A letter to my sister, Shirley

Dear Shirley                  January 11, 2016             Fruit Heights Utah 84037

   I think about you every day – when I’m in the kitchen, when I’m at the computer, when I go for a walk.

   Does Amy show you my blogs? I wish I knew. I don’t like to be redundant but if you’re not seeing them, it’s the way I tell my story.

   Amy Lyn’s getting to be quite an artist. She does watercolors.

DeMoin, Bryant, Lynn Charles, Calvin, Stanley, Keenan, Shirley,

Mama, Jolene, Nellie, Lucy, Jeanette,

David, Amy Jayne, Jeanne, Effie

 With Brent and DeRay minus Jeanette

   Where was Charles? At a meeting? You can tell it is a Sunday at Christmastime at your house. Was he out doing chores? At the ranch? 1970

Jolene, Effie, Nellie at the piano, Jeanne, David, Amy, Brent 1970

   And that’s your history lesson for today.  Carolyn would be between David and Amy but she was singing with them in heaven.

   It took all night for the memory flood gates to open.

   This was the second year in a row we had gone to Orderville for Christmas. We were living in the garage on the outskirts of Kaysville while building the house and we told the kids that since we had no chimney no way could Santa find us. 

   When we got back home, I had a miscarriage. We were devastated. We had been married over 14 years and had had one child and adopted one child.  I lost the baby (a little girl) at home but I went to the University of Utah hospital for the D&C and on the follow-up visit I was blubbing to the doctor. (Not the doctor who had miraculously performed the surgery. I say miraculously because it was Dr. Molktar from India or Egypt, I can’t remember which, the only one in Utah to perform that particular surgery at that time. Later it was perfected and became commonplace. The very day I had the surgery, his house burned down in India. He went home and I never saw him again. Dr. Poulson took over my pre-opt care.)  “Listen young lady,” he scolded, “you are very lucky. Many women who have that extensive of surgery never recover. They never get their health back.” It was for Endometritis and they told me they scraped and removed so many tumors. They had planned to remove my appendix while they had me cut open but they did so much other stuff that took so long that they left the appendix alone. All the rest of the time I was recovering, I had a side ache and just knew I had appendicitis until they told me to forget it.  I remember standing out in the street by Aunt El’s when I was a child listening to Mama and Pearl Bolander talk. Pearl was telling this horror tale of someone’s appendix bursting who died or who almost died or who could have died. She may have been talking about Karen who lived to rear a large family.
   In my mind, I always blamed that miscarriage on the above ground atomic bomb testing at the Nevada site during that window of time. Being home, I had foolishly eaten snow off the ground like we did in childhood.

   I didn’t know a miscarriage would be like a death. You go through all the stages of grief. I became fearful and over-protective of Brent and Jeanne. We had a stream above us and a stream below us and I would frantically run down the steam looking for them when I didn’t know where they were at the moment.

   Happily, within a few months, I was pregnant again and I was indeed one of the lucky ones. Brooke was born later than year (on December 21, 1971).

   And Eddy in March of 1973 and Amy December 1974, completing our family.

   With the normal highs and lows of mortality.

   It’s worth every tear.

   I wanted to send a picture of us in England or Washington DC but they were downstairs and I’m upstairs so that will be for another time.

   We had a lot of good times together. San Diego. Washington DC. Nauvoo. Branson. But the best was our visit with Zena in Scotland.

   DeRay sends his love. He had two cancer surgeries on his face in December which healed nicely but he’s having a hard time getting around and can’t raise his arms and things like that. We’re thinking old age isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

   With much love and admiration,

                                 Jeanette