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She stayed with them a
week. She told the story to Uncle Morton. He wanted Mommy to write
it all down.
Uncle Morton was a psychiatrist, and he had a big clinic and
a secretary. So Mommy went with him next day to his office. She
told the story into a Dictaphone, and the secretary typed it. It
was twenty-two pages.
That was the beginning of this book. Uncle Morton was interested
in "extrasensory perception," something about knowing
about things we don't see around us, but Mommy was interested only
in getting the story told. She just couldn't keep it to herself.
She had to tell it.
This is the way she told it, like the way she talked about
it, because she told it into the machine, and a lot of sentences
run into each other. Mommy likes to talk a lot, but I don't mind
it. I like it most of the time.
These are the twenty-two pages:
Linda became ill in June 1950. A few weeks before she became
desperately ill, she had asked me to find the little book in the
set of the miniature "Golden" books that she had loaned
to a friend of ours, a woman who had a little girl named Suzie.
The woman's name was Louise Miller. Linda suddenly requested that
I try to find Mrs. Miller because she wanted those little books
very badly. They had been given to her by a friend in Urbana, Illinois,
a Miss Foltz, a woman there who took care of children, who had become
very fond of Linda and of whom Linda was very fond. It-the little
set-had been given to Linda as a parting gift when we had left Illinois
to come to Baltimore to live.
She wanted me to find Mrs. Miller, and I made an effort to,
but it seemed that the woman had moved away from the apartment building
where Linda and I had been living for a year, and she was not to
be found. Later on, Mrs. Miller asked to keep the books after hearing
about Linda's death so that she could feel close to Linda, but then
she didn't know how close!
Linda suddenly became terribly ill in June and died in November.
I had forgotten completely about the little books because, of course,
I was with her all the time and there was no question about them
again. She seemed to have forgotten.
On November 16th, she died. She died a beautiful
death. She was happy, and she went to her rest with a smile on the
face. Her last words were, "Go rest, Mommy, and smile."
I, of course, was exceedingly distraught and felt that I couldn't
find an answer after the child had been taken away-she was a wonderful
child, an only child. I sought many ways, many places to find some
peace, and, one day, a very good friend of the family, a very good,
kind sort of person, Edward T. Norris, dined with us as we all sat
at the kitchen table Linda and I had ordered shortly before her
death. The table and three chairs were delivered almost exactly
at the moment she died on November 16. Of course, we weren't there.
We were at the hospital. It was brought back to the house much later
on, weeks later.
As Edward ate with us, he told me that he thought it would
be good for me to attend an Episcopal Church in the city of Baltimore
where he had been going all of his life; he had been taken there
when he was just a little tot by his mother. I decided that it might
be a very good thing for me to do. I went to the church on a Sunday
morning, and there I prayed very deeply that I would receive some
help from God because I desperately needed it to go on living after
losing Linda.
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