The Lost Time of TB

By Eileen Sypher

This book is a daughter's late-life piecing together of her father's short life. These were years of lost time, time when she knew only the silence surrounding him. He died in 1952 from tuberculosis, leaving behind a wife, a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son. Like so many who suffered from tuberc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose River Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597132671

Book preview

Prologue

Our dead continue to live on in us. We remember them. Sometimes we may even speak to them, even though we know they can’t speak back. For years, though, I seemed barely even to remember my father. He had become too much like the name we share, a cipher. The photographs of him, of us, were stored away in inaccessible albums. He left me no written words and but a few dim memories. And none who knew him well spoke of him much to me.

At 5 ½, in 1952, I lost my father to the world’s still most rampant disease, tuberculosis. A culture of sparing children grief, a mother’s need to survive herself, the quiet stigma in a community that shrouded tuberculosis: all had the effect of sealing him up in the grave.

I do not know why I should, seventy years later, have felt a compulsion to resurrect him. Perhaps it was the unrelenting culture of death during the current pandemic, the witnessing of so many children losing parents, the fear that stigma would once again silence talk of how they died. Perhaps it was some altruistic need to show other young people how to remember. Perhaps it was the insistent series of small eruptions over the years. Perhaps it is my nearing my own end time. Whatever the causes, because of this book he now fills part of the frame of my life as he never did before. And I am grateful. I am completed. A lopped-off limb has grown back. Do I know him now? I do not know. But in my struggling to imagine, to piece-together, the life he lived and the illness that killed him I have come much closer.

I remember, or maybe I imagine, the moment I heard the news. I was in the farmhouse kitchen when the door opened, the handle turned by my uncle. My mother followed him inside. It was a hot day in June. My grandmother, standing by the Dahlstrom table with the red vinyl chairs, had just finished making strawberry shortcake. I remember no words. I only saw her drop the shortcake on the floor. I felt as if I were in a cloud in the ceiling or hiding behind a door.

Then I said nothing even when someone, I think the minister, told me when he took me out for a drive later that afternoon. Six months later I said to my mother, take me to Daddy’s grave. And then I said little about him after that. My mother would often say, not a day goes by that I don’t think of your father. I didn’t say anything then either.

Underground rivers have their way. When I was in my 40s and in therapy, two therapists coaxed me while I lay on the floor under blankets, eye shades and headphones on. The therapists made notes of my smallest movements and words. Very quickly I became a small child again, lying in my bed in a room utterly without light. There was no one else in the house. Foxes were crying outside my window. As I shuddered, one of the therapists whispered, do not be afraid, this is a place you already know. I knew then what that dark absence was inside of me. I stayed in that intimately known, so familiar place for a while. But. at the end, I was suddenly sitting in daylight in the open field behind the house. White light exploded within and all around me. A little chink of light had gotten through.

During the summer after, my mother called to tell me that the swamp maple my father had planted by our house had been cracked open by lightning. He had carried the little maple from the edge of that field. It was now fully grown. I wrote my first poem about that tree, about my father’s ancient gesture: planting a shade tree for our new home. We tried to save the tree for years but failed. I wept when it was felled.

Ten years later, seeing a different therapist, I brought in two photographs taken by my mother in different years. I do not know what prompted me to do this. My mother, the photographer, is standing in the same place on the lawn in each. In the earlier one, she has pointed the camera at my father kneeling by our birdbath. He is supporting me, six months old, so I can stand securely to face the camera. Smiling, he looks strong, sinewy, his shirtsleeves rolled up. My face, too, is one large smile. In the other, later photo, I am about eight. She has pointed the camera at me. I stand alone on the sidewalk across the driveway. I am looking at that same birdbath, which now is empty. My posture is slouched, my mouth drooping. All the early photographs of me are like this, after 1952.

Then there were the accidental moments. I was at a dance outside of Baton Rouge, La. I saw a young father sweep his young daughter off the floor and dance around the room holding her. In another, I was driving by a frozen lake in Connecticut. I saw another young father skating with his young daughter. Agonizing, suddenly piercing these.

After my mother died in 1996, I became curious about my father’s family, who had been largely absent from our lives. I began to visit his remaining brothers and sister, who lived not ten miles from me. I began, tentatively, to ask them questions about him (with no response). I grew interested in that family’s genealogy so I could make up a past for him, a life lived long before me. He became more solid this way, though more separate. I traced his middle name, Reuben, to his great grandfather, a sawmill keeper, for whom he was clearly named. Reuben, a name I loved as a child but which perplexed me because I’d never heard it spoken elsewhere. I imagined my father’s grandmother Mary meeting her husband Abraham when she went to buy a hat in his shop in Brooklyn. I hunted for photographs. In the earliest one I found of him, he was about ten, bundled up in a winter coat and hat, shoulders slightly hunched, looking somehow overwhelmed. He seemed shy of the camera, uncomfortable. Was he sick then?

And then, over ten years later: the decisive eruption. I had taken a young girl shopping in Meriden, Connecticut. She had been my neighbor. One day as we were leaving the mall near where she lived, car window open, she reached her hand out the window and, pointing to a wooded area off to her right, started talking excitedly. I walked in there once. Awful things went on there. It is abandoned now, but they used to treat the patients horribly, mental patients.

At that moment it happened. I said, Undercliff. That is Undercliff. Indeed it was. A place I had forgotten about. Undercliff Sanatorium for Tuberculosis, later mental hospital. I knew the place too well.

My mother would take me there sometimes. It was 1951 and 1952. She could go inside. I could not. I was five, sitting alone on the blanket she had laid down for me on what seemed a vast lawn. I was looking up at small windows in a tall brick building, the highest building I’d ever seen. I was looking up for a face I couldn’t see, a face that was looking down on me, a face I would never see again.

Red brick, tall, the sanatorium was intimidating to a small child used to a small house in a field, a house in which I could go in and out of rooms. These walls kept me out. This door was locked to me. I keep trying to find pictures of it as it was then, in 1951. But all I have are earlier photos, when it was made of wood, and then later, interior photos when it briefly housed the elderly. All those beds were lined up in one large room. My father’s years are not photographed. For a time the abandoned site became the stuff of ghost hunters. Abysmal decay. Graffiti on the walls. Chairs with their stuffing torn out. Boxes of records scattered over the floors. Ceilings falling down. Dirt. Decay.

My mother went inside during those days in the early 1950s, but she did not talk about it. In 1994, two years before she died, she wrote me a set of vignettes of her life. She tucked them under the attic eaves—hoping, she wrote, I would find and read them when I too was eighty (I beat her estimate by a few years). My brother, who still lives in our birth house next door to mine, found the box and brought it up to me one afternoon, as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing. There it was, in her lovely handwriting, the stories of her life.

There is just one brief chapter on her life with my father. It was a good, if short life, she says, and he was a good man. But there is absolutely no mention of his having had TB when she met or married him. She says only that when they lived in New Mexico before my birth, he was gaining weight. Then nothing, until she