The Year of Living Deeply

“Stripped of everything, I love my nakedness and this November rain.” Depending on how you slice the syllables, it makes a haiku. I wrote this at the end of 1969 and it fully expressed what I was feeling. After a year of illness, I was about to leave for California. I had no prospects, was leaving loves and friends I had made. But my sister Solveig was in San Francisco and between us, we quickly made up a life. A new apartment, nursing school for her and a job at a legal publishing company for me. It had, nevertheless, been quite a year and I was as blank as a piece of paper.

My troubles began the previous fall, when I took a job in the Chicago Public Library after completing my M.L.S. Almost immediately I began to have eye infections. They would clear up and I could work. But I didn’t dare go to the demonstrations that accompanied the 1968 Democratic convention. My friend Susan went, but I had all I could do to go to work and pay for my apartment in Hyde Park. The infections, which were thought to be a herpes virus lodged in my right eye, never quit. The eye doctor plied me with steroids, but by December he was scared. He told me I should go home. I quit my job and left the city.

When Dad and Mother picked me up at the train in the middle of the night, I was in such pain they took me to a doctor’s house. He roused himself and gave me an intense painkiller which made me feel like the yolk of an egg, and safe, driving home with my parents. Was the pain worse because it was in my head?

Our home in Iowa was still full of kids, the four younger ones of our clan. I wore sunglasses so no one could see how leaky and terrible my eyes looked. Always nearsighted, I couldn’t read or do anything. I had a room in the basement, and I figured my efforts must go into trying to keep myself from dampening the spirits of our lively household. 

With characteristic creativity, my Dad signed me up with Iowa institutions for the blind and soon, boxes of long playing records, the audiobooks of the day, began to arrive. I could choose the books from a limited list. I know my brother listened to some of Tolkien’s The Hobbit with me. But mostly my sisters and brothers were busy while I lay around in the dark, listening. The most extraordinary book was Tolstoy’s War and Peace on 69 records, read by Alexander Scourby, whose voice I can still hear in my head!

My Dad also began to foster a photography hobby he and I shared. He set up a darkroom in the laundry where the first modern washer and dryer my Mother had ever had gleamed. She was teaching at this time. The only ones home during the day were me and Dad. He brought home the Des Moines Register every day and I avidly struggled to read enough to find out how the trial of the Chicago Seven was going. I also bothered Dad playing my Cream and Music from the Big Pink records. My friend Marshall sent underground newspapers from Detroit, which bothered him even more!

By summertime, the family removed to our lake cabin in northern Minnesota. There was no plumbing at the time. We had an outhouse and bathed in the lake. But I soon found that, since the only way I had of keeping down the pain (which was from inflammation and swelling) was the hot water of a shower and frequent hot water applications, I couldn’t stay. When Dad went back to Iowa for pastoral duties, I went with him to our more civilized house. I remember a day when I felt just exhausted from dealing with the constant pain, Dad handed me a vodka drink he had concocted. It was amazing, completely fixed me.

In August, the virus had finally run its course. I began to be pain-free. I had an appointment at the University of Iowa hospital at the end of the summer. They decided that the ulceration in my cornea had worn it so thin that it might just break. Instead of me losing the eye, they proposed a fairly new corneal transplant surgery. That night they prepped me for the transplant of the cornea of a young man who had lost his life in a water-skiing accident. His donation was part of the Lions’ efforts to help the blind. More than 50 years later, I still have that man’s cornea.

As the eye healed, I began to be able to read, an eye patch on one eye. I read my next Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina, with my own left eye. And I began to think about what to do next. My parents, who had so generously put me up all year, were happy with my progress too. The virus had scared us all. Would Connie, whose life had looked promising, be handicapped forever? It was this question, plus dealing with fairly constant pain for months, which had stripped me clean.

Feeling shaky but resolute, I flew to San Francisco. I did not lie to myself about what had happened, however. Herpes is known to infect opportunistically. There is hardly a clearer case of someone’s body taking over where the self is having conflict. The inner self must give in while the body tries to sort itself out. A demonstration of human wholeness. For my parents, it was easier to treat the whole episode as a physical phenomenon, but I knew otherwise.

I have often said I had to move from the 19th to the 20th century. We were a modern, post-war family, but our values were left over from Scandinavian immigrants. I wanted to be “of today,” but “today” looked nothing like the small towns I grew up in, where the churches and schools ruled our social lives. I had never met a Jewish person or had a black friend.

At the university, in Michigan, my roommate Susan had had Howard Zinn for a teacher. He was involved in civil rights and trying to rewrite history from the bottom up. She was in love (at a distance) with Tom Hayden. I went straight to Planned Parenthood and got a prescription for birth control pills, which freed me for more realistic randy behavior. I went to the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., that year, and hitchhiked back to Ann Arbor with Marshall the day Robert Kennedy was killed. I had moved into the 20th century, but I could not share these things at home. 

My parents and myself felt the “generation gap” keenly. My next two sisters, Solveig and Naomi, were on paths similar to mine. It remained to our younger siblings who still live in the Midwest to knit us all back together. But the year I lived at home, troubled and lonely, also helped. I was very grateful to my family and I think they could also see who I was becoming. I was learning, as Pasternak wrote to a friend in 1959, that “everywhere in the world one must pay for the right to live on one’s own naked spiritual reserves.”