A Snippet From The Life Of Teresa Horan

If I don't record this while I'm thinking of it, it will never be remembered. This was told to me by my mother but also by Dot, I think:

When my grandmother was pregnant with her 5th child, a year after having lost her baby boy at 3 days of age, she had a stroke. It was July when it happened. The only thing to be done with her was to put her to bed. She was 36, and the year was 1920.

A month later, a little girl was born, 2 months premature. She lived for 5 minutes.

My grandmother spent a year in bed recovering from the stroke. I believe Aunt Mar stayed home from work to care for her. At the end of the year she got up and put her life back together. From then on she walked with a cane and had a 'withered' left hand - something I remember vividly from my toddlerhood.

So that's the background. The story I want to record is what happened shortly after she was on her feet again:

A young girl, maybe 12, a neighbor from up the street, got appendicitis. My mother, who was about 10 (or possibly Dot, who would have been about 5 or 6), came home and said to her mother, Anne Boyle (or whatever her name was) died last night.

My grandmother was aghast! Just the day before the girl had been fine, and all this, the attack and the infection and death, had occurred overnight.

So my grandmother put on her black coat and her black hat. I know she had on black tie-up shoes because she always did - ones with a bit of a heel, a rather blocky heel. Then she took her cane, and made her way out the door, across the wide front porch (where I sat years later playing Hearts with Aunt Mar and Cousin Bobby Strauss), down the front steps, down the concrete walk, down the step at the end, and up the sidewalk to the home of this young girl to console the mother, her friend.

It was not easy for her to make the short walk, but it was in her character to go and do what she could. I wanted you to know that.