#illness

Dorothy Harrison

By 2018 she needed an oxygen tank just to walk into town, and getting to her specialist appointments forty minutes away usually meant relying on volunteer drivers from church, since Dad was often out working and I was buried in the store. This selfie is from that period -- a bad photo, dim and out of focus, taken on a rainy morning to send to me and never actually sent. I only found it on her phone after she passed. Mom died at home in November of 2019, in the same bedroom she and Dad had shared since 1961. I think the hardest part of her last years wasn't the illness itself but the quiet -- my sister had been gone for decades by then with no way to reach her, and between the store and my own kids, I couldn't be there as often as I should have been. She never complained about it, which somehow made it worse.

Dorothy Harrison

That changed slowly, not all at once. In her late sixties she developed chronic lung disease, likely from decades of secondhand exposure to factory dust that clung to Dad's work clothes. This photo is from 1992, taken outside the tool shed the two of them had run as a small side business for years -- it finally folded that spring after a bigger supplier undercut them, right around the time my sister's absence from the family had become permanent. Nobody in this one is smiling either. Then in 2017 the town shut the library down for good, and with it went the only independent income and daily routine she'd had for four decades.