August 15, 2015
It is gives me hope when I add up the dates and realize I met Marcy less than two years ago. Hope that she might not really be gone. Because it is impossible that I knew her for less than two years. I know, somewhere deep, that ours is a relationship of many years, of a lifetime. If those twenty months were really longer, then maybe time is warped by relativity or something. Maybe all the space shuttles and satellites have messed with the universe. Maybe she’s not really gone, or she’ll be coming back around. Yeah, I know that’s crazy, but it is so much crazier to believe that Marcy could be gone forever.
It was at Blue Mountain Center in September, 2013, where I was spending a month trying to write, and she and Mike stopped by for a week. I think I talked with them for five days or so. See what I mean. That right there is impossible. How would I get this close to a woman in five days?
I was drawn to her, an organizer and a woman who was dedicated to writing down what she knew about the work. It seemed to me that not enough of us had done that. Very little, it seems to me, is written by organizers. Most of what exists is written by white males, God bless ’em. Time for women and people of color to put some fingers to the keyboard. I was glad to have her company in my efforts.
Marcy was so upfront about the cancer that I felt comfortable asking her at breakfast one morning, across the huge table that held more than twenty for dinner every night. That morning we were a half dozen eating our optional breakfast, and I asked her loudly across the table.
“So it’s stage four ovarian cancer?”
The table went silent. I wondered for a moment if I had misread Marcy, if she did not want group discussion of her condition.
Then she turned to me.
” Yep,” Marcy responded. “I was supposed to be dead by now.” Then the questions began, and Marcy seemed very much at home launching into clinical trials, how she found them and got into them, what she was learning. All the women at the table knew someone with ovarian cancer, or, more ominously, had known someone. We talked throughout the meal, and then headed back to our writing or artwork. But the ice was broken, and Marcy would manage to climb into our hearts in her short time at the retreat center.
For me, it felt different. Blue Mountain was run by people who were something like organizers, but the participants were largely writers and artists with decent politics but for whom organizing was neither clearly understood or valued. If anything, they seemed a bit confused by organizers. Lovely people who I came to adore, but not the kind of people who already understood you without any explaining required.
Marcy, however, was an organizer. We got each other in some deep way.
Evenso, she had done organizing on the most difficult, divisive issues in the most difficult, seemingly impossible places. Not only had she chosen to organize white people, but she had chosen to organize white people in rural areas of Oregon on issues like homophobia and immigration. When I heard that, my heart hurt. How would you do that, why would you even attempt it? I was scared for her, for all the rejection, even the violence. She was sitting right in front of me after decades of the work, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. How? Why?
I had spent my organizing career in the welcoming communities of low income Black and Brown big city neighborhoods. I felt loved, cared for, fed — literally and figuratively — in those neighborhoods. I felt at home in the so-called “high crime” neighborhoods of Englewood and Lawndale in Chicago; wrapped up in generous hugs. When I had to interact with white people, as I did when we canvassed the suburbs to raise funds for our work, then I was really scared. The people seemed colder there, like the white people I had grown up with in middle class communities and army posts. It seemed to me that white folks lost some feeling in their effort to maintain their privileged position — in exchange for claiming that they belonged in this nation, they had to move to a more isolated and cooler climate. They did not notice the cost of our privilege, but I did. It was scary to me.
I had come to the realization late in life that I had an obligation to these same white people — my people. But I had no idea where to begin. So I retired early, turning the post-ACORN organization I founded, Action Now in Chicago, over to a young Black woman who was a fine organizer and a brilliant manager.
And now, here was a woman in her fifties telling me that she knew something about organizing white folks, with integrity, around all the issues, not just the easy ones.
She had my full attention.
Marcy and I talked a lot at Blue Mountain. We went for hikes and sat together at meals. We did tai chi one morning on the dock by the lake. We climbed a hill one day that let us look out over the gorgeous autumn bordered lakes. It was five days, and she and Mike were working pretty feverishly on their book, but we made the most of our proximity.
By the day she and Mike left, I was looking for more. Turned out Marcy lived close to my sister in Portland, who I visited every July. We left each other in September with a goal of meeting up the following July in Portland.
**
Then I noticed something about Marcy. She kept reaching out to me, through email, to see how I was doing. She was dying, very livingly, but she was the one who kept checking to see how I was doing.
I subscribed to her blog, and responded to her posts from time to time with emails to her.
Then June, 2014 came around. My sister Maria and I had made plans to meet up in the south of France that August, so I cancelled my plans for my July visit. But as I did so, I thought of Marcy.
“She’s too busy working on her book, fighting to get into clinical trials, stopping the doctors from giving her death sentences,” I thought to myself. “She doesn’t have time to see me. Who do I think I am? I’ve known her for five days. She has a host of real friends and family. She doesn’t need to see me.”
I made plans to go to Seattle instead to visit my brother in July. That’s when I got the email from Marcy.
“When you coming to see your sister, and me?” she asked. “It’s getting close to July. I better be on your itinerary!”
I felt like Sally Field at the Oscars. “You like me, you really like me!” There I was, thinking of myself as an imposition, as an acquaintance trying to pretend I was a friend, and there she was, saying “Hello, friend, when you stopping by?”
As I made my plans to rent a car at the Seattle Airport and drive down to Portland, I wondered at the guts it took to assume I wanted to see her, to spend time with her. After all, I had lost faith that she would want to see me. Yet Marcy seemed to realize that time between us was a gift, and she reached out confidently, hopefully.
That was the thing. It wasn’t just the time with her, which, given her diagnosis, was indeed a marvelous thing. But the real gift was her assumption that I wanted what she wanted. Her willingness to read the many cues I had given her that I would love to see her again.
That’s how Marcy was. She assumed I wanted to know her. Deeply. She was right.
**
I ended up setting up a semi-regular phone conversation with Marcy, on one of the good days that fell every other week in between the bad chemo days. I got to read her writing, both memoir and organizing manual, and then I got to ask her plenty of questions. At first I took notes, but when I realized that what was coming out of her mouth was pure gold, I started taping her.
During those conversations, I learned that Marcy had a working assumption: that a large majority of the people on earth would be interested in getting to know her. And that she and they would benefit from making the relationship as deep as possible.
Still, I was stunned to learn Marcy’s approach to organizing in Nebraska when she got her OSF Fellowship, just before her diagnosis. Marcy had set out to see if her Rural Organizing Project model would work in other states. There was a whole section of Nebraska where she had no contacts, and she needed to build relationships throughout that region. How did she begin, I asked her.
Marcy reported that she got the phonebooks for the towns in the region and started calling.
“You what?” I asked.
“Well, Madeline, we’ve both worked at ACORN. I know you’ve driven to a new town and started doorknocking, cold.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty lonely and scary too. But I was asking people what was going on in their neighborhood, what improvements they wanted. It was a pretty easy rap.” “Well, my way wasn’t much different. I called through the phonebook until I found someone who would have coffee with me when I traveled to Nebraska. And when I found someone who seemed particularly good to me, I asked if I could spend the night at their place.”
“You what?” I repeated.
“Well, a lot of these towns don’t have motels, and besides, it’s in the hours between dinner and bedtime when we were likely to have the conversations that would allow me to scope out where they were coming from, and maybe share some observations and principles that would help them in putting together the first meeting.” “But Marcy, how do you call people cold out of the phonebook, figure out if they will be up for an ethical position on gay rights and immigrant rights, and also, by the way, invite yourself to spend the night?”
“Actually,” Marcy confided, “I loved that. The sheer brashness of the request. These are good people, but this was a heavy lift. If they went for it, I knew we were dealing with the caliber of person who could probably build something in that town.”
“Did anyone say yes?”
“Oh yeah,” Marcy laughed. “I got quite a few potential leaders over the phone. But then I got the diagnosis and I had to call them back and put them on hold. Too bad. I really loved those people.”
**
It wasn’t just in her organizing where Marcy was so bold. In her first clinical trial, I think it was, she told me that she built such a tight knit group of patients that they figured out, from the continued illness and death of their compañeras, that the trial had not worked, long before the doctors informed them of that fact.
“How did you build such a group?” I asked.
“Oh, when I was in a waiting room, I would look around and could pretty much guess who was in my trial. They had to be women, first of all. Women of a certain age, probably. So I just went up to middle aged women and asked if they were in the trial and got their contact info. Then I created an email listserve and we were in touch.”
I loved that. I don’t think I had ever thought of communicating with the other patients in a doctor’s waiting room. There was such a social, even quasi-legal, prohibition against asking about a stranger’s illness. But that did not stop Marcy.
She built quite a group that way.
**
In early November, Marcy told me she was planning to head home to Iowa for the holiday. In typical Marcy fashion, she offered to stop by to stay a night with me in Chicago.
“I would love it,” I squealed.
“Mike would be coming too,” she added.
“Good, he and Keith can cook for us while I tape record your organizing stories.”
“And then there’s the dog,” she added.
“I love dogs. And I’d love to see your puppy again.”
It was a date. Marcy had been in pain at Blue Mountain, and again when I visited her at her home in Portland, but this time I could see the pain more clearly in her eyes, in her limp, in her difficulty sleeping. But it was a lovely visit, nonetheless, and we both knew it might be our last time together in person. Then again, Marcy might live forever. That was always my thought. Someone with such a strong life force might in fact be able to beat all the odds. Marcy, Marcy, burning bright.
It was not to be. But lately I have heroes in the movement who have passed on who are so full of life that I have come to believe in an afterlife. A kind of surround sound, where they live, just out of touch, but not always gone. Some say they must have known their life would be shorter, because they lived it so intensely. Yes. But they live with me still.
Marcy lives there, urging me out of myself to believe that people everywhere will be glad to get to know me. She is laughing at me, the way she would, and gently pushing me. “Sure they want to get to know you, Madeline. Who wouldn’t?”
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