Free After the Stroke by May Sarton Page B

much Eleanor was able to see although she is legally blind. She noticed all the changes in the library due to the fire and remembered the little ring of Netsuke round a bowl of shells, for instance. How can she see them, I wonder?
    Elyce meanwhile was fascinated by Pierrot in one of his wilder moods—what dismay when I found earlier that day an awful mess he had made in the corner of the library! I heard him scratching and rushed in—oh dear! I wish he would learn that the whole great outdoors is there for his purposes!
    I wish I had something long, absorbing and rich to read! I have ordered Yeats’ letters but they haven’t come, but it adds to my feeling of being in limbo not to have anything to read. I thought I would reread V. Woolf’s The Years , but found it too depressing—the too vivid account at first of the household where the wife and mother is dying upstairs—not what I need right now.
    Today a last meeting with Fran and Royce who leave on Wednesday and are coming to take me out to lunch. I’m glad to get away. My desk is a nightmare of the undone and will stay like that unless I can be well and write ten or twenty letters a day as I sometimes did on the week ends.

Tuesday, July 29
    Hard to say good-by to Royce and Fran. When I got up from my nap around four I began to cry and couldn’t stop. I feel as ill or worse than ever—with the fear hanging over me that they will refuse to do the operation because my heart is—or was last week—in sync, due to the medicine. It is too ironic!
    Dr. Petrovich has doubled my dose of Bumex because I pant so much.
    But I did pick a funny little bunch of flowers for the house in the late afternoon: self-sown nicotiana, opium poppies, veronica, day lilies, Shasta daisies, “an artless bouquet” as the interviewer from the Times described my indoor flowers—but it was a real pleasure to do it and I must tell Karen so. She has soldiered on without enough interest or praise from me, I know, and she is so dear with Tamas, he will miss her. I shall feel forlorn when she goes back to Tucson on August fifteenth.

Thursday, July 31
    I lay awake a long time last night listening to the rain, and thought how badly I have handled myself lately. Loneliness has taken over what used to be a vitalizing solitude, a pause between poetry readings and seeing many friends who used to come. Now I feel abandoned and desolate—and would like to miaow in the way Pierrot does now and then to say, “Where are you? I’m lonely!”
    People, especially Janice, with all her nursing knowledge and compassionate spirit, have been as supportive as they could. But Anne and Barbara are far away—everyone after all has someone important, a job—I become the extra effort in their full-to-capacity lives. And so, I must admit, I have been for years myself, the quick responder to cries of help, often from people I have never seen, but who write to me as a friend. One reason for my depression now is that I can no longer “respond” as I used to. I feel so cut off from what was once a self.
    Everyone I know must be as sick and tired of this illness as I am.
    People, friends, do come, and Nancy’s daily arrival at eight all week is of immeasurable comfort. She is so steady and so kind, it is a blessing—and she is very good to Tamas and the Wild Beast, Pierrot, too. On the days when she is not here, a sort of blackness takes over the house and me.
    Of course what is lacking is the tangible “we” when two people live together in amity—and at seventy-four I have to admit that the likelihood of its ever happening again is slight.
    In spite of the gloom yesterday I made brownies, so all is not lost!

Friday, August 1
    Back from lunch with Edythe to find a note from Nancy to say “prepare to be admitted to Phillips House on Saturday.” I called them of course. “Why?” “Because otherwise you might