Connie's First Baby, part one

Leta had six grandchildren, three from her daughter Vivian and three from her son Dale. Vivian’s son Donald was the oldest, and Dale’s daughter Constance was next in line. At age 19, she married Edward Demski. Nine months after the wedding, in May of 1963, their first child and Leta’s second great-grandchild Christopher was born. Leta’s daughter-in-law Kathryn was ecstatic. “I’m a grandmother!” she would gush to anyone who would listen and some who were not interested at all. Her joy was infectious, and she spent many hours showing Connie, who had never had much interest or experience with babies how to take care of the newborn.

On one particular August evening, Leta and Richard were visiting the new family. Leta had performed all the proper processes. She telephoned and asked what day and time would be best, and she also told her granddaughter that if she or the baby were not having a good day, they could postpone. They arrived at the appointed time with the intention to only stay for a couple of hours. Leta made them a peach pie.

Connie and Ed welcomed them. The baby was sleeping.

But Connie looked exhausted.

“He doesn’t like to sleep much,” Ed shared, “but he’s started to grow. And that’s good. At first, he was losing weight. That was scary, so we tried to feed him more but he wouldn’t eat more.”

“Babies always lose a little weight right after they’re born,” Leta said. “Didn’t Kathryn tell you that?”

Neither answered, and Leta was a little dismayed. She started to wonder what else her daughter-in-law had not told the new parents about babies.

“Mom told us to keep him wrapped up,” Connie added, the first she had spoken, even though it is so hot. He’s always sweaty—.”

“—and he developed a rash,” Ed interrupted. “So we rushed him to the doctor’s office. It was just heat rash, the doctor called it. Lots of babies get them. So we wiped him off with a cool washrag a couple of times a day, and started giving him a bath a day, and it went away.”

‘Mom didn’t like that. She worried about dry skin,” Connie added.

Leta noted that her granddaughter was falling asleep.

“Connie, darling,” Leta said. “You don’t have to entertain us. If you need to, you can go lie down for a quick rest. Lord knows you don’t get much of an opportunity to sleep.”

Ed stiffened.

“No, no, no, Grandma,” he said. “She’ll be all right, won’t you, honey? Why don’t you go into the kitchen and start the coffee. I’m dying to have a little taste of that peach pie your grandmother made.”

Leta stood. “Let me take care of that,” she offered. “You two just sit and relax.”

It seemed as though Ed was preparing to protest Leta’s decision, but just then they heard the baby fuss. What little energy Connie was mustering suddenly escaped her, and she sunk deeper into the sofa where she had been sitting.

“I’m up,” Leta said. “Let me get him. He’ll probably want a change.”

“I can do it,” Connie said, forcing herself to stand. By this time, the baby was wailing.

“I’ll go with you,” Leta offered. “It’s about time for me to hold my new great-grandson.”

To be continued.

Louise Loses a Child

Leta's nephew--Robert Wescotte, son of her sister Louise and Hiram Wescotte died unexpectedly. He was only 44 years old, and Louise took her son’s death very hard. Subsequently, Leta spent many hours sitting with her and trying to be a comfort.

“I always thought I would go first,” Louise told her. “No one thinks their child will die before them. It just isn’t natural.”

“I know, I know,” Leta said, sitting close to her. Leta believed her. She had witnessed her own daughter-in-law experience the loss of a child and suffer from the uncertainty of life because of it. In her own life, she had lived through the death of two beloved husbands from which she never thought she would recover.

Louise gripped her arm tightly. “No, you don’t understand. I feel Robert’s death deep inside of me. In here,” Louise stressed, putting her other hand on her womb. “This is where he came from. This part of me has gone with him. I feel empty inside. Totally empty, like a big part of me is gone.”

Fortunately, Louise wasn’t alone. Her husband Hiram was experiencing his own kind of grief, but he was there, as well as their daughter Little Leta, a grown woman, who had never married and still lived with her parents. Even though Little Leta was not much of a cook or housekeeper, with her Aunt Leta’s help, they managed to keep the family fed and the house maintained.

One evening after she had been with Louise for the better part of a day, Leta was sitting at home with her husband Richard. They had eaten their supper, and Leta cleaned up the kitchen. She had hardly said a word from the time he picked her up.

“Are you all right, Leta?” he asked, cutting through her detachment.

“Just thinking,” she answered.

“Thinking or worried?” her husband persisted gently.

“It’s Louise.”

“What happened today?”

Leta took a deep breath and then exhaled. She turned toward her husband for the first time since they started the conversation.

“She was in the living room, Hiram was outside. I was in the kitchen getting supper. Little Leta was at school for some reason or other. I started humming a hymn, you know, as I do when I’m doing housework. I didn’t think I was that loud. But at one point I turned and nearly shrieked. There was Louise, standing in the doorway, and she looked furious. Her face was red. She was tense, and held her hands in fists. Of course, when I saw her, I stopped humming. She was glaring at me. ‘No singing!’ she ordered. I think I put my hands up and backed away. She was like a rabid animal.

Richard moved from his chair to beside her on the sofa, putting one arm across her shoulder.

“That sounds pretty awful.”

“There’s more, Richard,” Leta added, her heart growing heavier. She took a long pause, and he waited for her to speak. “She says she’s not sure she can believe in God any more.”

Leta took a deep breath.

“’God hates me, and I’m done with Him.’ She actually said that.”

“She’s just hurting. I’m sure she didn’t really mean it.”

Leta pulled away from her husband and looked at him.

“You don’t know her the way I do, Richard. I felt it in my heart. She meant it.”

“She just needs time. That’s all,” he said.

They looked at each other for a few minutes, and then Leta softened and returned to her prior place leaning into her husband.

“It’s a bad situation,” Richard commented. “She’s going to say and do all kinds of things. You already know that. And I am feeling badly for her. I don’t know how I’d react if I lost a child.”

Leta Gets False Teeth

Three weeks after she married Richard Eckman in September of 1960, Leta had her remaining teeth pulled. Over the years, she had been losing them steadily to cavities and receding gums. By the time she was 60, she only had four front teeth on the top and two molars on each side on the bottom. Consequently, she wore four partials,

Richard suggested that she undergo the procedure. She had been complaining of discomfort from the way her bottom partials rubbed against her natural teeth and if she drank something too hot or cold, the front teeth ached.

“Taking aspirin isn’t doing my good, my dear,” he told her one morning when she winced as she brushed.

“It’s helping,” she commented as she rinsed.

“Look at that,” he instructed, pointing to the sink where little strands of blood swirled in the water. “You’re bleeding.”

“I brushed too hard,” she declared.

He looked at her skeptically but seemed to let the matter rest.

Fifteen minutes later, she gasped and put her hand to her mouth when she had her first sip of coffee. Her face tensed and her eyes popped.

“That’s enough, Leta,” Richard snapped. “Make the appointment.”

Richard had been wearing dentures for more than a decade, he told her, and he particularly liked how they made him look and the ease with which he could speak and eat. He explained that he had terrible natural teeth. They were crooked and cracked. At one appointment when he was in his thirties, he had ten cavities. “Those vile things were rotting in my mouth. My breath was terrible. My mouth hurt all the time. I couldn’t eat things I liked.” So he had them removed.

“Best decision I made in my life,” he declared. “Well, one of them,” he corrected, as he winked at his wife.

During the dental procedure, while her mouth swelled and ached, while she waited for the dentures, even the first few weeks after she received them, Richard took care of her. Leta hated how she looked and hated feeling ill. Aside from a cold here and there and the occasional bout of influenza, she was very healthy. Having her teeth removed made her mouth swell. She had no appetite, and when she tried to eat, her mouth objected. She numbed her aching gums with whiskey and then she could swallow soup or gelatin. Vivian made her applesauce which went down fairly well, and she could swallow mashed potatoes.

She also refused to leave the house, have anyone visit her or even speak on the telephone—in fact—she rarely talked until after the dentures arrived.

Even with these, she took several weeks to get used to them. Her gums remained tender, she choked on them, and even the slightest particle of food irritated her as much as getting a speck of dust in her eye.

One morning Leta woke and went into the bathroom. There were two highball glasses sitting on the shelf above the sink. The glass on the left held her husband’s teeth, and the one on the right held her own. She had been dreading putting them in, but this morning, when she saw the glasses, she laughed. She could not help herself. A week earlier, she overheard Richard talking to one of his children on the telephone. “…like his and hers towels,” he said, “only in glasses and on the counter. The only way we can tell them apart is that I’m on the left and Leta is on the right.”

That day the artificial teeth seemed to fit, nothing irritated her, and she ate well. The next day she went shopping. Two days later they visited Vivian and that Saturday night, they hosted her grandson Don and his very pregnant wife Pat for an evening of card playing.

She was finally in her comfortable place, and if she said so herself, looked pretty good.

Robert Has a Heart Attack, part four

Robert Fields was not injured in an accident at work. That had been a lie his coworker Smitty told Leta in order to keep her composed until she arrived at the hospital. Robert actually had a heart attack. He had just spoken to a coworker and turned away. The coworker was turning back to his own work, but caught a glimpse of something in Bob’s demeanor that kept him watching Bob. First, Bob wobbled as if he lost his balance. Then he clutched his chest as if someone had just punched him. Finally, his right leg crossed in front of the left, he twisted to the right and fell to the ground.

By the time the ambulance arrived, they could not tell whether or not he was breathing. While he was taken to the hospital, Smitty called Leta. “Tell her it was an accident,” another coworker ordered. “They can explain everything at the hospital.”

Leta waited in the hospital for more than two hours before her daughter Vivian was able to compel a physician to speak to them. When the doctor told her that her husband had died and not from injuries sustained from something at work, but from a heart attack, Leta felt more stunned than she should have. She was stunned that her husband had died, but she also felt betrayed by the deceit perpetrated against her. In fact, her feelings were so twisted that she seemed as though she hadn’t heard.

“Ma?” Vivian said gently, her own eyes filled with tears. “Are you all right?”

Leta felt a tear roll down her right cheek, and she instinctively put her hand there to wipe it away.

“Yes, of course, darling,” she answered without turning her head toward her daughter, staring straight at the cold pale wall of the waiting room.

“Do you understand what the doctor just said?” Vivian asked, becoming more alarmed by the second.

“Well, I’m not deaf,” Leta replied. “He just said that Bob wasn’t injured at work, that there was no accident. He just had a heart attack all on his own. All by himself. And now he’s gone.”

Suddenly, the realization of what happened struck Leta like a missile, and she exploded.

“He’s gone? He’s gone! He’s gone.”

Leta did not cry or sob. She wailed like a child, thrashing her body in her chair violently. Vivian reached for her, but the grief was too strong. She could not restrain her mother. The doctor stepped back defensively. A few minutes later, when her physical reaction had ceased and she was simply weeping openly, she felt the doctor pull back her sleeve, pat her forearm and poke her with a needle.

“This will calm her down a little bit. Then you can take her home,” a voice said.

From that moment, Leta knew that her life once again would go into turmoil.

Robert Has a Heart Attack, part three

Leta sat in the hospital waiting room. Her husband Robert had been injured at work and was with the doctors. A friend of his telephoned her at home while she was preparing supper. She had dropped everything and taken a taxi to the destination. So far there was no word. She did not know the extent of her husband’s injuries and now, after being at the hospital for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, she did not know how long she had been there. She remained in the seat where the nurse guided her upon her arrival. She looked around the room from time to time. She heard bits and pieces of conversations that occurred around her. She heard doors open and close and stretchers and wheelchairs being maneuvered around. The telephone rang, and someone answered it.

“Ma?” Vivian said, and Leta jumped in her seat, startled out of the trance she had fallen into as she waited.

“Vivian?” Leta questioned and for the first time in her life she felt old. She was only 52, and while she had been tired many times, she had never felt old.

Vivian sat down beside her before she could rise.

“Thank you for coming,” Leta murmured. “Where is Don?”

“With the neighbors,” Vivian answered. “What happened? On the telephone the nurse said that there was some kind of accident?”

Leta told her daughter all that she knew, which in Vivian’s mind was far from acceptable.

“How long have you been here?” Vivian asked.

“What time is it?”

“Quarter after four,” Vivian answered.

‘How did you get here?” Leta asked.

“I took a taxi.”

“That’s so far.”

“Ed is still at work. I had to.”

“Where is Don?”

“With the neighbors.”

This felt safe. She was talking about something else. Talking about transit and her grandson. Leta felt as though a breeze of simplicity was lifting her off of her chair and away from all of the uncertainty and fear that had been holding her in her place. She wanted to float away from all of this, wake from it in her own life of husband, laughter, housekeeping, and grandchildren. That was where she belonged.

“Ma, what time did you get here?” Vivian inquired, yanking her back to the emergency room, where she was anxiously waiting for information about her husband.

“Since quarter after three,” Leta answered.

“That’s two hours!” Vivian exclaimed. “And you haven’t heard anything?’

“No.”

“Are you all right for a minute?” Vivian said. “I’ll be right back.”

She patted Leta’s hand and stood. Leta considered watching her, but could not bring herself to doing anything other than what she was already doing—sitting and waiting.

To be continued.