My sister, Mary Ruth, was born on this day in 1955. She squeezed a lot of living within the short span of her life. She traveled throughout Europe and the South Pacific. She camped in the Boundary Waters. She received her degree from St. Catherine’s College as an Occupational Therapist, specializing as an O.T for cardiac patients, and received and M.A. in Education from the University of St Thomas. At the time of her death in 1997, she was working on a Doctorate.
She did all of this even though she suffered greatly from Crohn’s disease. While we can’t pinpoint when her illness began, it was misdiagnosed for a number of years, she began to get sick around the age of 15 years. Over the next 25 years, she had one to two surgeries a year cutting out the diseased part of her small intestine and resectioning her small intestine. At the time of her death, she had three feet of small intestine left. She would spend an average of six to eight weeks in the hospital a year.
The last ten years of her life she was on medical disability. While she could eat, the disease prevented her small intestine from passing on the nutrients of the food to her body. She got her nourishment through hyperalimentation, in which the nutrients were intravenously passed into her body. The downside to hyperalimentation is that it sucks the calcium out of the bones. At the time of Mary Ruth’s death, her bones were brittle from advanced osteoporosis. She would cough and break a rib.
Mary had an indomitable spirit and refused to let her illness define who she was and what she could do. With the help of her two best friends, both doctors, she did a lot of world travel. To this very day, they will gather at her grave and sing all their favorite songs. Since Mary Ruth was born on Flag Day, inevitably, “Your A Grand Old Flag” and other similar songs will be sung at her gravesite.
Because Mary Ruth was a trained medical person, she knew far more about Crohn’s and her Crohn disease than did her internist. Over all the years of her being treated for the illness, she developed numerous allergies to the medications she received. When she would go down to surgery, her medical history files would travel down with her, twelve inches of medical files stacked on top of each other.
As difficult as her life was, she loved life and to quote Dylan Thomas, was not willing to go “gently into that dark night.” She was on medical disability the last ten years of her life. She researched everything she could about her illness and was ready to try all sorts of new treatments to extend her life.
Mary Ruth would take my kids out for movies, to Dayton’s Downtown Minneapolis at Christmas to see all the decorations on the fourth floor of the department store. There were the numerous family formal portraits at Como Park in St Paul and other locations. The picnics she would plan at which the bees and the ants had the most fun and food. She was the one that kept our family connected to our greater family in Pittsburgh and Virginia. When mom and dad celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, two years after Mary Ruth’s death, I missed Mary Ruth’s ability to organize big family gatherings. She really knew how to throw a party.
Finally, Mary Ruth’s illness prevailed. The doctors were unable to stop the internal bleeding caused by the illness and Mary was transferred from ICU to the hospice wing of St Joseph’s Hospital. After the nurses had settled Mary in her room, Mary looked around the room and greeted all our dead relatives present. She turned to my mother and I and said, “They are playing my song, but I am not ready to hear it yet.” My mom said to me, “It must be the morphine.” I replied to mom, “It’s morphine, mom, not LSD. She is beginning to see beyond our world to the next. Your mom and dad, your sister, Greta are all there to welcome her.” Mary Ruth was not ready to her their song. She still had two days of life left. Those two days were tough for her. I remember Mary Ruth’s last words. She woke up, looked at me and asked for some Seven-up and ice chips. Then she said to me, “You know this really sucks don’t you?” I replied, “Yeah, I know.” She took a sip of the Seven-up, ate a couple of ice chips, and slipped off into a coma from which she never woke up.
This is a song I composed as a birthday present for my sister in 1988. Happy birthday Mary!!!
