by Ashley Judd
Dario was traveling most of the time on the IndyCar circuit, but I think God arranged for us to be together when I finally found Percy’s remains in a field. I believe the body is but a jacket, a garment we lay down when it is time for our souls to change rooms. I believe the soul, which contains the essence of all I know and love about a person, is immutable, unchangeable, eternal. Yet I am human, and I have a terrible attachment to the bodies of those I love, the home in which I have known their soul. Finding Percy was a crushing, devastating blow. I wailed and wailed in grief.
I called Tennie in the depths of my pain, and when I was able to calm down a bit, she asked me, “What is the lesson Percy came to teach you?” The answer, clearly, is unconditional love. God is everyone’s personal Percy. Totally, beautifully, unflinchingly focused just on that one person. I began to picture every woman, every child, somewhere with Percy, the most beautiful cat in the world, the biggest baby boy, sitting on their chests the way he did mine, paws folded, purring, heavy-lidded, but oh, watching with utter devotion, occasionally reaching up to kiss me. Scraping his cheek along mine is his signature expression of adoration. God as Percy. I loved it. It worked.
My final exams in both econ and quant were scheduled for the day after we found Percy. I was reeling and unsure how I could possibly pass these tests. I had been using my recovery tools incessantly, including slogans such as “First things first,” “Let go and let God,” “Easy does it,” and “How important is it?” to help me organize myself, figure out not just how to move forward, but which foot to put in front of the other. I knew, sadly, I would have plenty of time to grieve my Percy and that it was okay to do first things first, which now meant these tests. As I sat for the exams, I felt Percy was with me, and I asked for his help.
A few days later, when my work was handed back to me with A’s, I had Percy, along with Graeme, Rachel, my economics tutor, and my classmates to thank for how far I had come. I knew when I held my work that I had learned it. I had a newfound, strong confidence in my math ability, I actually found it intensely pleasurable. I had at last exorcised the demons of high school math, so implicated in the debilitating shame I experienced as a kid living on her own, with no one to help me in school.
Soon I was doing original math in further quant classes, for example, bringing together my deep interest in family planning, field experience in Congo, and new confidence in my abilities. In “Population Changes and Consequences” at the School of Public Health, I showed, using the 2008 Demographic Health Survey and modeling software called Spectrum, that by 2050 an astronomical 89,847,607 million babies will be born in Congo to women of reproductive age who have a desire to plan and space births but who do not have access to family planning. I also showed reductions in these unintended births, as well as reductions in maternal mortality, by making family planning available to increasing percentages of women of reproductive age. It was a powerful way to bring home the statistic that though 63 percent of women in the global South use a method family planning, in Congo a scant 6 percent do. I was in wonk heaven!
After the grueling intensity of the summer term, I settled into the marathon of my fall semester. In spite of stern warnings, I was carrying more than the recommended number of classes, and even at this fullness, I mourned the courses I could not take and the extra activities I had to skip. On a daily basis my “HKS Today” email invited me to talks, seminars, brown bag lunches, and forums that were enormously appealing. I spent most of my time in study, with every spare moment hanging out with incredible people, students and faculty whom I admired, which was pretty much everyone, but I narrowed it down by field of study, mostly within human rights, social justice, feminism, moral leadership, and spirituality.
Feeling initially like a hopelessly incompetent dork who could never get it—I had been out of college for twenty years, after all—I was amazed at the ease of the uptake and how in no time at all I was a high-functioning graduate school student, reading up to a thousand pages a week and turning in long papers with confidence—by tricked-out course page websites, no less.
Although Dario supported my efforts and recognized that the health of my soul was linked to my service work, he found that living full-time in Cambridge didn’t appeal to him: It was too crowded, school and the happenings there weren’t interesting to him, and he was taken aback by how class work devoured my time and attention. He likened my summer semester to what his schedule is like when he competes in the Indianapolis 500: totally consuming. And yet I sustained that not for three weeks, but for an entire degree. Not to mention those Yankee roads—those, he really didn’t like! We did memorably experience Concord, Massachusetts, and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in October and coastal Maine in March, but for much of the time, I found myself going it alone. I also had a series of unfortunate studentlike encounters with sickness: I had a rotten, Centers for Disease Control–verified case of H1N1, complicated by a wicked sinus infection, followed by two post-flu infections, all of which made my life wholly inoperable for a few weeks, even as I maintained the improbable wish that I could keep it all going at such a high level. When my dad came to visit, I took full advantage of his late-blooming, prodigious nurturing abilities.
Dad visited no fewer than five times during the school year, including being there to drive me my very first day of summer semester. He had his own guest room on the second floor of the house, and he would do a lot of the shopping and cooking that would otherwise eat up so much of my time. He enjoyed having something to do, and I loved it. I would wake up in the morning and pass him in the kitchen on my way to do my meditation, saying, “Are you making breakfast for graduate students this morning?” followed by, “What’s for lunch.” After a reprisal of those hearty bowls of oatmeal from the Camp Wig days, he would send me off with a little lunch basket filled with a sandwich and nuts, teabags, and a thermos of hot water. I would load them into my bicycle’s cherry blossom saddlebags, along with books and notebooks, and pedal across the Charles River to class, saying hello to my friends the geese and the sycamore trees along the way. In the evening, I’d come and lay out all the work I needed to do that evening, organizing reams of paper, coordinating readings with class notes. Dad would have been in the kitchen preparing a beautiful meal, which we would share, and I would talk excitedly about my invariably interesting day. When I hosted dinner for classmates, he and Mollie did all the work, making sure the food was wonderful, the table adorned with cherry blossoms. (They, along with me, hung on every word my Palestinian and Israeli classmates, who took part in their countries’ top-level negotiations, were saying.) It was like living out my childhood dream of having full-time parents to take care of me—a need that one doesn’t outgrow, whether in kindergarten or in graduate school. It was what I had always hoped family could feel like.
When the weather was bad or I was running late, Dad would drive me to class. I introduced him to all my professors, and he audited a few of my classes. Diane Rosenfeld, who taught a course in gender violence at Harvard Law School, actually sent him home with reading assignments. He told me it was all he could do to keep from raising his hand in class. Although Dad does not share my politics, defining himself as somewhat right of center, we respect each other’s opinions and would have interesting political discussions. He wanted to read everything I was reading for class, from scholarly articles to entire books. He would look at me when he was ready for more reading material, his eyes tracing back and forth from what I had in my hand to my face, making me smile because it reminded me of what Buttermilk does when I am eating something and he wants a bite of it. It was nourishing having him back in my life.
Within weeks of the fall term, my joy was intense, bordering at times on the ecstatic. In certain classes, such as “Public Narrative: Self, Us and Now,” taught by my glorious advisor Marshall Ganz, my biggest challenge was making my papers short enough. More than once, my work would be sent back to me with stern reminders about length. Once, I had a point deducted, which was absolut
ely the most effective way to induce my respect for page count. (I was obsessed with making straight A’s at Harvard and nearly succeeded. Two profs had the “audacity” to give me a B plus!)
My enthusiasm was unbounded. My mind and soul were on fire, which is my favorite mode of being. I sometimes wept in classes, overcome with the connections crackling inside of me, overcome with gratitude and a specific type of happiness I hadn’t felt in years. At times, in classes such as “Health and Human Rights” and “Informal Economy: Linkages with Growth, Economic Crisis, and Gender,” I stopped taking notes, pushed back from desk, and just enjoyed the show.
When Dario won his second IndyCar championship, I fortuitously had a long weekend break from school. Missing class for anything was not an option: Once admitted, we were told to cancel all prior commitments, and I did, including my personal invitation from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to be on a panel with him about the role of girls and women in securing peace. Thus, good ole Columbus Day allowed me to be with Dario at the track when he took the checkered flag. Later, in the hotel room, he basked in the glow of this life-changing moment, answering hundreds of emails and texts while I worked on an evaluation of the Bush administration and Condoleezza Rice’s foreign policy toward Cuba for my “Reasoning from History” class.
One of the most thrilling aspects of my year at Harvard was reconnecting with some of the remarkable leaders I had met in my travels. Everybody in the world of development and human rights seems to pass through Harvard at one time or another. Mu Sochua, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for trusting me enough at the very beginning of my international work to take me to the Svay Pak brothels in Cambodia, presented at Harvard for a week, and I was overjoyed to be reunited with her. I was able to invite sex slavery abolitionist Ruchira Gupta, with whom I had such a salient adventure in India, to be a guest lecturer in my “International Childhood: Human Rights and Globalization” class. She captivated students so viscerally and spoke so deftly from every angle of the debate that students followed her to her car and were still engaging her as she had to drive away to catch her flight. I was very proud when PSI president Karl Hofmann presented a seminar on what PSI is and how we work, and the impressed responses from my cohort. “Show-and-tell for the smart set,” quipped Dad.
It was meaningful to make the connections between what I had seen in the field and what I was learning in class and develop a new language to evaluate what I’d observed. For example, all over the world I’ve sat in slums with people selling little things—vegetables or crafts—set out on blankets in a market or in wheelbarrows on a sidewalk, or setting up a “beauty shop” in a field. I know from my studies that these enterprises occur within the informal economy, and I have studied the pioneering theories from the 1970s that first captured and described informality as well as the current prevailing debates. I have been in tiny apartments where I now realize the woman was a home-based industrial outworker, making piece-rate goods for a global value chain. I was now able to evaluate such exploitation from a variety of angles, including from her sometimes not being reimbursed for the materials she used, the lack of enforceable contract that meant sometimes the middleman didn’t even pay her for the finished work or when orders were canceled she lost the capital she’d invested, and the lack of occupational safety as she sometimes worked with toxic, hazardous materials in a small, unventilated space. With deeper study, it was easily confirmed that microfinance is valuable, but I learned that it is only one dimension of the financial services and instruments needed by the poor; they also need insurance options, to be able to save, to have more flexibility in the access and timing of their loans. I have learned about informal savings clubs, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, that are fascinating in their sophistication and ingenuity. I have learned more explicitly about legal empowerment issues, ranging from the need to access sidewalks for trade to legal recognition in bureaucracies. It may sound wonky, but these subjects are like homemade peach pie to me—I gobble them up.
It would be impossible to choose a favorite class, but if a measure is how fired up I was, it may have been Diane Rosenfeld’s “Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice” course. In my final paper, I was able to metabolize so many of my life experiences to propose a model that encourages women to engage in a feminist analysis of their own lives and, through strong female-to-female alliances, disrupt the virulent problem of gender inequality in their homes and communities. We can do this by the willingness to become aware, then accept, and finally take action to begin to heal from patriarchal wounding, and from increased personal empowerment commit to service work, addressing gender inequality at the grassroots level.
To suggest a solution, mindful of the many times I have witnessed the power of female-to-female alliances both in the global South and in my own life, I built upon Diane’s and Professor Richard Wrangham’s studies of the bonobos, those wonderful primates I met in the Congo, offering them as a model of how women at the household-to-household level can influence communities into peaceful society. I developed a workshop inspired by the brilliant social architecture of Twelve Step programs, the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, and modern sexual abuse and trauma survivor therapy. The workshop would be exportable to any community and open to men as well as women. As Margaret Mead said, every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man. Also, many men have no idea the effect their addiction to power and degrading women has on us, and them having the opportunity to sit in groups with women who have suffered abuse is an underused strategy. The workshop would incorporate, inter alia, feminist analyses of one’s past and present life, include trauma and shame reduction experiential therapy, role playing, inner child work, art therapy, and identification of compulsive behaviors and addictions, and suggestions for after care and advocacy. The crux of the experience would be for each participant to identify core patriarchal wounding in their life, begin to recover from it, and accept responsibility for advocating feminist social justice change in their communities in whatever way is most meaningful to their personal narrative. Once we begin to recover, we can be most useful in precisely the ways we have been most hurt.
I couldn’t have guessed that my own story would have everything to do with feminist social justice theory and that the gifts I had been given of clinical inpatient treatment and recovery would bring me back to radical feminism.
The paper won a dean’s scholar award. Diane told me when she felt down, she’d read my paper again, and it would put wind in her sails.
I graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School on a glorious day in May 2010, surrounded by some of my dearest friends and members of my families of chance and choice. In a reprise of my college graduation, my mother and sister chose not to attend the ceremony, but Dad was right by my side, along with Mollie. And Tennie, my most wonderful surrogate grandmother, brought her quietly radiant, affirming presence to the commencement, marveling with me at the 468-year-old tradition in I which partook. After I had sung “Fair Harvard” in Latin and had run around hugging classmates and thanking faculty, she presented me with a beautiful necklace on which dangled a key, with a framed reading that said, in part, “There is no more ‘aloneness,’ with the awful ache, so deep in the heart.… That ache is gone, and never need return again. Now there is a sense of belonging, of being wanted and needed and loved … We have been given the Keys to the Kingdom.” The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Indy Racing League would not excuse Dario from a half day of press obligations related to the 500 (which he would win that weekend for the second time), so he sat in his bus on the track, watching the school’s live Internet feed of commencement, while we chatted back and forth via texting as the exercises unfolded.
After the stately procession through Harvard Yard, the various schools dispersed to smaller venues around the campus to hand out the diplomas. The Kennedy School crowd looked like a United Nations General Assembly, with the foreign students wearing their formal native dress: Africans in colorful dashikis and foulards, Asi
ans in jewel-colored silks. Ever the mountain girl, I went barefoot as I bounded across the grass to accept my diploma. As my little cheering section rose to clap and whoop for me, I felt down to my toes that I was just hitting my stride, that truly anything was possible.
I’m not sure where this journey will take me. All I know is that I’ll always be traveling on the front lines of hope, expecting miracles to happen.
Remembering.
On the path to God, light gives way to darkness, and darkness to light, at intervals. A measure of integration takes place, and we enjoy a moment of peace and joy, but the longing sets in again, and we must again exert the terrible effort.
—CAROL LEE FLINDERS, Enduring Grace
EPILOGUE
Up on a high ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I walk a narrow footpath ribbed with roots. Dense foliage rubs my shoulders. Some trees I know, but there are more than 400 species here. This park, comprised of mixed mesophytic forest, has more biodiversity than the whole of Europe, so, outside my comfort zone of maple, oak, hickory, larch, walnut, paw paw, persimmon, elm, birch, dogwood, redbud, cherry, buckeye, I have at best, a 1-in-400 chance of naming something. Today, I love knowing what I don’t know.
It is my first long walk since the July full moon. It’s unlike me to not walk, even at night, even if just for a short jaunt to look around, visit the butterflies, watch the turtles in the lake. The woods are spiritually chiropractic. On any given walk, I may not even know I need an adjustment, but once I pass that margin and enter the cathedral of trees and all who live with them, I am changed.