Water Resources People and Issues
she started to lose her motor control, was losing her ability to walk, and she
was losing memory of very common ordinary things. She had another
operation 14 months ago to remove the cyst which had developed, but it was
in a different form. It was in a more malignant form, and they told me at that
point that she was terminally ill.
I didn't really believe it last January, a year ago, when they told me that. We
put her in a nursing home where she underwent therapy to teach her to walk
again with a walker, with the hope that we could bring her home. She's been
there all this time, gradually losing function. They had to stop the therapy
because her motor control just could not control her muscles. So we have to
just leave her in the nursing home there. We visit her every day, at meal times.
Both daughters have been very, very faithful along with me in visiting, so that
she usually has two visits every day. We're not even sure now how much she
understands. She had not been able to speak since about last June or July, and
she had to be fed. My daughter's down there with her now. I missed going
today probably for the first time. Yesterday I didn't have to go at noon because
someone else was going, but I went in the evening.
When we can't get there, the nurses will feed her, but I just can't give her up.
We've been together a long time. It's been years since we started our
friendship, and over 44 years of marriage.
Well, you've obviously had a very long and successful career and also a happy
marriage and a happy home. In order to try to put things in focus, I always like
to ask one last question, and the question is, looking back on this long
successful career, do you think there's anything you'd like to change if you
could? Is there anything that you look back on with particular regret or
something that, if you had it to do all over again, you would do it differently?
A: I'm not sure. I think I told you that I was never in a position to plan my career.
I walked into the Army Engineer Office and asked them for a job, and they
hired me right away. Then I got my offers from the civil service exams, and
since then I never really applied for any jobs-except during World War II I
had tried to get into the Army Specialist Corps, and also when I found out what
a wonderful place San Francisco was, I
about the possibility of getting
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