August 11, 2009
Dear Cheryl,
Congratulations on reaching 65! Did any of us disabled U of I girls think that we would all still be here? We tough old birds have stuck together and supported one another since we were children—we were 18 when we met.
There are so many things that I remember about my life with you throughout the years. Allen Hall is one of them. I always remember that on weekends, you would never come out of your dorm room (before we were roommates) and I wondered how you could study that much. Yes, some of us were very naïve! Then I learned that Roger spent the weekend with you! Boy was I envious and I felt not just a little bit stupid!
I have a vivid memory of you studying in the study room in the dorm—typing a paper actually—with the speed of lightening. I had my first and last cigarette in that room—could it have come from you?
You took me home to Indiana for a few days and you put highlights in my hair. Your father was watching us and when we were all done we asked him how it looked. He said that if the point was to look older, it didn’t work! How perceptive of him. I liked my hair anyway. Your mother had a beautiful yard full of flowers and she was the inspiration for me to garden in pots, decorate our rooms with flowers, and to love visiting arboretums, etc. She gave me a wonderful gift.
Mary Lou, you and I became roommates. Three women in wheelchairs in one room was a logistical feat that we all handled quite well. Mary Lou gave me an education in dating every man on campus, a different one each night, with a new story to tell. She was quite an inspiration to me—still is but for very different reasons!
It was very frightening for all your friends when you were attacked in your bedroom and nearly strangled. Were you the only target? Was it going to be one of us next? Did we know the person? Fortunately the person never came back and life went back to normal.
Going to your wedding was wonderful. It was a huge affair, you were gorgeous, Roger was nervous, and the ceremony was lovely. And then you guys moved into the married student apartments and lived across the hall from us. What fun! We had some good evenings visiting with you and Roger, Doug and Norma. Do you remember the ribbons on the door handles?
You were fearless in your pursuit to have a baby. And what a wonderful baby she was and is. I couldn’t believe you were pregnant when you told us. How was somebody with such compromised breathing and somebody who wore a back brace going to carry a baby to term? Well you did it! If I remember correctly, you spent a lot of time in bed at the end. You and Norma are the only ones of the Allen Hall crowd who had children. We visited you for the weekend when Dawn was just a few weeks old. It was so sweet to see Roger changing Dawn, feeding her and fussing over her. I was amazed at how you cared for her, too. You figured out ways to do everything and it was a joy to see the love between the three of you.
When we lived in Chattanooga, you moved to the Atlanta area so we were in close proximity again. It was fun to have the three of you visit or for us to go to your house. Familiar faces were always nice.
We need to fast forward a bit here because we lost frequent contact for awhile. My next big recollection is the phone call from you saying that you and Roger were divorcing. What a shock! Then there was the phone call telling us that you had fallen off your van lift. We came to visit while you were home and in bed. Your parents were there taking care of you. When we arrived, you were living in the dining room in this big old hospital bed! You handled it with your usual dignity and strength.
Of course, the phone call that hurt the most was telling us that Roger had died. He was one of the first people to die who was in our circle of friends and our age. It was chilling, sad. He was too young. You were calm when we talked, but I knew that you weren’t calm on the inside.
About four years ago when we visited, I learned that you had been a Stephen Minister. I had been asked by my pastor to train as a Stephen Minister and I was thinking hard about it. Talking with you was what convinced me that I should do it. Now I am a trainer and supervisor of Stephen Ministers. I have you to thank for the joy, satisfaction and love I receive from the program.
So, now you are retired and free to go to Texas for the winter. We are envious of your warm winters! It is great that you can be with Dawn for those months and have all the adventures of a care giver in training—hehehe.
This letter is a bit disjointed—bringing up history is like that some times. But through our lives, we have remained open and honest with each other. We have shared joys and we have shared hard times.
You have been my friend, my teacher, one of my role models, and an inspiration by how you keep going in spite of what is happening to you or your family. I look forward to your (infrequent—hint) phone calls, and know that if I needed you, you would support me.
Happy celebration of your 65 years of life.
Love,
Sharon and Don
Dear Cheryl—
You are reaching the magical age of Medicare just a bit before me, so I look to you as a role model for ways of living large as a senior—many happy returns on your 65th !
Although we went in very different directions after the University of Illinois, we shared some life changing moments there that made a lasting and indelible impression on me, and no doubt on you, too. You were always a serious and devoted student while I preferred to ride around in the country with the boy-friend-of-the-moment or hang out at Steak’n’Shake rather than do my Blake homework!
I loved the semester when we shared a triple with Sharon, but I can’t recall which of you went to sleep every night with the phone lying on your pillow, connected to the soon-to-be husband. And that semester was a turning point for me politically. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements were coming into my field-of-vision and later they served as guideposts when I became involved in the disability movement. We three also shared the fear that Tim Nugent would catch us being pushed by someone and (oh my!) occasionally we managed to stay out all night without getting caught. Were we really fooling anyone?
Do you remember the summer semester, perhaps before our senior year, when you and I shared a dorm room and took a couple of courses? My motive not only was to avoid going home, but also to hang out with Dan Kaufman. You probably were serious about the courses you were taking, though Rodger featured prominently in your leisure hours. I have such strong memories of lining up for meals at the dining hall that summer, Rodger and Dan converging from one direction, you and me from the women’s dorm or just off the bus from class. Somehow every moment was fraught with hormones and summer heat, and the promise of evenings to be spent doing unspeakable things in the front seat of cars parked in the shadow of sky-high corn. That summer we four also traipsed to Chicago and stayed at the “Y.” We pushed and pushed all over everywhere while Rodger helped us negotiate monster curbs (so long before the ADA.) Those few days seemed like such a brave adventure, but why wouldn’t they? We were so young.
While our summer at Lando Place ended abruptly, it was also an important time of transition for me. I moved on to Chicago and a life I could not have imagined then, but you were always more emotionally intrepid than me, and thus better equipped to evolve more quickly into a bona fide grown up!
Thank you for having this birthday. It has given me an opportunity to dust off some of the old memories we share.
Have a blissful day and a much-deserved celebration.
Much love,
Mary Lou Breslin
Little Cheryl
It must have been when I was about three, maybe four years old, my mother and dad established a bedtime routine. After a story, we would kneel by the bed and fold our hands in prayer. We would say aloud:
“Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take.
Amen.”
Then we climbed into bed.
Soon, my mother had us add another line, one I did not understand, and one that did not rhyme or fit into the cadence of the prayer. Perhaps it was my first opening to free-verse poetry:
“Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take.
And help Little Cheryl.
Amen.”
We said this prayer every night for what seemed to be my entire childhood, and long before I really knew who Little Cheryl was, or why she needed any help.
Our parents were, even then, 1952, part of the monthly “potluck gang”. I can remember the gang mostly from the times, every six months or so, when it was Glen and Ruth’s turn to host them. The gang members would leave their children with sitters and gather at 3303 Parnell Avenue, just before my bed time, and bring food. There would always be easy laughter and a tone of practical jokes that seemed to go way back, decades back, before I was born, and that made this circle of friends seem like a gathering of siblings. My Aunt Mary and Uncle Clair were part of the gang, and of course, were, in fact sister and brother-in-law to my parents, but really, I could not tell any difference in the level of love or the joy, ease, commitment, and longevity of these other relationships. I would go to bed, maybe soon after they had shared a meal, as they were settling into the living room chairs, and knowing that the pot luck gang was in the living room was like having a huge emotional pillow I could sink into. I would say that prayer—always ending with “and help little Cheryl” but still not associating her with the potluck gang—and climb into bed. From there, I could hear the benign buzz of conversation. The men would razz each other about long-standing habits. The women would comment on food and clothing. They would argue about religion and politics, but always in the way true friends argue: for the fun of testing out ideas and breaking up certainty. [I later learned that Dean and Vic were the resident atheists, the only heathen we knew in our otherwise devout circle of friends and family, a circle that generally shared the tenants of Methodism and Lutheranism and whose lives were ordered by the gentle weekly cycles of religious practice. I’m pretty sure Vic was just going along with Dean on this atheism theme, and was getting some joy out of goading the pious, who were plentiful. But, as a brother, he was loved just as dearly, despite (or maybe because of) his wrong-headedness.]
Although the potluck gang was made up of all white protestants, they were a group of young friends who had stuck together through the tribulations of the War, and returned to take very diverse paths in life, some entering the professional and managerial upper-middle-class and others remaining in the fold of the working class, some who had attained advanced college degrees, others with only high school. All the women were prim, in that they insisted their children be polite, take schooling seriously, speak correct English and go to church. Their schedules were like clockwork, and one non-negotiable item was the monthly potluck gathering. What I did not know, then, was that, lurking behind this idyllic scene of domestic bliss was the Specter of terrible disease that had been taking children and twisting and destroying lives, disease that punished close contact, and that could take anyone’s child at any time, disease that had laid into the nerve and sinew of a great president, who successfully had hidden this fact from most of the public. By the time I came to an age of consciousness, a vaccine had been found; the Specter had dropped into the background like dark shading on wallpaper, having etched deep in the heart of every parent the idea that happiness must always be set in the context of possible horror. At the time, I could not have known how love forces a parent to the extremities of urgency for the safety of one’s child. To this day, I can’t imagine what it would be to have lived in a time when, in addition to the myriad treacheries facing my children, this Specter was actively prowling, prowling every neighborhood. I later learned that a law partner of my father had lost twin girls to this disease, and I then began to grasp why that lawyer and his English wife wore visages weighted by the unfathomable.
Every night, I did as I was guided to do, and I repeated this line, the one that did not rhyme, at the end of that sing-song prayer: “…and help Little Cheryl.” And God listened, and answered this prayer, not in the way my mother had imagined, but still….
I think it was not until my family became committed to Lake Wawasee, and began to rent cottages for two weeks, for a month, and then for a whole summer, that the potluck gang began to gather there, with kids, and then I saw Little Cheryl, swung up from the family sedan into the cheerful arms of her dad, Ade, comic banter chittering between them, bringing the party’s vibes up one notch, followed by Doris, holding her gooey casserole out from her perfectly cut new yellow dress, with sister Candy in tow, smiling shyly. I never put two-and-two together [the “help Little Cheryl” prayer and this shining, brilliant, humor-charged child who was riding on her father’s back]. This did not ever look, to me, like a little girl who needed any help from me or God. She was in charge of her life, with her father as her great ally.
As time passed, I learned how true this insight was. While Ade valiantly lifted little Cheryl, with all her hardware, long after she wasn’t so little, and after age had taken some of the timbre out of his muscle, it became clear that there was another kind of lifting that had gone on within their souls, one that somehow powered this young woman to take charge of her adult life and to continue to move through time and space as if carried by someone. Networks of friends, a mastery of technology, a bright, educated mind, a will of pure steel, and that intrepid sense of humor, has continued to carry Little Cheryl into sixty-five years of love, of joy, of anger, of creativity, of leadership, of child-bearing and of raising her own with that same pot luck spirit: The birth of a girl who has become a true, beautiful, actual, angel.
Little Cheryl: All I have ever given you was this prayer. You have given me inspiration. You keep reminding me, without even trying, that I am of value, that friendship is all there is, that there are no excuses for wallowing in misery, that life is a trajectory of chosen joy and laughter (even as the Specter mucks about in the shadows) and that, long after the Great Generation has passed, the potluck spirit lives on, so long as we have our cell phones, our cars, vans, wheelchairs, a restaurant table, and our beating hearts.
Thank you, my sister. Much love. Happy Birthday.
John Beams
July, 2009