Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of NervousnessCarroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Science
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Carroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Nervous system -- Hygiene
The following Sunday afternoon seemed propitious for the beneficent
work of the soul-doctor. The whole family had told Mrs. Judson how
much better she was looking-the Doctor had kept her on soft diet since
her attack. "You have told me so little of yourself," said Dr. Bond.
"I only know that sorrow came." He then told her of herself as she had
lived in his memory. She had forgotten the beauty of her childhood.
The Doctor brought back the picture in tones which could stand only
for high reverence. She felt he wanted to know, and she knew she
wanted to tell. So for two hours they sat, hand in hand, as in their
childhood, and he heard of her father's moderate success as an
editorial writer after he came West when she was nine, of their
comfortable home in Detroit, how well she had done in school, of her
early ability as a teacher, of her election as super-intendent of the
St. Claire Academy for Girls when she was twenty-five, of her marriage
to Herman Judson, a childless widower fifteen years her senior, before
she was thirty, of their very happy home, of her own little girl and
how she grew into womanhood, of her daughter's marriage, and then of
tier little girl, and how wonderful it was to be a grandmother before
she was fifty!
Then it was "Nurse, the bottle for 'Tightness of breath'... I don't
see how I can tell it. You can't know. Nobody can. It was never the
same for any one else. The train went through a bridge, and they were
all three killed, my husband, my only girl, the darling grandchild.
God turned His face away that night they brought them home. I've never
seen Him since. I've never looked for Him since. I don't see how I
kept my mind. Something snapped inside. I couldn't go to the funeral,
and while I brought my sister home to live with me, and after she
died, have done the best I could to raise Irma, her child, and Irma's
tried, I know, to be a daughter to me, yet I've always been so lonely,
so wretched and miserable and sick. I haven't anything to live for-but
I'm afraid to die."
Then began the cheapening catalog of the nearly twenty years of
illness, her weak and sensitive spine, her constant difficulty in
breathing, and the eternal thumping of her heart. And on and on, the
list so old to Dr. Bond's ears, so commonly heard in the experience of
helpers of the nervous sick-as usual to the nerve-specialist as the
inflamed appendix to the modern surgeon--yet in the mind of every
nerve-sufferer so unique, so individual, so different. But of all the
long, two-hour story, one short sentence stood out, eloquent in the
doctor's mind, "I haven't anything to live for, yet I'm afraid to
die." He gently thanked her. He had felt with her in the recital of
her great sorrow, and she knew he had suffered in her suffering. "You
can get well. You can find something worth living for, and you can
lose your fear of death, if you will pay the price." For the moment
she misunderstood.
"Why, Doctor, I would gladly give thousands for health."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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