On the left is my mother as a young woman, on the right as I always knew her, in a wheelchair and her arms in contraptions that supported them and gave her some measure of enablement. You will notice that in both, her glance is fearless and unself-conscious; she always met life head-on...
In
what I guess was the summer of '48, my mother caught polio, perhaps
from me or my brother.
We had been vacationing in the Pocono mountains,
and there is one last movie of Molly with Bill and I at the edge of a
swimming
pool. It was soon evident that Molly, who was rarely ill,
was
seriously so and then that she had polio. Our good good friend,
Dr.
Adler, was Dean of the UPenn medical school; he cleared a ward, so that
Molly, highly contagious, could be hospitalized and placed in an iron
lung that "breathed" for her. Molly never spoke
to me of that time, except to say, once, that the pain of polio was
having
a tooth pulled....all over your body. When the disease had run
its
course, she was left with the ability to move her head and very weak
abilities
in her arms and hands; she went for rehabilitation at Warm Springs,
Georgia
(where FDR had been treated). She "wrote" this letter from there to my older brother, then 6 years old.
She spent the rest of her life in a
wheelchair or bed. With her arms supported by ball-bearing glides
(one of which you can see at the bottom left of the right-hand
picture),
she could feed herself, dial a phone or turn the pages of a book in a
rack;
she could lift nothing heavier than a fork with food on it (and
certainly
not her arms themselves or herself).
I never once heard her complain.
This winter, my step-mother Biddy came across some old letters from
Philadelphia. In them was the letter below from Molly's, written a year
after the disease had struck. What spirit she had; she remains my
exemplar of courage.
The first warning, although
we didn't recognize it
as such, came one night as we were getting to bed, and I voiced
something
that had been with me all day, but which I'd been to busy to note
consciously:
"I have a funny pain high in my back", I said, "It doesn't hurt much
but
it just doesn't go away." That was on a Tuesday night and the
following
Sunday late, I was in the hospital too agonized to care to much when my
husband said goodnight and back home to two neglected little waifs we
had
left behind crying to see their mother carried out. The next
morning
before daylight, I was in a respirator, horrid and blessed monster, and
the ensuing week I know nothing of, which is all right by me. I
remember
only snatches now and then of a frantically worried husband standing
over
me, and my thinking how silly he was to take it so seriously, nothing
ever
happened to me. I was LUCKY. And so I was. Our two
sons
never contracted the disease---or if they did, it was that nice mild
form
that passes without notice. Neither did Wy get it, and he has
been
busy all this year producing substitutes for my missing muscles.
We had two loving families to help us, to care for our two sons and to
get ready for us a house in which to resume our life as a family.
Everything about polio is long and slow,
excepting
the speed with which it stops your stride. It takes a long long
time
to believe it. For two months I never looked at anything but
ceilings
until I felt sure I had memorized the top of every hall and corridor,
elevator,
treatment room and a good many just plain rooms in the hospital.
I recall in the respirator thinking how I would be back at home by
Thanksgiving
to bake a blackberry pie from the canned wild blackberries that our
oldest
boy had picked on the hill above his grandmother's house while we were
being giddy and irresponsible somewhere out west. As it turned
out,
by Thanksgiving I was just beginning to feel comfortable enough to bear
the pain of being turned on my stomach. And by Thanksgiving too,
I was increasing the scope of reality to absorb the possible fact that
I might not walk again. It took me longer to face the fact that I
wouldn't be able to do all I might wish with my arms. By then,
though,
I had learned to appreciate the compensation of a good trunk [torso],
and
breathing muscles returned to normal [SD note: She exaggerates: she
didn't have the strength to cough well and colds, bronchitis and the
like were dangerous].
I have not had any great
spiritual difficulties to
solve, and although I can't deny a normal amount of emotional trouble,
there has been very little that we have been unable to work out in the
family.