25 to 28 October 1959

Sun - Oct. 25 - Ma came home to M. [Millbrae] about 4:15 by ambulance. Did not awaken at all - either leaving hosp or entering 320 Palm & then bed.

Had coffee at 11 pm when Mrs Richardson (n. [night] nurse) took over. Slept all nite

Mon Oct 26 Bedpan after breakfast, about 6:45. Grapefruit / poached egg / coffee / toast. Glass water / orange j / G. Ale.

Lunch - soup with noodles & turkey / Turkey, cran sauce coffee.

Egg nog about 3:30 - - Bed pan

Dinner: Turkey [crossed out] chicken - apples - spuds - IceCream / coffee

Tues - Not a good day -

Bk - Lunch - Dinner: not much of anything

Brandy about late [crossed out] early eve

Sleeping Pill about 8:20 pm - not much effect. Out of bed sev. times when N. Nurse was in attendance, but manged [managed] to ge her back. About 2:30, calle me--& I did get her back to bed. Didn't get up after that, but talked a bit. No. Night [Nurse] quits as of 2nite

Wed: Got up about 5 to 7 - walked into [crossed out] in to Bud's room, proceeding 2 make his bed. Took her to bath room. Wanted an enema. Back to bed - another enema (cold, acct. of burn). Back to sleep - finally had breakfast. Back to sleep, awakening her about 12:15 for lunch of Turkey soup with cut-up Turkey & Rice / cup coffee - Back to sleep, 12:30.

2:30 - Egg Not (half) - sleep

6:30 - Dinner - meat casserole / strg. beans, / mashed spuds custard / coffee - Very little of everything

Hot Toddy - 7:30

9:30 slight vomiting

Slept all night - no bedpan since A.M.

Thurs Bkfast 9:30

Hot Toddy 11:00 / Bowel trouble

Milk Mag[nesia] 11:40 - Enema (no effect)

Sleep 12:15

Commentary

My grandmother (La to us but Lillian to her friends and Marie Lillian Reilly by birth) appears to have begun this diary in 1959 so that she could record her work caring for her mother as my great-grandmother, Lillie Gertrude Reilly (nee Quinn) was dying. Due of this, the diary focuses on how she cared for her mother from 25 October 1959 to 10 December 1960, when my great-grandmother died (at which point I was six and a half months old). 

I never knew my great-grandmother, but I have been in her presence. My grandmother I knew well, but my five siblings and I knew her the least of any of her grandchildren, because we lived in other countries and occasionally other US states, except for those months when we actually lived with her. 

My grandmother was an extremely intelligent and productive person. She worked constantly, she thought constantly, and she often spent her time caring for others. Her diary, however, is a strange reflection of her, since it usually has the sense of being told by someone besides her, since her recording of her life usually focused on the quotidian activities of her day (cooking, feeding, seeing people). 

Yet it provides startling revelations of her life, because it shows when she is happy, sometimes when she is upset, and often enough--in a family a large as ours--when she is sad. She dilutes her sadness, though, never telling us what caused the death of any of us, with the possible exception of her mother, whose death she will soon record for us in her diaries.

This initial diary is simply four sheets of lined paper folded together and stapled into a booklet, the general format she used for the first three of her diaries.