Sometimes things hurt harder to explain than to just endure

To The Daily Sun,

Thank you for printing Alan Vervaeke's column, "At What Point Will We Believe Them?" As I read it, what came to mind was something I witnessed while taking care of my dying mother. She was born in 1913 in New York State, one of eight children raised on a Tug Hill Plateau farm that included cows with a focus on crops too. An everything farm. She liked to say that during the Depression it wasn't much different for them, because they'd always been low on money but would never go hungry. During the Depression, extended family members came to live with them and do farm work and be able to eat.

One night when she was close to her January 11, 1994, death, she appeared to be having a nightmare. She had a day-bed in the dining room, and I slept nearby. She fought the covers and was agitated. Her eyes shut, she cried out, "He shouldn't be here! Billy shouldn't be coming through the window into the girls' room!" Her fright was huge. All I know of this Uncle Billy of hers is that in his elderly years he made obscene phone calls — but made them to family members, as those were the phone numbers he knew. I was at Grandma Webster's house once when he called, and she said to her brother, "Oh, Billy. Get off the phone. Find something else to do."

Her Uncle Billy seems to have invaded mother's space when she was a girl, and what else? — we won't know. A girl-child didn't draw attention to herself, and maybe it's still that way, hurt harder to explain than to just endure and put at a distance with time's passing.

Lynn Rudmin Chong

Sanbornton