Never Sang

VALERIE BENDER

The polio epidemic of 1952 was the worst ever, with over 58,000 cases. Some became paralyzed, many recovered partially or fully. My father had just passed his 25th birthday when he came down with the spinal and bulbar poliomyelitis that left him a quadriplegic. He was in a hospital for about a year, first in an iron lung and later in a rocking bed, but he didn’t like being in the hospital, so he had himself discharged and then my mother had to take care of him at home. My mother lasted about a year before she had a complete breakdown. This was the end of our family, when I was three years old. She took us to live with grandparents and later divorced him. His later years were spent in the care of the Sisters of Mercy Infirmary or sometimes his mother, Pearl, who was already elderly. Recently I talked with a nurse who had taken care of polio patients in the 1950s, and she said he should have remained hospitalized because of the severity of his condition. She said it usually took a full staff of nurses working 24/7 to take care of such a patient. And there was my mother, trying to do it all by herself, with three small children underfoot. 

Prologue:
My mother said we all three had chickenpox
When she took us and ran for our lives,
Three scabby kids and a child-bride
Bundled on the bus to survival.

1.
I never sang for my father.
Hell, I never even knew him.
He was stolen from us by a virus named polio.
The first memory I have of him
Is of climbing up on a rocking bed,
Going up and down, head to toe.
I couldn’t have been more than three years old,
Going up and down, head to toe.
I can’t remember his face,
I don’t remember the iron lung at all,
Just that rocking bed, our first baby-sitter.
We would climb up to watch TV or take naps
So our mother could get some rest.
We all nearly died—
My mother from taking care of him
And three children under the age of six
Without much help and even less money.
Some nights she got only an hour of sleep, 
And when the electricity failed, 
She cranked the iron lung by hand,
Sometimes for hours, so he could breathe.
He didn’t take well to being paralyzed and helpless—
He used to spit on my younger brother,
Called him a bastard, although he knew it wasn’t true.
Even paralyzed, “He had to have his sex,”
My mother told me years later. He cursed her
When she stretched his locked up muscles and limbs.
The pain was all he felt, not any empathy
For her broken heart or fatigue.
She was only twenty years old,
And she hadn’t planned on this,
He was supposed to take care of her.
Younger brother cried in his crib all day
Mama had no time for babies with her husband so dependent.
I nearly died from dehydration,
Mama had no time to give me a drink of water.
Big brother could fend for himself at five,
And grew up unable to trust anybody.
“They” were going to take her children away.
Instead, she took us to live with Grandpa,
And all through our childhoods
She seldom spoke of our father again.
It was too painful for her to remember.

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