My mother's life has been as much of a medical tragedy as my father's. But whereas my father was the victim of accident as often as disease, mother was exclusively the victim of disease (well, I have forgotten the broken back ...). I wish I could say of myself that I was a sufficiently large person to have risen above the difficulties in mother's and my relation caused by her illnesses to have dealt directly with her, the person who suffered; but I cannot. I carry some burden of shame that when my mother was weakest and needed all the care of those around her, I could not respond. True, I was only twelve or so, when her blindness occurred, but I understood what was going on, and could not respond.
During my last, or next to last, summer at Camp Belknap, my mother and father visited me--perhaps the only visit of my five summers at this boy's camp. It was a sunday--I believe. I remember we met and talked in the early afternoon in the open-air chapel, in the pine grove on the hillside that sloped from the cabins and playing field to the lake.
[In a marginal note in differently colored ink, I later wrote:] Mother remembers a different chronology for her illness; ... ]
I don't recall whether I was then told the nature of my mother's illness; I was told that she was going in the hospital. She seemed to me--though I had no sense of the magnitude or consequences of her illness, sad and distance [distant]. Smiling at me through the distance of her own thoughts. I did not visit her at the hospital, Mary Hitchcock Hospital at Dartmouth College in Hanover, until the summer was over and I had returned home from camp.
Her illness: high blood pressure had burst the blood vessels in her retina, causing blindness. She lost nearly all her sight for a brief while, and was limited to the vaguest stimuli of light, but without vision for years. Her sight improved slowly after a few years, and perhaps as long as a [as] ten years later she could see well enough to try driving a car. Though after nearly running down some pedestrians, the state took away her driver's license.
The medication for the illness helped her, but it had unfortunate side effects: she grew dark facial hair and became obese. She went from being a beautiful high school girl, in her memories, to being an ugly sick woman.
Of course, all this changed her personality. She turned to faith healing and an insistent literal Christianity.
Her relationship with father deteriorated. Father was never a paternalistic--in the sense of nurturing man--and caring for mother strained him; of course, during this time, the mid-1950s, his own job fell apart and our new house burned, placing a great strain on father's finances. Highly conscious of her ugly physical appearance and her inability to fulfill father sexually, mother became jealous of other wives, convinced father was attracted to them--which he was. She shared her fears for father with me.
In the midst of these tragedies and disasters, I entered adolescence, and tried to deal with mother, at the same time I tried--had--to deal with myself.
I can remember going to Hanover, several times in the fall 1954(?), to visit mother at the hospital. I can recall once that I could not visit her room. At home, father employed a young woman to look after S_ [my sister] and me when we came home from school and to prepare supper. I was quite upset all the time, and I was not nice to her, generally refusing to allow her to please me. I remember only one pleasant experience with her--making our own frozen "TV Dinners."
I have no memory of the events, the day, or my emotions, of mother's return home from the hospital.
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