Nancy Douglas De Baca
I've been a prolific letter writer since I was ten, ever since my best childhood friend moved away. I write to people with very little encouragement. Thus, I had been in yearly contact with a Presbyterian minister's wife, whom I haven't seen since I left Charleston, Illinois in March, 1983. She just passed away earlier this year; I found out through an email from her daughter. This is my eulogy for her; she was 93. Without her, I would have never found the medical care for my son while he was still small.
How I ended up in Presbyterian hands
I was raised Methodist, and when I became a difficult teen, I no longer wanted to go to the same church as my mother, so I found a holdout Methodist (not United) to attend. My future stepsisters went to a Lutheran church with their Mom. When Gregg married Mom, we all became Presbyterian. (1977) I wandered away as an adult to a different church, (1979) but found that this church would not marry me (1980) because Steve and I had moved in together before marriage. (We had no choice about getting married, as the landlord insisted we get married or it voided the lease.) Actually, no church would marry a couple living in sin, so we went back to the Presbyterian church, who would overlook it because of my parents. My parents, being pillars of the church and such.
My stepfather bought a business in Tucson, and my mother and younger siblings (jr. high age) moved out there shortly after. I stayed behind; part of the reason I got married is to have someone stick up for me when Mom tried to bully me into switching colleges and coming along with the family. So I had no family around when I was pregnant with Jeremy. After I had him, I stayed in Charleston until he was a year old. Then I finally gave up and moved to Tucson. (1983)
Betty took care of me in the way that minister's wives were expected to behave; she made sure someone brought me food when I was pregnant and broke. She also helped me in her professional capacity as a speech and language person. Because of my prenatal rubella, Jeremy was born partially blind and deaf, with microcephaly. (His body was in the 25th percentile, and his head was in the tenth.) He had one eye that was rudimentary, with even the nerves and muscles not growing (where he wears the glass eye shell now), and the other eye was too small, and the iris pointed at his nose, so he looked cross-eyed. (Thanks to treatment and exercises, he can see with that one eye now.)
As a speech and language person, Betty knew that if Jeremy couldn't hear that he wouldn't develop speech correctly. She had me hold Jeremy on my chest when I talked or sang so he could feel the vibration. (Which moms do anyway.) Within a month of his birth, she was in contact with one of three doctors in Illinois who were rubella experts, and despite my being on indigent medical coverage, she got me in to see them. The "deafness" was fixed with surgery when Jeremy was three months old. (He was born with an ear infection, and he got tubes through his eardrum like many other children do, to drain the pus -- then everything healed correctly by the time he was two.)
I lived in a run-down trailer post-divorce, and it had a trick stove. I never did figure out how to get the oven to work. So if I wanted a Thanksgiving turkey all for myself or anything else baked, I did it at Betty's house. Betty put together the baby shower that I had.
When my son was a year old, I had surgery. They used a different anesthesia back then, and I had an allergic reaction to it. I could not lift up my head without vomitting for 24 hours. While alone with a year old child. So Betty stayed there with me.
