A Blog Post By My Mom

My mom passed away in January of last year and I miss her every single day. While cleaning out her home, I came across a basket full of notebooks filled with her writing. I knew my mom journaled, but I had no idea how prolific she was. In the notebooks, I found writing about her childhood, writing about her family and friends, love letters to my dad, advice for her grandchildren, some poetry, detailed flower and vegetable gardening instructions and tips, and even a story for children! Funny, I thought I was the first writer in the family. I wonder if my mom had dreams of being published like I did. I wish I could ask her.

For the last few months, I’ve been reading through my mom’s notebooks. There are so many memories packed away in them that some days I could only read a little of her writing before I became emotional and had to stop. In one of the notebooks, she wrote about the death of her older sister, Fay, at age four from pneumonia she developed after having scarlet fever. Mom wrote that it was right before penicillin was widely used. If Fay had become sick just a year or two later, she might have lived.

Reading what she wrote broke my heart, but the writing is so compelling that I thought I would share it with you. My mom is my guest blogger this week and I hope somewhere, somehow, she knows she is a published writer! I hope this story touches you as much as it did me.

Medicine in 1941

By June Barrett Bolinger

When I was young, doctors made house calls when people were sick. If a family member had a contagious disease such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever, etc., the household was quarantined. A very prominent sign would be placed on the front door so nobody from outside would enter.

The father was allowed to go to work, and children could play outside but only in their own yards and only if they weren’t the ones who were sick.  Penicillin had been invented in 1928 but was not in use in the United States until 1942. I remember the drug “Sulfur” being used quite often before Penicillin was available.

In later years, I heard that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had pneumonia around 1938 and agreed to try an experimental drug, Penicillin, which was highly effective, but in 1941, it was not in use in the United States. Had it been, my older sister, Fay, would probably have survived childhood.

My sister, Fay, was born in March of 1937 and was three and a half years old when I was born in October of 1940. In September of 1941 when I was 11 months old, my sister, Edith, my brother, Don, and my sister, Fay, all came down with scarlet fever, and our house was quarantined. My Grandmother Ritchie, my mother’s mother, came to the house to help care for us. After they all started recuperating, Fay had a relapse and developed pneumonia. Fay became very sick, and the doctor was at our house as she lie dying in my parents’ bed.

Norma Fay Barrett

As a last resort, the doctor decided a blood transfusion might save my sister, Fay, who was four and a half years old. With no testing or typing of blood, he gave her a transfusion from my mother, but it was the wrong blood type. If they had given her my father’s blood, she might have lived.

My mother told me that Fay went into convulsions almost immediately, then opened her eyes and said, “They’re coming, Mommy” and died.

A local funeral home embalmed her, which was a fairly new procedure, and prepared her for burial. My Uncle Paul Barrett took the backseat out of his car and drove her tiny casket from Indiana to Tennessee, where she had been born, for the funeral. My parents followed his car and their daughter’s body for 500 miles to Readyville, Tennessee. Her casket was taken to another uncle’s house, and Uncle Harmon and Aunt Ruby Barrett used their formal living room for the viewing, and the family all sat with the corpse day and night during the wake.

My father bought six lots at Riverside Cemetery and that became Fay’s final resting place. On her grave, they placed a heart-shaped pink marble monument with a little lamb resting on top. Below her name and the dates of her birth and death, it simply reads “Our Darling.” My mother was wracked with pain. My father collapsed at the gravesite, prostrate with grief. The land of her birth had opened to accept Fay’s tiny body.

Just one shot of penicillin in 1941 and I probably would have known the little girl, my sister, that I don’t remember but have heard about all my life.