student carries in crates of bottled water, and a silent man in overalls mows the lawn just because it needs it. Wilma’s family wants to be able to thank each person, hence the list. Once again the individual honors the community, and vice versa. I finally understand why Winterhawk, Charlie’s son by an earlier marriage, turned down a s
cholarship to Dartmouth and stayed here instead. It was not just land that brought Wilma home; it was also community.

  At the long kitchen table, knowing Wilma creates a bond among us, and strangers talk. The husband of her dear friend who died in the car crash has been here for days, and explains that Wilma helped to raise their daughter. Gail Small, Wilma’s friend and one of the activists she admires and profiled in her book Every Day Is a Good Day, has come all the way from the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana. There, Gail has waged a lifetime battle to keep extractive and exploitive energy companies from destroying the land, and to keep religious schools from abusing the next generation. As she says, “Children were sexually molested by priests and nuns, then came home to spread the cancer themselves.” She started not only an environmental group called Native Action, but also a high school on the reservation.

  Oren Lyons has come from his home in upstate New York, the headquarters of the governing body of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee. It is the oldest continuous democracy in the world.20 Whenever Wilma or I used to ask him something serious, he always answered, “I have to consult with my women elders first.” In fact, it was the equality of women in those nations that inspired white women neighbors to begin organizing the suffrage movement.

  Wilma’s own mother is there every morning, having walked from her house just down a dirt road. She tells me that Wilma took her to Ireland to see her own hereditary land for the first time. We both know that she will outlive her daughter.

  I’ve promised to bring Wilma conversations from her kitchen table, since she is unable to have them herself. Over the two weeks I’ve been here, this house has become like a ship at sea for me; nothing else exists. I tell her that, thanks to her, I’ve come to understand the power of community. There is silence. I fear her good hours are gone. Then she smiles and says, “You’ll never be the same.”

  Later, a medical attendant arrives, and I know she has decided to accept morphine. Since this is real life, not a novel, there is no sharp line, no definitive good-bye. Wilma just seems to pull away from us, like an ocean tide receding from all of us left standing on the beach.

  The moment after is utterly different from the moment before. Now I understand why people believe the soul departs with the last breath. Everything looks the same, yet everything is different. We stand in the room around Wilma’s bed. She is no longer there.

  Respectful attendants come with a stretcher on wheels, open the French doors, and move her slowly across the porch where she loved to sit, and onto her beloved land one last time.

  Later, her ashes will be returned to the banks of the spring where Charlie’s medicinal herbs grow. This is where she wanted to be.

  —

  IT’S THE BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY MORNING of April 10, 2010, and we are sitting outdoors at the Cherokee Cultural Grounds. Though it’s only four days after Wilma’s death, 150 tribal, state, and national leaders, including President Clinton and President Obama, have sent messages, and about fifteen hundred people have gathered to hear friends and family share personal memories. It’s the best kind of memorial because each of us will leave knowing Wilma a little better than we did when we arrived.

  Among her last requests was that everyone wear or carry something in her improbable favorite color: bright pink. A symbolic drink made of strawberries is served. Strawberries are called ani in Cherokee and are supposed to help her make her way through the sky to the ancestors.

  For me, this is the beginning of years of picking up the phone—and realizing I can’t talk to her; of thinking about our book—and knowing we can’t write it together; of hearing something that would make her laugh—yet I can’t tell her.

  My friend Robin Morgan, author of a lovingly researched novel about pagan times,21 has called to tell me that Wilma is being honored in many countries around the world as a Great One. Pagan and Native cultures share many beliefs, and one is that lighting signal fires at high points in the landscape will light the path of a Great One home. As Wilma’s friends put it, she is finally going to the other side of the mountain.

  At the end of my own tribute to Wilma, I tell the people gathered here in rural Oklahoma that in no fewer than twenty-three countries, signal fires have been lighted for Wilma, and are now lighting her way home.

  Back at Wilma and Charlie’s house, Charlie carries out her last request, one she was and wasn’t laughing when she made. She asked him to take the metal leg brace that she had had to wear all the years after the car crash, place it in a field, and blast it with a shotgun. He does just that.

  —

  IT IS NOW FIVE YEARS AFTER Wilma’s death, and I’m more than ever learning from and about original cultures—on my own continent, in India, and in countries of Africa, where we all came from. Our current plight is not made inevitable by human nature. What once was could be again—in a new way.

  I once asked Wilma if one day my ashes could be with hers, and she said yes. In the future they will be. Even though my ancestors were forced to escape their homes and come here, I feel I’ve found my land.

  If I could say one thing to Wilma, it would be this:

  We’re still here.

  Coming Home

  As I write this, I’m fifteen years older than my father was when he died.

  Only after fifty did I begin to admit that I was suffering from my own form of imbalance. Though I felt sorry for myself for not having a home, I was always rescued by defiance and a love of freedom. Like my father for instance, I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t earning enough money as a freelancer to file income tax returns, something I had to spend months with an accountant to make up for. Like him, I’d saved no money, so there was a good reason for my fantasy of ending up as a bag lady. I handled it just by saying to myself, I’ll organize the other bag ladies.

  Finally, I had to admit that I too was leading an out-of-balance life, even if it was different in degree from my father’s. I needed to make a home for myself; otherwise it would do me in, too. Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.

  Gradually, the rooms that I had used mostly as an office and a closet were filled with things that gave me pleasure when I opened the door. I had a kitchen that worked, a real desk to spread papers on, and a welcoming room where visiting friends could stay, something I’d always wanted as a child when I was living with my mother in places too sad to invite anyone. Though it was a little late after fifty, I even began to save money.

  After months of nesting—and shopping for such things as sheets and candles with a pleasure that bordered on orgasmic—an odd thing happened: I found myself enjoying travel even more. Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of Everybody has a home but me. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.

  Long before all these divisions opened between home and the road, between a woman’s place and a man’s world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, our animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory.

  Living things have evolved as travelers. Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight. On journeys as long as twelve thousand miles, birds tuck their beaks under wings and rest on anything from ice floes to the decks of ships at sea. Then, once they arrive at their destination, they build a nest and select each twig with care.

  I wish the road had spared my father long enough to show him the possibilities of and instead of either/or. If he’d been around when I finally created a home, I might have had something to teach him, as well as time to thank him for the lessons he taught me.

  I wish my mother hadn’t lived an even more polarized life of either/or. Like so many women before her—and so many even now—she never had a journey of h
er own. With all my heart, I wish she could have followed a path she loved.

  I pause for a moment as I write these words. My hand, long-fingered like my father’s, rests on my desk where I do work I love, in rooms that were my first home—and probably will be my last. I’m surrounded by images of friends and chosen objects that knew someone’s touch before mine—and will know others after I am gone. I notice that my middle finger lifts and falls involuntarily, exactly as my father’s did. I recognize in myself, as I did in him, a tap of restlessness. It’s time to leave—there is so much out there to do and say and listen to.

  I can go on the road—because I can come home. I come home—because I’m free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

  My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home.

  Neither do I. Neither do you.

  COURTESY OF ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

  AT HOME IN NEW YORK CITY, 2010.

  Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.

  Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

  Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:

 

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