My Life on the Road (28 page)
Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
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.
I
T’S THE BEAUTIFUL
S
ATURDAY 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,
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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.
I
T 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.
A
s 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 her 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
A
T HOME IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY, 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:
I’ve done the best I could with my life.
This book is for you.