Free That Went Well: Adventures in Caring for My Sister by Terrell Harris Dougan

Returning to Devereux was another matter.
    “No! I don’t like it there! I don’t want to go back,” Irene wailed. Mom started to cry. Dad was firm. “Yes, but you are going back, Irene. Remember how Terrell went to Stanford and had a bedroom there, and roommates and everything? This is your turn now.”
    Dad, like all of us, continued to labor under the illusion that you can reason with Irene.
    How they got her in the car and onto the plane, I’ll never know. I’m just thrilled I was nursing a new baby in Denver and Bammy was tending her big sister, far removed from Irene’s piteous cries not to be sent away again.
    During our three years in Denver, Paul was away on businessfor weeks at a time and I learned how to be a single mom. Again we made lifelong friends, this time with our neighbors, who took me under their wing in all sorts of ways. We had a German shepherd, who drove me so crazy I wrote a humor piece about him, just to get my frustration out. It was a habit I began to adopt when things went wrong in the house, or with the kids or with the car. If it drove us nuts, I found the humor in it and wrote it down. I kept a little file of pieces written when things were so bad there was nothing to do but laugh about it. Paul and I have shared that habit over the years. When we are at our wit’s end, one of us starts to shake with laughter.
    Then, in 1966, Paul was called back to Salt Lake to work in the home office of the company. Mom and Dad were overjoyed. We found a lovely home on Third Avenue, one block from Paul’s childhood home.
    When they told me who had owned the house at one time, I nearly fainted. It was the doctor who had delivered Irene, the one that Bammy had cursed so often for not being more helpful to Mom. “What ever happened to him?” I asked the realtor.
    “Oh, it’s so sad. He is down at the state mental hospital. Been there for years. Just went insane and never got well.” I could hardly wait to tell Bammy. She would nod her head and quietly discuss divine justice.
    I also wrote a piece about the horrors of moving and finally sent it, along with my piece about the dog, to one of our local papers, just to see if anyone was interested. To my surprise and joy, the features editor called back and said they wanted them. I asked how she felt about my doing one a week for them. She quickly responded: “Yes! Let’s do it! What would you like to call your column?”
    I wanted to be free to write about anything, and so I stole a title of one Robert Benchley’s books, silently asking his late spirit to forgive me. I said, “Let’s call it Of All Things.” My first column appeared in the Desert News on June 7, 1967. Just as my column appeared in print, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley’s partner and girlfriend, died. I have no idea what any of it means, karmicly.
    The column ran on Mondays for thirteen years, and in all that time, I didn’t mention Irene. I couldn’t get the right tone with her as a subject. The last thing I wanted to do was make fun of her, although I regularly made fun of my husband and children as well as myself. In fact, my family was hurt when they and their latest activities didn’t appear in the column.
    When my first byline appeared in the paper, the folks in the Association for Retarded Children—ARC—remembered me from our family’s earlier work. They called me right up to ask my help in promoting still more programs for the mentally disabled. “We know Irene’s in California, but you never know when you might want her to come home again and be part of her hometown community,” they said. Knowing my parents’ commitment to this project, they just assumed I would pitch in and help. I felt as if I’d just had an offer I couldn’t refuse.
    From the time we swept out the first day care center when I was twelve, I knew these families, and now their children were grown up and had nowhere to go during the day. Their parents were aging and worried. They certainly