Charlotte is my grandmother. She was diagnosed yesterday with Hodgkin's lymphoma. She and my grandfather, John Alden Frost have been married for 51 years. She has three children, two surviving, and six grandchildren. She and "Denny" are retired on a farm in Cornwall Bridge, CT.
Sam: How old were you when you first met
Gramp?
Charlotte: Six!
Sam: Six
Charlotte: I was going to school up here, in the fall and the spring and I had my tonsils taken out, and you know the way first graders have to send get well cards to someone who was sick? Well this was Easter time so they were sending me get-well cards, Easter eggs and stuff. We think that he must have dipped his in all the dyes to get it black. He also put my pigtails in the inkwell, when we were a bit older
S: You guys had inkwells?
C: Yep. We’re antique, remember? [laughs]
S: How old were you?
C: Well, probably for that was eight maybe. Third grade possibly.
S: And when did you guys start dating?
C: well, we were both fifteen. It wasn’t real dating in the sense that you do because it was other people driving us to square dancing and movies and stuff like that.
S: What was your first date?
C: I have no idea
S: You have no idea?
C: I have no idea. We were hand holders. We weren’t smoochers beyond any other you know… we did a lot of square dancing, a lot of movies, a lot of hiking. And then at seventeen, about seventeen I guess we sort of broke up and went our separate ways, expansion…
S: Why did you break up?
C: Uh, it was just sort of, I don’t know, maybe it was me, I wanted a wider horizon, or maybe I was away at school, I don’t specifically remember. And Den was in the army.
S: He was in the army when he was eighteen?
C: Ah eighteen yes. Right after he graduated, that fall afterwards. In ’54. Then he got out of the army and we started seeing each other.
S: What did you do when he was in the army?
C: I was at school. I was at Wheelock.
S: What were you studying?
C: Education. Pre-school through third grade teacher. So I was there and Den was in the army, he came home in the fall of ’56, Christmas time, and we started seeing each other and we were engaged in January ’57.
S: Really quick.
C: Well, ‘cause we’d known each other pretty well, for years. We were both… twenty-one at that point.
S: Do you remember the first time you saw him when he came back?
C: Yeah he came knocking at the front door.
S: Here, at the farm?
C: Yes. He had a crew cut that was growing out, at that point it was sticking straight out in the air, and he had on a coat that was, it was a neat coat, wonderful Harris tweed coat that he’d had made when he was in England. And uh, he was standing there and all I remember wanting to do was give him a big bear hug and I don’t know whether I did or not. I don’t think I did. I was too shy.
[The phone rings]
Oh that’s probably Beth
[I turned off the recorder for a moment, and then reconsidered. Charlotte had been to her doctor earlier that day to discover the results of a biopsy taken from a mass in her head, her oldest daughter, Beth, was calling to find out what was happening to her mother.]
C: …It seems that it’s a Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Yup. In that sense it’s not good, but if I were going to have a cancer, that’s the one to have. Um… I don’t know exactly. The oncology doctor who I assume is going to do a pretty thorough physical and is going to send me for some more tests to make sure it hasn’t gone in different places or other things it could do… I don’t even know yet. I go tomorrow, to him.
And um, the treatment will be probably radiation and chemo. It’s likely to be. But they don’t, Doctor Lucy got his pathology report over the phone, so he doesn’t have anything written down besides what he got over the phone. And also, the other thing is they don’t know which stage it is at yet, because they haven’t finished all the testing.
…
Yes, it’s one of the ones that is very treatable. It’s very treatable. That I know. 90-95% if you catch it soon enough. And that’s the thing; we don’t know what stage it is at yet. Um, but anyhow, now I know what I’m fighting.
…
Oh sure, it’s just going to take a little while to get used to it. The idea of saying that “I have cancer” is not very pleasant [laughs]. Cause that’s basically what it is.
…
He said I could go for another opinion if I wanted to, but that would take six or eight weeks.
…
I’m going to! But I’m going to take Sam to the train in a little while, and after that I think I’ll call him. So. I guess it feels good to know what it is, better than it did. But it hasn’t settled yet. I don’t know if it’s good bad or indifferent but lymphoma means lymph, and as far as I know there are no lymph nodes involved at this point. So that…
… Yes, that’s what I’m saying. But he called it Hodgkin’s lymphoma, so it sounds contradictory. And I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you called earlier, but you had a chance to talk to Sam. … Bruce said he wanted to know what’s going on also, so pass it to him. … I will call Linda later, yes. … I’d like to be there
[Beth is in Hawaii, visiting my mother, Celia. Charlotte and Denny were supposed to go but couldn’t when Charlotte became too ill]
But don’t, don’t worry, I’m not curling up my toes yet [laughs]. I hope not! Because I’m not going to do it! Sorry guys, sorry! [laughs] There we go, that’s right. Well, okey-doke. Well, I’ll let you know if anything strange comes up; I’ll let you know. … I know, I wish I could be there. It was twenty minutes of eight your time when we came home, and Den said ‘they’re probably still on the beach!’ I bet you are. Don’t forget to use the stuff so you get a cancer kind of tan! You don’t need that. You know, sunscreen! Oh, Bruce did? Ask him about the top of his shiny head… Uh-oh! He’s got it covered up. Good. Well you and Anna, half the time you forget to do it too. Be careful. Okay, okay, well I’m glad you called; we’ll be in touch. I love you guys. Okay honey, bye.
[She hangs up]
Does that sound not too scary, the way I put it?
S: Didn’t sound very scary. You sounded very, persevering through it.
C: It’s gotta be a decent attitude, you know?
S: You can’t mope.
C: No, there’s no point. Maybe it’s better knowing a little more about it. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? It’s good knowing more about it. But I don’t want to scare you either. And you can pass the word on to your brother. You should call him.
…
S: So Gramp had just gotten back from the army, and you wanted to but you were too reserved to give him a hug.
C: I guess, something like that. And I don’t remember what we did but it didn’t take us long to get comfortable, three weeks later we were engaged.
S: Where were you working at the time?
C: I was in school. We wanted to get married, we didn’t want to wait a whole year for me to graduate, so I took a full semester at summer school at NYU, summer of ’57. I got eighteen credits.
S: In one summer semester? That’s a lot.
C: I had to get special dispensation. What I mainly remember was that I took an abnormal psych course in four weeks, and the midterm was about three hundred multiple-choice questions, and I hadn’t taken one in years. I was going into my senior year in college, I was twenty one, so I went to my professor and I asked him, well how do I study for this thing? Because I had to get a certain grade in order to transfer back to Wheelock, and I don’t remember whether I didn’t quite make it or I wasn’t happy about it so I went to talk to him. For the final, you know, two weeks later, it was seven hundred questions, and we were getting married the next day, after the exam, and that was my last class…
It was a Friday in August, or September sixth that I came up from New York to go to our rehearsal. We were married September 7, 1957. And as I passed my exam in to my professor with my home address on it so that he could send the results he said ‘Oh, Cornwall Bridge? River Road?’ [River Road is the road her farm is on] As it turns out – you know that house on the corner, across from St. Bridget’s Church?
S: Yeah
C: That used to be an inn – Laughingwater Lodge. He used to go fishing there. I got the card the next day, and I’d passed, well enough for Wheelock. I never know to this day whether I really passed it or if he just gave it to me. It was just one of those unexpected coincidences.
S: What was the marriage like? Who was there?
C: Oh it was at the Church, everyone was there – the whole big family. Your great grandparents, great uncles and cousins, everyone. Den and I both come from really big families. Tommy Nolan was alive then, I remember mother scolding him for putting his finger in the icing of the cake.
S: Where was it, was it at UCC [United Church of Christ]?
C: Yes, the service was at the church in the village and the reception was here. We have lots of pictures of it; it was an overcast day so the pictures were good. It was, I don’t know, two hundred or more people. My family, Den’s family, and a lot of Cornwall people. It was a neat wedding, it was fun. And then we were driving up to the Adirondacks, to camp for our honeymoon and we stopped someplace, I don’t know where it was, and your great-grandfather had put a bottle of champagne in the car. We got into the motel and Aunt Polly, who was a real penny-pincher, she had gotten the motel and we should have known better because it was dirt bag, it was terrible. We were going to have our champagne anyhow, and we knew it had been rattling around in the car all afternoon so we opened it up in the shower and the cork, it shot all around the tin shower [she makes a ping!ping!ping!ping! noise] and we were trying to be quiet, newlyweds sort of thing and the cork was shooting around in the shower stall. We eventually got to camp; we were staying at George Kittles camp. People had stuffed our suitcases full of rice, and the mice got into all the rice that was in our suitcases! We had quite a time. And then the rest of our family came up to the Calhoun camp next door. We got teased quite thoroughly – ‘you mean, you guys took your honeymoon just a hop-skip and a jump from all of your family? What kind of nuts are you?’ but we had a fine time.
S: When was Beth born?
C: Beth was born in May ’57. We lived at the end of Cornwall Valley, and then two years and a bit more Steve was born, three years after that Celia was. We were under thirty by the time we had our third child.
S: That seems pretty normal. I mean; it’s young for now.
C: Well yes, people are waiting another ten years. And some of them are finding that they can’t even have children.
S: What do you think about that?
C: Um, I think that even at, even at thirty for me, women are already beyond their prime. I mean, the prime age for women is what, sixteen to twenty-two, something like that?
S: Yes.
C: It’s a lot younger than you think, physically. And one of the things that people have found, if they wait too long is that in the first place they don’t conceive as easily. I was the kind of person – there was this saying that the husband hangs his hat on the bedpost and I’d get pregnant.
S: What?
C: A husband hangs his hat on the bedpost! In other words, very fertile!
S: Oh, okay.
C: So I never had any trouble with that, but I was also under thirty. And I think, from my little bit of reading stuff, and I think that if it’s not easy to conceive when you’re twenty-eight, it’s going to be even harder when you’re thirty-eight. I mean, you may still be under the wire of menopause, but still it’s harder. I think the older you get, the more you’re set in your ways, as a couple possibly, and also as a person. You’re used to it just being you, without an add on. My feeling is that say, twenty-five to thirty-five is good timing. Because also your energy levels are important.
S: That’s what my mother says.
C: She’s made the comment, well, I guess she had it made to her, is that, she played with you kids. And a lot of parents don’t, because they’re older and they don’t have the energy. The other thing is that, if you have a baby when you’re forty, by the time it’s twenty you’re sixty! In other words, the aging, it’s different. What you get to do with your kids. I’m inclined to think that if the person is responsible, with their life in general, it is better to have children earlier.
S: What was life like when they were all children?
C: Oh it was fine. We didn’t have any money. Most of the disagreements we had were about money. Or sometimes we had disagreements about how to discipline children. The father with a daughter treats her different from a son, he’s much harder on a son. And one of the things I had a problem with was screaming women – you know, if someone screams? Or if any of them are bitchy, which your mother is very aware of.
S: I know; my mother doesn’t like other women.
C: Because they can be real stinkpots! They’re unpleasant and I think that a woman is more aware of that happening, and a man… a daughter can wind a father around her finger much better. I suppose with the sons that it’s somewhat a same thing only different causes, only they’re harder on the son than they are on the daughter. I think that’s just human nature.
[her dog outside barks]
C: I think she wants to come in
S: I’ll go get her
[the dog bounds inside]
C: Hello Freya! Hello squirt.
S: What was it like when Steven got sick?
C: Sheer hell. It was, it was. You could say we were shell-shocked. Someone took a picture of the two of us sitting in the kitchen…
S: You and Gramp?
C: Yes, talking about it very shortly after we found out. The other thing was that it was Celia’s eighth grade graduation night when we found out the diagnosis [of teenage leukemia]. I had finished her dress all the way, and hung it in the hall in the other house, and her present was somewhere it could be wrapped and only Den and her went to the service, because they didn’t want Steven to go to the service. His white cells were down which meant he was susceptible to bugs and infection. Everybody knew very quickly what was happening. For six weeks different people from the town had dinners at our house for us, between quarter of six and six o’clock every day. No repetition of the same food or the same people. It was amazing.
Steve, like a lot of treatment for that type of leukemia, the first six weeks, the rounds for that type of stuff is very intense, the chemo, to knock it fast. It’s a blood cancer. It was very rough; I always called it the killer-cure. He was pretty sick. But there were good pieces to it. He was a sixteen to eighteen year old hell raiser.
S: So he was trouble?
C: Yeah, sure. He used to take a 60cc syringe… it made a wonderful water pistol. Particularly with the bucket of ice water he had right next to him. [laughter]
S: Did he squirt you?
C: No, doctors! When they came into the room. A fellow… I don’t know where that term comes from but it’s after a residency, it’s another year of… practice or whatever. He was a young guy who had a beard. I remember him standing in the doorway with water dripping off his beard. Steve was in stitches.
Then another time, he had chemo five days straight which he had to be in the hospital for. He was just about finished; I think he had another day, half a day of chemo to go. And he blew a vein; the IV went out of the vein. He had to get a new IV. They didn’t have the ports back then. So they had to do another one and he knew the routine, but he was furious. He was six feet one or two, and he sat in the hospital bed and was so angry that he straightened out his feet as fast as he could and he broke the bed [she’s laughing]. It was really quite something.
He was in pediatrics, but he was at the top of the age group. The hospital per se did not condone pot, but they also knew that it helped with chemo. Steve asked very quickly and probably in private whether he could use it, and they said ‘well we won’t kick you out, just shut the door.’ I guess it was fine; they had air conditioning, that kind of thing. So that was okay and Steve got home and told his friends and they all offered it and whatever. This was the pot heaven time, this was ’78. There was plenty around.
S: Still is.
C: And also, what was the nasty thing? I keep thinking of PCBs.
S: Acid? LSD?
C: No, it was PC…
S: PCP?
C: Yes. Angel dust? That was around a lot. Anyhow they were aware of things but the doctors said later on that they were not against pot being used but that they thought it should be medically gotten, because it was pure. Because the stuff that the kids would get could be bastardized.
S: Laced?
C: Yeah or whatever. You never know what. And the other thing that they were worried about was addiction. It was up to him though; we didn’t help him financially at all. Except for when he didn’t work, then he had a chit list. You can imagine what he called it.
S: Where was he working?
C: He would work for Den, in the business [landscaping and excavation].
This one time he went in for a blood test and then he had to go back in for chemo at UCONN. We went in for a test and his blood was ready for a new round of chemo and so they told him, which they didn’t usually do, that he had to stay. He raised the roof, he was so angry. Finally, when the doctors went out of the room he snapped at me ‘Mom! I have no pot!’ and I said ‘Well, so well, so what? That’s alright you can get it.’ ‘Well, you have to get it’ and I said ‘Me?!? Don’t be silly! I’m not going to get you any pot!’ but I gave in. When I got home I called one of the people he’d told me and I said ‘Uh, ah, um, Steve said, ah, this is Charlotte Frost’ and she said ‘oh I’ll bring some right over.’ And she brought over a half-gallon zip lock bag chockablock full of pot!
So I went over to UCONN Farmington, an hour away – you were on the same floor [when I had Guillian-Barré]
S: Was I?
C: Yes. When I got to Unionville I was sitting at the light and I looked down at the passenger seat and there was that big bag of pot! And I thought, ‘Oh my god! That’s pot!’ and I went ‘Oh! Ah! Oh!’ and I hid it under the seat. I went into the building like this [mimes hunching over a package hidden under a jacket]. I tell you, what a lion will do for her cub! Gee whiz.
S: I’m sure he appreciated it.
C: Oh he did. He wouldn’t show me that, but he did. He wanted me there, but not necessarily in his room most of the time. He just wanted me around, where he could yell for me to come if he wanted me to. The nurses liked him and that was good. He was cantankerous and ornery, but what sixteen year old wouldn’t be in that situation?
S: It was not a happy thing.
C: No, it was not a happy thing. But you laugh at the fun things.
S: What were Beth and Celia doing, at this time?
C: Um, Celia had just finished the eighth grade, it was hard on her because things, logically had to sort of work around Steve in terms of scheduling. It was hard on her. Beth was nineteen, she was working, I don’t remember if she was at school, if she was at UNH or not but she would come down and see us. It’s very hard, Beth is such an enthusiastic person and she wants to be involved in everything and it’s hard to be involved in two things at once. It was that kind of splitting her life that she would have problems with. She took a semester off, she was working at a diner in Canaan and that way she could keep track of everyone. She would come home on the weekends and see Steven sick to his stomach as all get out in his hospital gown, and the next time she’d come he was off skiing with somebody. It was tough. It was tough on both of the kids in different ways.
S: And it was tough on you two.
C: Oh, it was very tough on Gramp. He couldn’t talk about it much for a long time. It wasn’t until, I don’t know how long it was until after Steve died. For example, there was a truck, an old milk delivery horse – you know that takes the big milk thing behind it – and Den had bought it and was fixing it up. He and Steve were working at it, Steve and Dan [Beth’s son] are very alike, very mechanical. Although Steve wasn’t as good as Dan is. And he and Gramp had had a good time talking about it, and planning it, what they were going to do and it was good for both of them. After Steve died, Den said that he was going to sell the truck, and I said ‘Sure you can sell it, but you have to wait a year.’
S: Why?
C: Well because, your decision maker isn’t very good. Your emotions are too tangled up. And sure enough a year later, he started working on it again. It was an interesting thing. Somebody had also told me that when I was sorting through his things, if in doubt about something save it for a year. It was a very rough time but I think we are stronger, better people than we would have been. And Steve was a better person than he ever would have been. More character, I think.
S: Really?
C: Yes. He loved children. And how many times would you see a grown, he was eighteen, he was in the unit with the pediatrics, and there was a preemie, a downs syndrome baby who had just come upstairs, I think he was maybe five pounds. Like most downs syndrome kids if you hold the heads still when they’re infants, they look perfectly normal. And here’s Steve, with hands like gramps – they were huge – holding this tiny five-pound baby’s head. He was sitting in a wheelchair with an IV pole, no shirt on, with his hands like this [she cups a pretend infant]. You wouldn’t see, most kids wouldn’t show that piece of them, but he was able to. He was special. To us, anyhow. He and Gramp came up with the idea for a scholarship for the Child Center, which was neat.
So, there you go.
S: Are you getting tired?
C: No! We’ve got to watch the time; we have to leave in twenty minutes so you can make your train.
S: Um, what did you and Gramp do when everybody moved out?
C: [Laughs] Oh, it wasn’t a big deal. It was no real jolt for us. Some people say ‘oh, empty house syndrome…
S: Empty nest?
C: Yes, but we didn’t have that.
S: No?
C: No. Well, I guess we were too busy. I was teaching still, full time so… We missed everybody. I’m really missing the girls more now with them that much farther away than I did when they first left the house, because they were in yelling distance and they would turn up like bad pennies all the time. Which was fine.
I didn’t think that it was affecting me as much as I realized, as time went on in the past year, to have them so far away.
S: They are very far away. I think I’m the closest one in the family.
C: Yes. But you know, it’s hard on them, too. Witness how often they call. And this kind of thing that I’m doing doesn’t help [laughs].
S: What do you mean?
C: This… um, growth that I’ve got.
[The dog starts growling]
Freya, stop! You don’t need to make that noise. Are you all collected upstairs?
S: Yes, I’ll go get my stuff.
