Journeys

Over the last few weeks, I have been immersed in the works of the late, great Wilma Mankiller, who in 1985 became the first woman to lead the Cherokee Nation as principal chief.

I had spent my law school years working on tribal law issues out in Oregon, and although I was no longer in that field when she took the oath of office, I remember the pride and elation I felt at the time.

Wilma died on April 6 of this year. I was sad when I read her obituary. Now that I have spent my days reading her words, I feel the loss profoundly.

I have been thinking (a lot) and writing (a little) about change - spiritual, personal. Life change. Wilma Mankiller is part of the path I find myself on at present. She has been pointing out landmarks as I walk.

In 1979, Wilma was in a head-collision that almost killed her. In her autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, she wrote at length about being so near death, about coming to terms with dying, and about coming to terms with living. Then she wrote:

From that point on, I have always thought of myself as the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.

Those words grabbed me. I have used similar words to talk about myself before and after my diagnosis of multiple myeloma. I did not come as near to death literally as Wilma Mankiller did. She was dying immediately; I was dying slowly. The impact was the same, however. My illness forced me to hold death close, touch death, take death into my life. It changed me forever.

To read someone else's acknowledgment of this is very powerful.

Wilma wrote that the near-fatal collision, an accident in which the other driver - a close friend of hers - died, and her long, painful recovery caused her to reevaluate her life. She wrote:

During the long healing process, I fell back on my Cherokee ways and adopted what our elders call "a Cherokee approach" to life. That mean one has to think positively, to take what is handed out and turn it into a better path.

Again, her words held me. I am not Cherokee and, despite stories of Native American blood in one branch of the family tree, I have never seen any indication of it beyond that family story. All the same, I appreciate and hold onto the spirit of what Wilma wrote.

It feels right because it is what I also concluded in the course of my long treatment and healing.

As principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller relied on her convictions that self-help and self-determination would strengthen the tribe and lift it out of poverty. Water, housing, education, and medical care were all top priorities of her administration and her lifework. It was the Cherokee approach Wilma wrote about: take what is handed out and turn it into a better path. Because of her passion and her work, she left the Cherokee people better and stronger. She went on to reach beyond the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, advocating tolerance, acceptance, self-determination, justice, and unity in the community, this country, and the world. When she died, tributes from around the world flooded the family.

Over her lifetime, Wilma had repeated brushes with death: the car accident, a chronic kidney disorder that resulted in two separate kidney transplants, lymphoma, breast cancer. In late March, 2010, she and her family announced that she had stage IV pancreatic cancer. She said:

I want my family and friends to know that I am mentally and spiritually prepared for this journey; a journey that all human beings will take at one time or another. I learned a long time ago that I can't control the challenges the Creator sends my way but I can control the way I think about them and deal with them.

Wilma Mankiller died a month later.

I have watched portions of Wilma's memorial service online. There are repeated references to her journey into the lands beyond. Clearly she took the lessons she learned in 1979 to heart and brought them forward to the end of her life, sharing them with her family, her friends, and her people.

During the service, her husband Charlie Soap shared a conversation in which Wilma asked him, towards the end, whether he heard horses, saying that she heard them all the time outside the house. Charlie replied that surely the Indian warriors were gathering to escort her on her final journey to the other side of the mountain.

I cried when he related that story. I love the image of the warriors assembling to escort a great chief home.

When my journey comes, I hope I travel to the lands beyond with the same strength and grace that Wilma showed. I don't expect a warrior escort. But I would be thrilled to find Wilma on the other side of the mountain, smiling her trademark smile, wearing her Cherokee tear dress, and saying Tsilugi (welcome).

Wilma Mankiller, November 1945 - April 2010. Photograph by Charlie Soap.

Grateful to the Dead

We just finished a 4600+ mile trip out to Helena, Montana, to see Ben and Alise get married. I will be writing about the wedding as well as the trip. Really.

It was a wonderful wedding. It was a great trip. I really will write about what we saw and experienced. But my first post-trip blog is about the dead. More specifically, it is about the dead I carried home with me on this trip.

The return portion of our trip was a chance for me and Warren to explore, as we are often wont to do. We had some Big stops on the way home: Little Bighorn, Devils Tower, Mount Rushmore. We also had a number of Little stops on the way home, including the Blue Bunny ice cream parlor in Le Mars, Iowa, and the Dvorak rooms in Spillville, Iowa.

It was a lot of fun sharing that part of the country (which I knew somewhat) with Warren, who had never been there. It was a wonderful opportunity for Warren and me to talk, explore, and connect.

The dead, though, were always with me on the return trip. Maybe it was the talk that Father Joe (literally and figuratively: he is both Alise's father and an ordained Episcopalian priest who performed the service) gave in which he referred to the ancestors on "the other side of the veil." Maybe it was the Shehecheyanu, the Jewish prayer for celebrating special occasions. The prayer thanks God, "who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion." It kept chasing through my head as I watched Ben and Alise say their vows - five years earlier that day, I was about to undergo a second stem cell transplant. At the time, I didn't know if I would live long enough to see my older son graduate from college. And now I was sitting at his wedding, my hand in Warren's as we watched the joy light on our children's faces.

Whatever it was, I felt the dead - some nameless, some known - with me for the duration of the return trip.

One of our stops was Clear Lake, Iowa. Clear Lake is a small town in northeastern Iowa that gained posterity on February 3, 1959, when a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and Ritchie Valens, crashed into a cornfield shortly after takeoff. The crash site, located in a farm field about a half mile off a gravel road, contains a memorial marker to the musicians, and may be visited, provided you stay on the mowed access strip and do not harm the field crops.

The field crop this year is corn, which in this part of Iowa this year is growing particular thick and tall. Even though Warren and I were there in the early morning, the sun was already hot and the air was heavy and hot as well.

We walked slowly back towards the site. The corn formed a deep channel on either side of the strip of grass. You could smell the fields baking beneath the sun and hear the corn rustling. About halfway down the access strip, I commented to Warren that these were perfect "Field of Dreams" cornfields and I expected to see Shoeless Joe Jackson emerge any moment.

Warren quickly commented, "well, if Buddy Holly walks out, I'm out of here."

Buddy Holly didn't walk out. But by the time we reached the memorial marker, it was clear many, many people had walked in. The ground around the small marker was covered with offerings - coins, glasses, CDs, music, jewelry, pictures. Some articles of clothing were tied to a nearby stake, much like Indian prayer bundles. There was a second marker for the pilot of the plane, at which there were more coins, these all neatly stacked on the crossbar of the marker.

Fifty years after the crash, people still make pilgrimages and leave tokens to show they were there and that the musicians are not forgotten.

The day before we had been in De Smet, South Dakota. De Smet became immortal as the Little Town on the Prairie after Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about her youth on the great South Dakota plains. De Smet, even on a day when the thermometer was reaching 100 degrees, has a high density of small girls and frazzled mothers trekking from location to location.

One of the stops in De Smet, at which we found ourselves the only visitors, was the cemetery in which Ma, Pa, and all of Laura's sisters are buried, as well as a number of other townsfolk whose names and personalities appear in the books. In contrast to the crash site, the Ingalls plot is pin-neat. That surprised me. I thought that some of those mothers and daughters, making their trek to and through De Smet, might have left a flower, a drawing, or even a clothespin doll. But there was no sign of anything, and no indication that memorials of any type, even a rock placed on the headstone to show someone was there, were ever left.

The cemetery was quiet and empty, except for the two of us.

Two days before De Smet, we had gone to the battlefield at Little Bighorn. In the last decade, the National Park Service (and this country) finally recognized that Little Bighorn means different things to different people, especially those coming from the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes. Those tribes were the victors at that battle and there is now a memorial to the Indian warriors who fought and died that day. The memorial is an enclosed circle; visitors enter through openings in the wall. There is an additional opening in the wall that lines up with the memorial to the US Calvary soldiers who fell that same day. This is a spirit gate, placed there to welcome the spirits of the Calvary dead into the circle.

Little Bighorn is a haunting place.

Our ways of marking death are so varied. At the site of a long ago plane crash, people still walk a long fencerow to leave mementoes. In a windswept prairie town, the graves of those immortalized in the Little House series are painfully clean, almost as if Ma had her broom out on a daily basis. And in a remote battlefield where the battle began and ended 134 years ago in one bloody, desperate day, there is a gate for the spirits of all the soldiers - Indian and Army - to be at peace with one another.

As we walked down the corn row to the Buddy Holly crash site, a pair of yellow butterflies kept dancing in the air before us, almost leading us to it, as it were. It reminded me of the closing lines of I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a gem of a novel by Margaret Craven about which I have written briefly before. In the Indian village, all is still the night before the young vicar's burial. Only two residents are awake. One is Peter, the carver, who remembers that "in the old days," the soul of a man would return after death to the village in some other form:

Peter did not believe this literally. Yet it seemed likely to him that the soul of the young vicar would return to the village he had loved, as would his own, and surely it would be most inhospitable if no one was awake and waiting. Thus he dressed and sat on the top step of his house in the dark night, and hearing the rustle of some small night creature he, too, spoke softly, "It is only old Peter, the carver, who waits here, friend."

Those lines came to me as I watched the butterflies lead us to the crash site. They were nowhere in sight when we made our way back out to continue our trip.

Ellen's Garden

My mother-in-law Ellen died six years ago today, on my husband's fiftieth birthday. Later today Warren and I will stop at the cemetery where she and Arthur, who died exactly five weeks earlier, are buried and spend some time with them both. Maybe that is why she has been so much on my mind lately.

Maybe she is on my mind because yesterday we had the opportunity to spend time with one of Warren's nieces, in town for a soccer tournament, and at lunch Kaiti spoke about her grandmother. Kaiti was only eleven when Ellen died, but clearly she has a deep-rooted appreciation of her grandmother. She even told us a story that we had not heard before.

Maybe she is on my mind because, living in this house that she and Arthur built some 45-plus years ago, I am always mindful of her presence. The dessert glasses recently moved again after long months of quiet; I came downstairs one afternoon last week to find one at the edge of the shelf on which it sits.

Maybe she is on my mind because Ellen's chives are up.

Ellen was a prodigious gardener. She loved gardening - I have heard that repeatedly from her family and close friends. In her later years, she only grew flowers, but when Warren and his brother and sister were young, Ellen and Art planted large vegetable gardens.

The only remnants of those gardens, besides some black and white photos, are random stands of chives in the corner of the lot, where Warren's shed now stands. Last summer, I transplanted several clumps to the kitchen garden. I initially despaired of them "taking," but once the broccoli came down and the chives (along with everything else) got some sun, the results were stunning.

The chives wintered over and just recently I cut back the old growth. Warren commented yesterday, "maybe it's time to cut the chives back." I commented that I had just cut them back, then looked out the window. Where last week there had just been some stubs of chives, this week there were stands of them a foot or so tall.

Ellen would be so happy.

In the Jewish faith, the anniversary of one's death, from sunset to sunset, is a yahrzeit. Observant Jews light a yahrzeit candle, which burns 24 hours, on that day and it is day of remembrance and mourning.

I have also read about the yahrzeit being a day to celebrate, albeit quietly and respectfully, a life that was, a life - especially that of a parent - that touched your life and made a positive imprint upon it. Some families tell stories and share meaningful memories of the dead on that day.

Under Jewish law, today would not be Ellen's yahrzeit, because it is calculated on a Jewish calendar, not a standard calendar. But for someone like me, no longer of that faith but still deeply appreciative of its customs, yahrzeit is something I can transplant into my life, and April 11 is the day I know as Ellen's yahrzeit. And in listening to Kaiti and Warren talk about Ellen yesterday and in seeing her chives come back to life after the long winter, we are in our own small way honoring and observing the joy and love that was Ellen.

Ellen Wilson Hyer, June 13, 1921 - April 11, 2004.

Decoration Day

Monday is Memorial Day and Warren and I, like many others around here, will observe it in part by visiting area cemeteries in which his and my family members are buried.

Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, a direct result of the Civil War. That war touched every town in every state east of the Mississippi River (and some beyond). Small wonder: almost 10% of the nation served in the respective armies of the North and South. Some 20% of the soldiers serving, 2% of the nation's population, died in that war. Decoration Day began officially in 1868 to commemorate the war dead, and it still officially honors all those who died in wartime in service to this country.

In this part of the country, central Ohio, many families still observe Memorial Day, although we tend to treat it as a family holiday rather than a military remembrance. It is a time to head to the cemeteries, clean the graves, talk about the family buried there, and put out bunches of flowers. Boy scouts and veterans groups will beat many of us there to make sure fresh flags are in the war markers of the veterans.(Local history being what it is, local markers go all the way back to the Revolutionary War.)

We will arrive bearing flowers and trowels and, in some cases, statuary or balloons for the graves. In some ways, Memorial Day is as close as we, mainstream white Ohioans that we are, come to observing Dia de los Muertos. We do not feast at the cemetery, but we celebrate our deceased family members by remembering them at this time of year.

Decorating the family graves is a tradition my mother, father, and I observe together and one in which Warren has joined. One of the cemeteries we will visit is a large, open cemetery a ways from town, where my sister and my dad's parents are buried, and where someday my parents will be too.

At that cemetery, my parents and I have lots of friends, both dead and alive. Although that cemetery dates back to the late 1800s, a large section of it has been opened and used since 1950. My parents bought a plot there in 1955, when they had to bury their baby daughter, and bought their own plots at the same time. My dad's parents bought the plots next to them.

Over the years you get to know who's there in a cemetery and who their family is. Nearby is John Link, a close friend of my dad's, who died of cancer in his early 20s. My friend Laurie's dad is buried in the next section over; Laurie and her mother have probably already been out there this weekend. Denny and Marlene Schultz, whose friendship with my parents started back in high school, are just around the corner. Denny died a number of years ago; Marlene just a month ago. There is a little feeling of Our Town in that cemetery sometimes and I wonder how Marlene, who had a wonderful, bubbling, giggling laugh, would do in the setting that Thornton Wilder imagined.

We visited this cemetery a lot as I was growing up; it was on the route to or from my grandparents' farm out on Hogback Road. Although I didn't realize it then, I can appreciate now how much my mother must have missed her baby, who had died suddenly at three months. While my parents took the time to clean the headstone or just stand silently, arms around each other, we kids would use the time as opportunities to explore the nearby graves. Visiting the cemetery was not a macabre experience but a natural part of the rhythm of my childhood.

One of my favorite grave markers of all time is in that cemetery. I must have read it a hundred times as a kid and still always stop and read it every time I am out there. I will read it Monday, in fact. It is the stone for Alfred Livingston, who died in 1911 at the age of 70. Alfred Livingston was a sergeant with Company D, 121st regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and his stone proudly notes that he fought at Chickamauga, marched with Sherman to the sea, and marched in the Grand Review of the Armies in D.C. at war's end. The 121st was organized in Delaware, so I suspect that he was a local farm boy who went away to war.

I have often wondered what stories Alfred must have had to tell when he returned at the war's end. I wonder whether he participated in any of the veterans reunions, and whose memories he marked every year on Decoration Day. I like that his marker notes what must have been the greatest adventure of his life.

This weekend, the cemeteries all around here are full of family members pulling weeds and planting flowers. Some of the small towns in the area will hold Memorial Day parades and observances in the local cemetery. All of those ceremonies will include a recitation of the Gettysburg Address, because that is what you do on Memorial Day around here.

Monday, Warren and I will visit his parents' grave and make sure the flags are in good order. They both served in World War II: Art in the Army and Ellen in the Red Cross. Later in the day, I will clip Ellen's peonies, which are in full bloom right now, and we will join my parents, with their own bunches of peonies, and decorate the family graves in other cemeteries.

Decoration Day has taken on some different meanings since its official start in 1868, but here we are, 141 years later, still carrying our flowers and our memories to the cemetery on Memorial Day, and still looking after our dead. I think Alfred Livingston would approve.