Two Trailblazers Gone in the Same Week

"When we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment. It was just called life."

Gloria Steinem said that more than once. I read it again before I got out of bed, in the New York Times obituary that told me she had died at 92. Her death brought me to tears in a way few celebrities' deaths do, and I lay there a long time with that line.

Think about what it means for something to not have a name. It means there's no way to point at it, no way to say this happened to me and have anyone understand what you mean. It just happens, over and over, and everyone calls it life because nobody has given them another word to use. Steinem spent her career giving people that word. She took the things millions of women were living through in silence and shined a spotlight on them, so it could be seen, named, and finally changed.

I woke up to that news less than a week after Dolly Parton died. Two women, both gone within days of each other, both trailblazers in their own way, both from upbringings that could have kept them small. 

Gloria once said that not going to school until she was twelve, raised largely by her father, might have actually helped her. She never absorbed the Dick and Jane version of who boys and girls were supposed to be. She got to skip the lesson before anyone taught it to her.

I think about that a lot, how the things that look like disadvantages sometimes clear space for something else to grow. Neither of these women had an easy start. Both of them made something enormous out of the life they were handed.

When someone who lived that fully dies, I find myself asking what a life lived at full volume asks of the people watching it end, myself included.

What does it mean to you, reading about a life like that? Does it make you want to do something differently, or does it just make you grateful someone did? (There’s no wrong answer!)

I'll never be a trailblazer on the scale of Gloria Steinem, but I've spent years working inside a small, mostly-women movement that is doing something I think she would approve of. Death, in this culture, is often still in that "just called life" category. People go through it, watch the people in their life go through it, and mostly don't have language for any of it or ability to make meaning of it. 

Willow exists to change that. Naming a taboo doesn't require being famous. It requires people willing to keep saying the thing out loud until it stops being unspeakable, the same spotlight Gloria shined on harassment, and other injustices, aimed at something else that's gone unspoken for too long.

So many of the practitioners I know came to this work the same way, after a death cracked something open in them that couldn't be closed again.

I feel so honored to have been working the last couple of months bringing together more than twenty women (and one man) who will be speakers at The Death Worker Summit, Willow's free online event to help end-of-life practitioners build sustainable practices. It's work I hope Gloria would recognize, women following their calling and becoming trailblazers in their own right.

So here's my question for you today:

Whose life, lived fully, has asked something of you? What did you do with it?