Silent Courage

Introduction: A Wake and an Awakening

Kneeling in front of the tall beige dresser in my parents’ bedroom, I hesitated for a moment. I stared at Dad’s Don’t Touch bottom drawer then gradually allowed my fingertips to rest on its cool chrome dresser pulls. This had always been his drawer, not mine. It was 1995, and I hadn’t looked inside it since I got married, twenty-two years ago.

It was time for me to open this drawer. It was time for me to view its contents one last time. It was time for me to confront my father’s secret self.

Dad would never again return to his beloved, two-story, yellow stucco home in the Irish Catholic enclave of Beverly on the southwest side of Chicago, Illinois. Amidst the drone of bagpipes, our family had laid him to rest in a neighborhood cemetery that morning. After the funeral, kith and kin headed back to the house to continue the festive tradition of an old-fashioned Irish wake, invoking the spirit of the deceased and keeping memories alive.

In 1975, my family relocated from the southern edge of Chicago to Beverly. Buying a house in Beverly—home of the South Side Irish Parade, the largest neighborhood parade of its kind in the country—meant that you believed being Irish was both a religious and cultural designation. We lovingly embraced our Irish ethnicity.

Sounds of clinking glasses, a few lilting Irish brogues, tearful laughter, and choruses of, Jim would have loved to have been here, had filled the house that afternoon. But now all was quiet. The warm sense of comfort and security that everyone had provided now morphed into an immobilizing silence as the last guest departed. While my Dad’s heart no longer beat in this earthly world, the strength of his presence still permeated the house.

Dad had been a loving family man, but since we were his family, he called the shots. He had a way of penetrating your thoughts, even if you were hundreds of miles away and about to do something stupid. His disapproval could be felt telepathically. It made you think twice. Now, he was gone. The physical and psychological release from his spirit was jarring. The opening of Dad’s drawer would be my attempt to break through my feelings of, Where am I now?

I gave the bottom dresser drawer a strong tug. It creaked and inched out as if desiring to conceal its contents from me as long as possible. Finally, the drawer eased out. I lifted it and placed it on my parents’ bed. I stared down at its keepsake contents, hoping to pierce the veiled mysteries that typified the relationship between my father and me. Memories flooded back.

I smiled as my eyes fell on his signature black, horn-rimmed glasses. They used to match the color of his hair. Then my eyes drifted to Dad’s cream cable-knit Irish sweater, given to him after a favorite uncle from the old country had passed. Dad wore the sweater often, as it was his habit to keep the house colder than any family member preferred. On occasion, shampoo was known to freeze in the upstairs bathroom.

Next to his sweater was his shamrock pin. It was made out of a green pipe cleaner and topped off with a miniature cardboard pipe. He religiously wore it every St. Patrick’s Day. It may have belonged to his father. It was very old. My dad was an Irishman to the end of his days.

In the corner of the drawer sat his binoculars. I closed my eyes, recalling how he treasured teaching all his children how to identify everything from the birds in the forest preserves we visited to the distant planets in the sky. The keepsakes in Dad’s drawer defined his nature as a proud Irishman insatiably curious about everything from the natural wonders of this planet to the farthest stretches of the imagination. With seven children, the souvenirs in the drawer abounded. I continued to search for those that had a special meaning to me.

I eyed a deckle-edged photo of myself as an infant, pounding my fists on a tabletop as if I were ready to rule the world and dictate the course my life should take. I picked up a vintage car key that may have belonged to our huge car from the 1950s, several old report cards held together with a loose rubber band, and a fat bundle of maps from parks we had visited as a family. In another corner of the drawer sat an old key to our family cottage in Michigan, a postcard illustration from the Art Institute of Chicago that he always wanted to replicate with his oil paints, baby pictures of his children, a newspaper clipping about my wedding, and documents that he deemed to be important.

Dropping down on my parents’ bed, I pondered what I had seen in Dad’s drawer. The bricks that had built my world began to loosen and threatened to tumble. Everything felt different, like when I put on my first pair of glasses in third grade and the world took on a cleansing clarity. But there was an unsettled eerie aspect to this newness.

I’d expected to finally find answers. I did not anticipate that each object might trigger reflections on questions that I stored up from childhood. And silences ....

Why had certain topics been so unapproachable in our family? Why did my family always dance around reality and refuse to address tough questions like, Where did Grandpa go? Did he die? or Why do my legs always hurt? Is there something wrong with me? All these pressing questions had constricted family conversations for years.

Dad was gone. For the first time in my life I was in a position to consider, free of Dad’s judgment, these important issues and questions flowing through my mind. The largest and most daunting one right now was: why couldn’t Dad, who endured his own physical pain, ever talk with me about my lifelong battle with pain—the one I was fighting, but not winning?

We traveled similar paths. We both endured long-term physical pain. He never spoke about his; he never acknowledged mine. Did the drawer hold a clue as to why our unspoken suffering remained a secret? Were we victims of a multi-generational conspiracy to cover up the shame of pain? Would I have the courage to break the silence?

Chapter 1: A Secret is Cast

In August of 1951—after the obligatory counting of fingers and toes and a satisfactory completion of the newborn pre-release checklists at the hospital—my parents, who had been married a little more than one year, brought me, Mary Theresa Byrne, back to their third-story brick apartment in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Pictures of me as an infant show a blue-eyed, curly blonde itching to crawl.

We shared an apartment with my mother’s mother, May. Rolling foam-edged Lake Michigan waves, long stretches of beach, and flocks of squawking seagulls comprised our backyard. My parents savored the beauty of living lakeside with access to mature green parkways and sun-drenched sand. The panoramic cobalt sky stretching to meet the ultramarine water’s calm horizon provided no clue of the rough waters that lay ahead for our family. The first disruptive wave arrived that following spring.

Grandma May, hospitalized with pneumonia, had been on a respirator. A severe thunderstorm knocked out the area’s electric power and extinguished her ability to breathe and eventually her life. With barely enough time to regain their composure after Grandma’s death, my parents braced for another wave to crash into their lives.

When you were about a year old and starting to walk, my mother confided to me when I was in my twenties, you would fall down and you could not pick yourself up. It happened all the time. My parents’ short-term solution was to pick me up so that I could be on my way again.

When are babies able to get up by themselves? my father must have asked.

Maybe her muscles just need a chance to mature. She’s bound to outgrow it, may have been my mother’s reply. They had no clue that there might be a larger problem.

My parents debated the necessity, cost, and convenience of a doctor’s visit only when fevers didn’t break or bones did. They often put stock in God’s ability to intervene and solve problems. But they could no longer ignore that I was not getting better. I kept falling down. They kept picking me up.

I was finally taken to see our pediatrician. Dad could seldom take off days from work so I imagined my mom might have asked her sister, Jane, to drive us. A physical examination and an X-ray revealed that I had bi-lateral congenital hip dysplasia.

After birth, as part of the infant pre-release checklist, doctors did two things. They rotated an infant’s legs and listened for a clicking sound. The doctors also checked for any leg-length discrepancy in order to diagnose hip dysplasia. Despite routine checks at birth, my condition had gone undetected.

I’m not sure how we missed finding this. You need to consult an orthopedic surgeon as soon as possible, Dr. Brown, our pediatrician, possibly said.

My condition incorrectly positioned my femurs inside my hip sockets, which caused my pelvis to steadily lose its indentation. In addition, the ball tops of my leg bones became more teardrop-shaped than rounded. My later research showed that one out of every twenty full-term babies experience some type of hip instability, and two or three infants out of every one thousand require treatment.

Regarding the treatment of this condition in the 1950s, Dr. Charles Price, the Director of the International Hip Dysplasia Institute, said:

My guess was that the advice to the patients with good results would be, ‘You’re cured,’ but in 1950, advice to those with marginal results might have been, ‘You’re going to have pain as a young adult and we don’t have very good methods to treat it, so take care of your hip and make it last as long as possible. Don’t do any activities that might put pressure on your bad hip. Start thinking of yourself as a disabled person now so that you can avoid painful surgery as an adult.’

We still have some of the same thinking today. Fortunately, our treatments have improved, for children and for adults with painful hips, but we also know that successfully treated patients are not totally out of the woods for the rest of their lives.

In the fall of 1952, my corrective treatment began after a visit to an orthopedic specialist. They swathed me in a plaster leg cast from my hips down to my knees. The cast had a metal rod between my thighs that attempted to center my femurs in their shallow sockets. I wonder how it must have felt for an active young toddler to awaken encased in an unyielding plaster cast. How would a young child understand that this burden could not be removed by anyone who loved her? I only imagined how I might have cried, shrieked, and squirmed attempting to shed my plaster restraint. I envisioned myself with tear-streaked cheeks, holding a formula-filled bottle, surrounded by the treasures of my childhood—my favorite silken-edged yellow blanket and my stuffed white angora kitten.

It’ll be okay, a nurse may have reassuringly told my mother while quoting the mindset of medical practices in the 1950s. Babies don’t really feel pain and your daughter probably won’t remember it anyway.

I don’t know how long I wore my cast, maybe just a few months. I have an early childhood memory of being on our enclosed back porch, with the railings taller than myself, basking in the warmth of the sun through the rail’s shadows, and inhaling the familiar and comforting smell of the breeze coming off Lake Michigan. Did I realize that my beach swing and sandbox were somehow now out of my reach? Did I wonder if I would ever go to the beach again, hearing the squeals and laughter of children at play drifting across the sand?

Being a first child, there are many photos of myself as an infant. My mother had worked for a photography studio during the war, which provided affordable access. Despite this fact, there are only two pictures of me between the ages of eighteen months and two years old when I might have been in the cast. Notably it was disguised in the photographs. In one picture, I wore a fancy dress, fluffed with layers of underlying slips. I was sitting with a very straight back on my grandparents’ living room steps. The dress would have come down to my ankles if I had stood. The position of my legs, spread apart, knees bent, and feet firmly planted on the floor, appeared overly posed for a young child. The second photograph showed me with my parents. I wore oversized, footed pajamas with an industrial-sized zipper, leading me to believe that perhaps the outfit had been altered to accommodate my cast and its metal rod. Mom was a talented seamstress.

When I was twenty-five and spoon-feeding my newborn daughter in the kitchen of my parents’ Beverly home, my mother looked down at the high chair and said, The rod on your cast presented the biggest challenge for us when you were a baby.

This was the first time she shared any details with me about this experience. Quizzically responding to her disclosure, I encouraged her to tell me more. In doing so, I also learned that a normal high chair could not accommodate my cast so Dad built a special one, just for me.

And I was so thankful he figured something out, she concluded.

Dad often talked about an oversized car we had when we were growing up. It may have been purchased to provide room for my bulky plaster-cast-and-metal-rod apparatus. He bragged that there was enough space behind the front seat for us to put a playpen. He talked about making these special accommodations as if they were fun. I learned at a young age one of the Irish ways of dealing with adversity: there are never any problems or obstacles—only opportunities.

There were—and still are—four risk factors associated with hip dysplasia in newborns, and I escaped only one: breech birth. Unfortunately the remaining three factors were all accounted for: being a first child, being a female, and having a family history of the disorder on both sides of the family. I wasn’t the only one in the family to inherit the physical disorder. As an adult, I found through a relative’s genealogical research that my maternal great-grandmother, Elizabeth, born in Ireland in 1859, had hip dysplasia. I never knew her. But I did know my paternal grandmother Marie’s oldest sibling, Ann, born in Chicago in 1888. She also inherited the condition. My great-aunt Ann and my grandmother Marie dealt with the opportunities presented by hip dysplasia in two very different ways.

My great-aunt Ann and her husband, Ed, lived in a sprawling ranch-style home in the undeveloped prairies of the northwestern Chicago suburbs. She’d always greet visitors as she sat on her chrome-legged, red-vinyl kitchen stool, holding a thin cigar in one hand and clutching a beer in the other. Her laughter lit her path despite her struggles to get up from any seated position. Short and squatty, she plodded along reaching out to grab the backs of chairs as she moved around her home.

I recall one visit at age six when Mom, my four-year-old sister, Maggie, and me followed her into her living room.

Come on, girls, Ann chirped as she carefully waddled and eased her way into the next room. Look at the latest thing my daughter bought us! Pointing to a pair of bamboo-matted, African-style wooden masks hanging on the wall as she smiled. Have you ever seen the likes of this? She says it’s all the rage. She laughed. Do you think they’re a good match with the shamrocks on my Belleek China?

I always admired my great-aunt Ann’s spunk and humor. I never once heard her complain, and I will never know if she ever received a hip dysplasia diagnosis. Somehow she endured. Her lighthearted approach was a classic example of one way of dealing with the adversity brought on by hip dysplasia. I had no clue when I was looking at my great-aunt Ann that I could have been seeing an older version of myself. I had no clue that the fatigue I felt in my hips even at that young age foreshadowed the severe pain I would feel later in life.

Grandma Marie represented a different approach. My mom later told me that Grandma Marie once asked her not to take me out in public while my cast encumbered me. She feared that no one would ever marry me if they saw me like that. Grandma Marie probably worried about my future and wanted to keep any family physical imperfections a secret.

My strawberry-blonde Irish grandmother might have planted the first seeds of secrecy in our family regarding my hip condition. Her request to my mother might have been based on the guilt-ridden Irish belief that the sins of deceased ancestors often haunt the next generation as physical or mental defects. In my family, cultural wisdom had a way of trumping medical science.

I guessed that no baby buggy