A little while ago, I found out from Briana that Cady had died.

I talked about her once before here, some time ago, but since I’m not sick of reruns about her, I figure y’all have no right to be, either.

In my old Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, a couple blocks from my apartment was one of the most glorious houses I had ever seen. It was a faded white Georgian, clearly around 100 years old, with a sprawling lawn, a carriage house far bigger than my own dwelling, and it just had this incredible vibe. For a couple years, I had been dying to know who lived in it, but hadn’t seen anyone around every time I looked.

One day, in a race to deliver the first finished manuscript of the book to the first publisher that had it, I found out. I was rushing by on my bike, the manuscript in my messenger bag, pencils still stuck in my hair, in a t-shirt I’d probably been wearing for days, eyes on the prize when I heard a creaky but damn loud woman’s voice holler out “Ride’em, cowgirl!”

Cady, at likely all of 5 foot and 80 pounds, was standing next to a mower on her lawn, at that house, smiling and cheering me on as she wiped sweat from her forehead.

Of course, I had to stop. Deadlines be damned when a woman in her eighties who can project like that and handle a lawn that’s an eighth of a city block by herself calls you out.

We gabbed for a while, and over the next year or so, when we’d run into each other, we’d sit on whomever’s stoop and gab some more. Rather, she gabbed, I listened and expressed awe: old women’s stories are my legal high. The woman talked a blue steak, and coming from me, that’s really saying something. Once, she shared a stoop with myself as well as the toddler daughter of two friends, and I just basked in the coolness of such a span of generations between three women all interacting. Yawn if you must, but it was awesome.

My favorite story of hers was how she got her house. She’d told me she had been moved up to Minneapolis in a quasi-arranged marriage, in that house. Her husband, as it turns out, was a philanderer as well as an abuser, and she suffered under him for years.

She told me that one day something just snapped in her: after another bout of abuse leveled at her, he’d gone out to drink and play. She found his rifle, camped out on the wide front porch, and waited for him to come home. When he did, she negotiated a deal: either he’d leave, for good, and leave her with the house she (validly) felt was the least she had earned, or she’d just kill him, right there and then, before she let him into that house again, and that was that.

Yes, I’m a pacifist, yes, I advocate for nonviolence, and yes, I hate guns more than I can ever express, but I don’t have a problem with self-defense, and I really don’t have a problem with the mental image of that tiny (albeit loud)woman, holding her ground, 100% confident in her resolve, and sending that man away. I don’t have a problem with the thought of Cady shutting that door behind him, putting the gun away, and finally feeling safe in her own home, feeling ownership of her space and herself. In fact, since she told me that story, it’s one of many images I draw up in my mind often because I find it, I find her, inspiring and utterly awesome. Women like her, you just look at them listen to them, and figure that if you wind up being even half the woman they were, you’ll have done alright.

She got her house. To my knowledge, she never remarried, or even officially divorced. She never had children, but she told me about a few neglected children of others that she’d care for for years at a time. When we’d see each other, she was often walking back from the market with two overflowing grocery bags full of every sort of food for every sort of neighborhood animal you could think of (and according to Bri, the state of her house reflected the indoor animal refuge she’d created).

I’m irritated as hell with myself that I never got up the gumption to ask if I could photograph her: it just never felt right, for some reason, but selfishly, I’d love to have those photos.

Apparently, some young family bought her house, and a couple weekends ago, it was opened up, with everything in it on sale to whomever wanted to buy. Briana went over, and did manage to find us a couple of her aprons so that I could have something of hers, which makes me very happy, and her taking the time to do that for me and because she knew from Cady, was really wonderful.

But it all breaks my heart. Bri said every last thing she owned was for sale, right down to her scrapbooks. It breaks my heart because even in knowing as little as I knew about her, she was a magnificent, ballsy woman: she was a force to be reckoned with, not just an owner of some valuable stuff. Apparently, there was one room of the house full of children’s toys, crayons, the works: where were those adults who she once cared for as children? Why wasn’t there anyone at all who knew her who wouldn’t have wanted her china not because it was a valuable antique, but because it belonged to HER? Why wasn’t there anyone at all, who could say to someone else, “Here, this was Cady’s favorite book/mug/afghan/photograph, she’d have so wanted you to have it?”

Mark suggested I was so hurt by this because I was worried that’d be me. That’s not it: in fact, for years friends have already put in requests to have my stuff when I kick it, greedy little beasties that they are. My sadness wasn’t about me projecting (or about her likely dying alone: my bet is, that’s what she’d have wanted), it was about her deserving so much better than this, and about the sanctity of her home and uninvited visitors inside it to essentially ransack it. I worry that that new family moving in didn’t know or care what she did to keep that house, doesn’t know that, as she told me, from the minute she got that man out of it, she made a pledge to live until she died in that house because she had paid so dearly for it, and won her battle to keep it; because that house was emblematic of her freedom and her strong will. (Perhaps I’ll drop a letter to the address with this story, actually. It’s just criminal for someone living there not to know what an amazing legacy they’re living within.)

Our exchanges were relatively brief — heck, I don’t even know what her last name was — and fewer than I’d have liked. My sadness is also about never getting to see her again, never getting to find out even more of her history, find some way to document it so that she didn’t wind up just one more invisible woman who came and went, unheard and unsung.

This isn’t much of an offering as far as that goes, but it’s what I’ve got to offer, and it matters to me to put it out there. She mattered to me, and all the women like her should matter: I wish the older women in my family had been more like she was, I wish they’d have had a fraction of her nerve and resolve.

I’m Buddhist, I’m not an afterlife-believer, but with some people, I like to imagine there is, just so I can put them in a place in my mind that seems worthy of them. So, I’ve conjured up this image this week of Cady in my mind. She’s standing in front of some sort of ethereal place of eternal bliss, some floaty, big house of safety and peace for everyone inside it. She’s wearing her muddy, rubber boots, and she’s surrounded by her halo of fluffy white hair. And she’s vigilantly guarding the gates with her rifle, her small but forceful body, a gleam and an unspoken dare in her eye, keeping all the riff-raff out.

filed under Heather Corinna | surviving abuse | women
posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 10:07 am

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