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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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