Perhaps this story  begins in the late 1930’s. My mother was an athletic, fiery young redhead and Frank  O’Ryan favored her.  In those days a popular girl could play a wide field which Mother did often scheduling two and three different beaus in one day.  Frank was a lawyer who was not patient waiting in line, but World War Two intervened and everything changed. 

By 1945 Mother and Frank were married with two sons, but they weren’t married to each other.  Frank had found another fiery redhead, an ex-marine, and Mother had settled on a nice southern chemical engineer working for Dupont. Frank was raising his family in Mother’s old hometown in West Virginia while she and Dad lived in an industrial area a hundred miles further south.

In 1948 Christmas cards announced a baby daughter, Brigid, for Frank and a baby boy, me, for Mother. Good news, but I was born with two deformed feet sometimes called “clubfeet”. I was also blind, but my sight did come after a few months.  I don’t remember those early days of operations and serial castings intended to straighten out my feet.  My parents had to be very vigilant with each casting. There were at least eight different resets over time.  Once the cast cracked leaving a scar across the top of my tiny right foot. It was my reminder.

 I was a newborn, but I am told that the immobilization from the castings would have been stressful for me.  I like to think that the stress made me more aware.  I suspect I felt my mother’s struggling under the post- partum pressures with three young children particularly with the challenges I brought her. 

Her pressure was compounded when Dad accepted a job in her old hometown. Mother was uneasy about returning. There was too much old tension and family involvement.  An agoraphobic haze sealed her in her bedroom for many of the first months after moving back. I  think this is when I became sharply attuned to her anxiousness. I was always aware of it after that.

One good thing about moving to the hometown was that I had a playmate, Brigid. I don’t remember my casts, but I do remember the clodhopper shoes I had to wear to keep my feet shaped properly.  Brigid and I ran and played ferociously even though I was clumsy and slow.  I smiled a lot and we had fun. I can remember how good I felt when we played. 

But one morning when I was about five or six,  Mother took me into the living room and told me that Brigid had died the night before (encephalitis).  I did not know what “die” meant.  I remember staring at Mother waiting for an explanation.  She gave me the “gone-to- heaven” story which was not enough. I could not rationally grasp ”dying” and got upset.   Each day that passed without my playmate made me feel worse.  

Brigid never returned, but her family continued to orbit around me as I grew up. Her older brother and I were on the wrestling team together. I always liked talking to her sister and remember showing her younger brother around the college I attended. 

Whenever I visited with one of the O’Ryan kids, I would think of Brigid.  I was shy and sometimes thought of the difference Brigid’s presence might have brought to my life if she had lived. Would she have been a good friend or even a girlfriend? How much would my experience have been different if she had been there. 

Then her oldest brother was killed in Viet Nam, and I felt her mother, the ex-marine, had been dealt a parent’s worst nightmare. How does a mother survive the loss of a five -year old to illness and a 20 -year old to war? That was before I was a parent.   

 Some years later both of my daughters had been badly hurt in separate incidents. I was frantic and sought out Brigid’s mother for guidance navigating through the frustration, anger, and loss. She had a firmness and humor that patched me up.  I wondered if Brigid would have been like that.

As I drifted away from our hometown, my interactions with Brigid’s family were less frequent. Once in London I found her brother’s music recordings; Another time in Albuquerque we got to hear her sister sing in concert. When I came home to visit my parents, I would cross paths with Brigid’s mother and father.  They had come to my college graduation, and I had driven home for their funerals. 

This story is ending because Brigid and those who remind me of her have all moved out of my reach.  My first memories of laughing and having fun were with Brigid.  Because of her I now think I was a smiling, happy kid when I had plenty of reasons not to be.  She was a bright light for me in a lot of darkness.  I still wonder why she left.  Was she from the light or from the dark?  She was fun, but she died. That was cruel.

This story is about a presence I still feel.