Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice Read Online Free PDF Page B

stupidity, and she saw so much of it in emergency medicine.
    As part of her training for emergency medicine, Debora had done a rotation in internal medicine. While she and Mike lived in Cincinnati, she decided to switch to that field. Doing so would mean another residency, of course. Her husband was already in an internal medicine program, and through attrition, there were always vacancies at the end of the year.
    “So she came and joined my residency….” Mike recalled. “She and I were both second-year residents. We were both on call on the same nights, one of us at the V.A. hospital and one at the University of Cincinnati hospital. I can remember the very first night she was on call as a supervising resident. She had someone helping her, because she had been out of internal medicine for a while. But she called me up and was absolutely beside herself. She didn’t know what to do; she didn’t know where anything was…. I told her, ‘Just ask someone. You’re learning the ropes.’ But Debora couldn’t do that. She couldn’t seem to admit that she needed help with all these things.”
    That puzzled Mike. When he first met Debora, she had appeared very self-confident, able to deal with anything that came her way. Now, she was unsure of herself and hypersen sitive to criticism. And she continued to avoid Mike’s attempts at greater intimacy. She seemed either to be frightened by it or have no need for it; rather, she enjoyed solitary pursuits, burying herself in books or playing solitaire. Later, she played computer games designed for one person. Still, when they went out with other people, she was the same witty and vivacious person Mike had fallen in love with. He figured that she was just apprehensive about trusting in marriage; she had been mistaken once and maybe she was afraid she would fail again.
    She had a tender side. She talked about wanting to help people; she loved animals and adopted two cats—one a huge white cat and the other a tiny black kitten. A photograph that Mike took during their first year in Cincinnati reveals both his interests and Debora’s; she is sitting at her piano, holding her black kitten and white cat, while Mike’s first very modest wine collection of seven bottles is displayed in an inexpensive wine rack on top of the piano.
    Debora is slender and pretty in the photograph, but she gives the camera lens only a half-smile. She and Mike had been married for more than a year. She had a handsome and brilliant young husband who wanted very much to love her—but in the photo she seems sad, as if her world does not suit her at all. Mike, an avid photographer, took hundreds of pictures of Debora over the years of their marriage, and many of them caught an expression of deep unhappiness—as if Debora’s mind and heart were far away.

    Although Velma Farrar had her doubts about her new daughter-in-law and was not particularly welcoming at first, Mike’s parents tried to draw Debora into the family. Their efforts met with little success. One Christmas, the elder Farrars drove from Kansas City to Cincinnati—six hundred miles. Mike was still at the hospital when they arrived. “Debora had been reading a book in the back room,” he recalled. “She came out, let them in, and then went back to the bedroom and continued to read.”
    At other times, too, Debora virtually ignored Mike’s parents. On one such occasion, “I was on call,” he said. “Debora got home from work and they were there at our apartment. She walked past them to the bedroom and they didn’t see her again all night.”
    Clearly, Mike and Debora had a very different concept of family. Obviously, their principal common interest was medicine, and few professions demand as much in terms of time and commitment. It was relatively easy to overlook hollow spaces in their marriage, simply because they had so little time to contemplate them.

    In retrospect, Debora and Mike seemed so mismatched that they might have been