Each day, at dawn and at dusk, she heard a click-click-clicking sound,
a sound so faint it could have been the rocks themselves adjusting to the
sun's arrival and departure. On the third day, she discovered its origin. It
was the click of claws on rock of a huge black cat, a jaguar, that had been
watching her the whole time.
"Our eyes met," she told her brother Gary Miller, "and I've never felt
so much kinship."
For Cheryl Miller, who died of ovarian cancer Dec. 9, a few weeks
before her 50th birthday, the jaguar embodied the beauty and mystery of the
life force. She believed that modern man, by shunning visions and the spirit
world, had allowed senses once attuned to a deeper awareness to atrophy. She
sought to rekindle them.
Living more intimately with the earth taught her not only how to live
but also how to die, she believed.
Miller was born in Takoma Park and grew up in Rockville in a house
that backed up to Rock Creek Park. She worked with numerous nature groups
and in 1997 co-founded Mid-Atlantic Primitive Skills, a group dedicated to
reviving such skills as edible plant identification, tracking and shelter
construction. She loved teaching children how to interpret the hidden
messages in the tracks of a deer or a raccoon.
With new subdivisions, strip shopping centers and warehouses spreading
amoeba-like across the semirural Beltsville area where she lived as an
adult, she had to make an effort to seek out nature -- in western North
Carolina's Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, in a sustainable agriculture
community outside Baltimore, in a small vegetable garden across the road
from her house.
She was diagnosed with cancer in 1998. When modern medicine in the
form of chemotherapy seemed powerless, she turned increasingly to
shamanistic insights of the Huichol Indians, who live according to the old
ways in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. She made two pilgrimages
to the tribe's remote mountain villages, in addition to the vision quest
where she encountered the jaguar.
She told her brother that her ultimate aim wasn't a cure, necessarily,
but knowledge -- knowledge that would come, as the Huichol believe, from the
spirit of plants and from Tatewari, Grandfather Fire. As Miller described it
in a journal entry, it was knowledge from "the lost world."
Miller was more than the aspiring New Age mystic her nature-seeking
would suggest. She had a degree in business from the University of Maryland
and worked as a medical laboratory technician at Suburban Hospital and as a
sales manager for a drug company. She was working on a degree in land
management from the University of Maryland and had a black belt in tang soo
do, a Korean martial art.
As her brother recalled, she had to grow up early. When she was 5, her
mother died -- also from ovarian cancer -- and her father never remarried.
As children, her brothers, Gary and Mark, considered Cheryl their mother.
When their father was stricken with cancer, she was his primary caregiver
until his death in 1992.
"I didn't feel I was a very good mother, and always knew I had little
interest in having my own children," Miller wrote in a letter to a friend.
Yet she still yearned for family, Gary said, and when she was 30, she found
one. She fell in love with her karate teacher, Marcia Van Horn -- and the
karate teacher's assistant, Van Horn's husband, Robert. In 1985, Miller and
the Van Horns became "life partners."
However unusual, the relationship thrived. Miller and the Van Horns,
along with assorted dogs and cats, lived together for nearly 20 years, until
the day she died.
"The relationship that we had was extremely important to all three of
us," said Marcia Van Horn, a registered nurse. Although she tends to place
her trust in science rather than the spirit world, she respected her
partner's quest.
Like the Huichol, Miller believed that life, in some unknowable way,
transcends death, and at one point she contemplated hastening death's
arrival. An elderly Huichol shaman advised her to choose life.
And she did, Gary Miller recalled. The day before she died, he asked
his sister, "Are you scared?"
"No!" she said, laughing. "I'm still hoping for a miracle. Don't write
me off yet."
