Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick Read Online Free PDF

to tell. Though he conscientiously avoided gore, he showed young Phil his military souvenirs: his uniform and gas mask, sundry photographs. These stories, reinforced by Edgar's taking him to the 1931 film All Quiet on the Western Front, struck Phil deeply:
[Edgar] told me how the soldiers became panicstricken during gas attacks as the charcoal in their filtration systems became saturated, and how sometimes a soldier would freak and tear off his mask and run. As a child I felt a lot of anxiety listening to my father's war stories and looking at and playing with the gasmask and helmet; but what scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear. This was not my father any longer. This was not a human being at all.
Edgar returned to Colorado after demobbing in 1918, and he and Dorothy renewed their courtship. Dorothy was the middle child of three in a family of English descent. (As an adult, Phil would sometimes claim to be one-quarter German, due to his love for German opera and poetry, but Scotch-Irish-English is his lineage.) Earl Grant Kindred, Dorothy's father, was a lawyer whose financial fortunes fluctuated wildly. Earl's boom-or-bust economics could trigger drastic consequences for his children; in two different downswings he had their pets shot to save on feed money.
Edna Matilda Archer-the Meemaw who hid with baby Phil in the bathroom when the nurse came to visit-married Earl in 1892. Dorothy was born in 1899. When Dorothy was in her early teens, Earl announced that to make his fortune he would have to travel. What it boiled down to was walking out on his family. When he did circle back now and then, Meemaw took him in gladly, which disgusted Dorothy. When Earl was gone, Meemaw and Dorothy's younger sister, Marion, looked to Dorothy for support, both psychological and economic. Harold, her older brother, who was considered the wild one in the family, ran away at this time. At fifteen she went to work. A year later she met Edgar, and while he was off to war Dorothy grappled with a family in disarray. Throughout her life Dorothy would rue how she constantly found herself having to take care of people.
Edgar was likely a welcome source of support when he came home from the war. They married in September 1920, then moved to Washington, D.C. After graduating from Georgetown University in 1927, Edgar took a livestock inspection job with the Department of Agriculture. During this time, Dorothy's health began to deteriorate badly. Just after the move, she had come down with typhoid fever. Then came the onset of Bright's disease. One doctor told her she hadn't long to live. Dorothy survived to age seventy-nine, but suffered from kidney problems for the rest of her life. Later years brought on circulatory ailments and a consciousness of illness that some found obsessive or hypochondriacal (complaints Phil did not raise against her, perhaps because too often he found himself fending off similar charges).

The Department offered Edgar a post in Chicago, and, though both he and Dorothy hated Chicago winters, he took it. It was an advancement of sorts, and with Dorothy expecting, it seemed time to build for the future.

It is common medical knowledge today, as it was not in 1928, that of all the risks posed by a multiple pregnancy, premature birth is the leading cause of death of one or both twins. Psychological studies made in the past decade have further confirmed that, for parents and the surviving sibling alike, the death of a twin is a trauma with unique dimensions.
For the parents, the grief, guilt, and anger may be intensified due to the emotional magnitude of giving birth to twins. Researcher Elizabeth Bryan notes that society treats the birth of twins as a "special event," and cites findings that "a prolonged or abnormal grief reaction was more common amongst those mothers who had a single surviving twin than amongst those who had lost their only baby." Part of the anguish lies in "the