!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Jessamyn West's Mother

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Jessamyn West's Mother

In 1931, when she was about to turn 29, the author Jessamyn West was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. She spent the next two years in a sanatorium in Los Angeles, after which she was sent home to die.

Instead of succumbing to the disease, she recovered after another thirteen years of illness. West recounts the story of those years in the first half of The Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death. I read this book right after it came out in 1976 and have ever since cherished its account of how West’s mother Grace cared for her in a way that sustained her both physically and spiritually.

Grace West did not accept the terminal diagnosis the doctors had given her daughter. She threw herself into nursing Jessamyn, and also into entertaining her.

The entertainment took the form of stories about the Quakers of Indiana among whom Grace had grown up and with whom Jessamyn had lived until her family moved to California when Jessamyn was seven. These stories became the inspiration for West’s first published work, short stories collected in The Friendly Persuasion, published in 1945 and later turned into a film that was nominated for the Best Film Oscar in 1956.

Grace’s relationship with her daughter has become for me an exemplar of what dedicated, and generally anonymous, mothers do for their children. To mark Mother's Day 2006, here are some excerpts from The Woman Said Yes that show how Grace literally enabled her daughter to become a successful author:
Grace knew, though no word of mine told her anything, the limbo in which I lived; somehow, without words, she knew. Since I had no life of my own, past or future, in which to live, she gave me her own life , as a young woman, as Grace Milhous, a Quaker girl on a farm in southern Indiana at the turn of the century.

I was still not strong enough to follow a book, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, to its conclusion. But I could listen to short stories, and their narrator, a former elocution prize-winner. ...

Little by little, living with Grace, like the frog kissed by the maiden, I became human again. Not the human I once had been; my own past and my own problematical future were still areas too painful for me to enter. But Grace's past I could enter and explore and live in. It was better than movie-casting; her story was real and she, the heroine, sat by my bedside with her own gestures and accents. ...

While I lay in bed, with no life of my own to look forward to, or that I could endure to look back on, I was given this other endurable life to live in, to wonder over, to speculate about. Not yet to laugh at, though there was much Grace said that was funny. I was afraid to laugh. It would be tempting fate. It would be whistling before I was out of the woods. Grace expected me to get well, and talked to me about the time "when you are well." ...

Moving forward in time to the period just before Grace passed away ...
She died seventeen years after that operation [a mastectomy] of a disease not connected with cancer, but which did affect her memory.

In the week before her death, I, trying to identify myself to her, said, "I'm the oldest of your four children."

"The oldest?" she repeated.

"The one who wrote those Quaker stories."

She misunderstood my words, but her unconscious led her to an insight deeper than my words.

"Oh," said she, "did I get those stories written?"

"Written and published," I said.

"I always wanted to write them. But I married early and wasn't well. It slipped my mind that I did it. I thought I just dreamed I did it."

"It isn't a dream."

"I remember now. The horse race and the son's fighting in the war."

What she thought she remembered was purest fiction, something that never happened. What
had happened, the clink of her mother's wedding ring as she washed dishes, her grandfather's love of music, the whisper of snow, the rustle of shawls and full skirts in the Meetinghouse on First Day: these, the realities of which she told me, had been my dreams. It was a strange exchange. She accepted my fiction as real. Her memories and long-time musings had become my fiction.

"I'm so glad you told me," she said. "I haven't been well, and my memory's got holes in it. It makes me feel better to know I wasn't just a dreamer." ...

"I never could have done it," Grace said, her mind still on the writing and publication she had "forgotten," "except that you encouraged me by listening."

"What else could I do," I asked, "bedfast and you standing over me?"

Grace laughed. "What's the word for that?"

"Captive audience."

"We had some good times in spite of everything, didn't we?"

Jessamyn West’s husband encouraged her to submit her stories to magazines, and they started being accepted in 1940. She lived to the ripe age of 81, having become a prolific author over a period of four decades.

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