About Donna

Donna was born in 1944 to a mother who had at least thirteen children, and turned them all over to the State. Donna was raised by a foster family, suffering a full complement of abuse that is best left to your imagination.
She somehow survived, as she did all things until the brain tumor, and grew into a lovely young woman with wild dark hair and intense dark eyes whom no one expected much of. So people were surprised when she talked her way into nursing school despite being underaged, and became a skilled LPN with a talent for geriatrics, and strong enough to do double shifts on a regular basis.
But she felt emotionally empty and decided to have a child “who will love me forever,” as she’d say. The child was a son. She soon discovered she could not be a full-time nurse and a full-time mother to John, so when she met an older divorced man with three children who said he’d adopt John if she’d marry him, she accepted.
This proved to be a mistake she suffered through for thirteen years, but it led her to me.
Her husband turned out to be a career con artist, specializing in building trade scams. Donna’s job was to maintain a facade of normalcy and protect the children from the truth. Eventually she decided she needed more than enabling out of life, and signed up for community college.
Academically she was totally unprepared. Her writing and study skills were nonexistent. All she had was considerable native intelligence and a surfeit of determination. Fortunately, the college’s Freshman Comp. course was designed for such willing but unable students, and her prof was game to work with anyone who wanted to work with him. Work was second nature to Donna, and in the end she got her AA in Psych and Sociology, plus several courses toward her BA.
I was her Freshman Comp. prof.
I was married at the time.
My wife and I would occasionally socialize with Donna and her husband. She was a good-hearted flake; he was a windbag with the overripe scent of travelling salesman. We didn’t socialize much.
A couple of years later my life crashed. My marriage ended — my fault — which depressed me so much I couldn’t work, which ended my teaching career. After that I tried to find a hole to crawl in where I’d never be found.
Donna found me. She wanted to know what had happened to Mr. McD and, typically, wouldn’t stop till she had the answer. She couldn’t do much for me (in the end, all she did was heal my soul) but offer me hospitality.
I spend a lot of time with her after that, talking and playing 500 Rummy at her kitchen table. I began to see that this good-hearted flake was in fact remarkable, as a survivor and as a person. She was much smarter than I’d ever given her credit for. She had the toughness and guts of a street fighter, but somehow had not let her basic optimism be corrupted by her life’s traumas. Between the foster abuse, childhood rickets, a bout of cervical cancer, a hysterectomy, several fused vertebrae from a car crash, and her Byzantine married life, she made my problems seem trivial.
Something grew between us. In six months its growth had led Donna to separate from her husband. Then, after her husband absconded with her son, nearly driving her around the bend, we moved in together.
At first, suspicious of ourselves, each other, and institutionalized relationships, we lived together from month to month. We challenged and fought and got closer, partly because at that point all each of us had was the other. Essentially, that never changed.
But, heavens, the woman was strong! Could she work: at one point she was holding down two nursing and two waitressing jobs. Eventually, she saw in the paper a position for Administrative Director of a small nursing home in a neighboring state, run by Unitarians. Her AA and LPN license were her only paper qualifications; she’d never run a nursing home before. But she knew the business and how it worked; understood the relationship between such institutions and Social Security and other governmental programs, and she knew geriatrics. She talked the Unitarians into hiring her (with me as her assistant — I had a BA — and in charge of food service, a skill I’d picked up working my way through school).
So, after a year of living together, we moved south and began our new professional careers.
A year after that, Donna awoke one morning to numbness and tingling down one side. It was Multiple Scleroisis. Next it attacked her eyes, as it would several times over the years, rendering her almost totally blind by the end. At the same time, the State began requiring advanced degrees of its nursing home directors, meaning that Donna would have to get a Master’s if she wanted to keep her job. Despite pain and profound fatigue, the latter typical of MS, she was prepared to do it, but the vision problems fritzed the deal. She was unemployed.
Not for long. Donna had a kind of genius when she was on the phone, somehow able to talk anybody into anything. So she got work in a collection agency. She was so good at it that debtors sent her thank-you notes and Christmas cards: she’d help them restore their credit (but God help them if they were true deadbeats!). And even though the MS progressed, she got a second job, collecting for an established banking firm.
I’m not sure how she managed it. She was using her natural strength to get by, but gradually MS was robbing her of it, so she’d come home almost unable to move. It was sheer will, I think, that kept her going. “I have MS,” she’d say. “It doesn’t have me!”
Then an allergic reaction to a med, plus a doctor’s complacency, landed her in ICU for three weeks. Her body retained sixty pounds of fluid, and her eyelashes disappeared. Again, she was too tough to succumb, but the crisis left her a permanent diabetic and unable to manage stairs. By then, too, her eyes had descended into legal blindness. She gave up the fight and accepted disability, which she’d qualified for five years earlier. We moved into handicapped-accessible housing, and the last phase of her life began.
But if her body continued to deteriorate, her spirit seemed to grow. Remarkably, as each day took something else from her, she never had a moment of self-pity. I mean not one. She focussed on whatever good the day offered: a lovely sky, a child’s laughter, a flower in bloom, a good cup of coffee. If she ever showed pain, you knew it was a very bad day. Many times I’d be shamed into toughing out some malady or situation, because she always did. I’m not saying she never complained or felt depressed; she just never let anything interfere with getting the most out of each day.
And thus, among the many people who cared about her, her stature grew until she became a kind of spiritual touchstone. We turned to Donna because she reminded us of what determination and joy could accomplish.
Toughness, and her ferocious independence, caused admiration in her doctors too — while driving them to distraction. She was never a “whatever you say” kind of patient; everything was a negotiation with her. Generally she was right, albeit often in a believing-makes-it-so fashion.
So Donna was not always easy to deal with. Often she was her own worst enemy. Not only would she defend her independence past the point of common sense, but she was a two- to three-pack-a-day smoker, and her nutrition was horrendous. Her capacity for cake and candy would impress any five-year-old. Neatness wasn’t her forte; she’d leave trails of cigarette butts and kleenex wherever she went.
In the end, however, none of that mattered much. It was all part of Donna being Donna, and that usually was a wonderful thing. She was unique: equal parts Gracie Allen and LaVerne DiFazio (with a dash of Lucy Ricardo), Tina Turner at her toughest, and Pollyanna. She combined sweetness, craziness and grit in a most exceptional — and pretty good-lookin’ — package.
The last few years her body took hit after hit. MS is an autoimmune-deficiency disease, so its victims are vulnerable to nearly every illness that rolls down the street. We gave ground bit by grudging bit. Cane yielded to wheelchair. Major problems with hands, feet, digestive system. More and more hospitalizations. She became essentially housebound.
Then in late 2004 she started to have headaches. If we’d gotten an MRI right then, we might have had another six months together — but no more. The killer tumor had take hold. It would never let go, and no one could remove it. When we finally did the MRI the tumor had worked its way deep into her brain, invading the top of her spinal column. She lasted four more ghastly, heartbreaking months. But I was able to make sure she had her last wish: to die in her own bed, surrounded by those who loved her. Sept. 20, 2004.
I pray this blog does her justice. Donna was really something special. Without her, the world is just not quite as bright.