There’s a photo of the two of them at a fund-raising dinner for the hospital, taken in 1934. They’re holding hands and he’s leaning into her, as if he’s just whispered something into her ear. She’s looking back at him with a smile that radiates trust and affection. I don’t know if love can be felt from a photograph taken almost fifty years ago, but it is impossible to look at this image and not conclude that Helen and John were very much in love.
A year and a half into their marriage, Helen gave birth to twins, two girls. Although by all accounts her pregnancy was unremarkable, tragically they were both stillborn, and doctors were unable to resuscitate them.
John was a thin man with a history of asthma who tired easily. After the loss of the twins, he seemed to have trouble getting out of bed.
His breathing worsened, and he began coughing blood.
Tuberculosis was suspected, but the cause was mitral valve stenosis, a narrowing of the mitral valve to the heart, likely from scarlet fever when he was a boy. His heart was enlarged and profoundly damaged by the time the diagnosis was made.
He was, quite literally, going to die of a broken heart.
He was dead within six months, making Helen a widow at thirty. According to letters written to her father, she blamed herself for the deaths of both of her daughters, and even more so for John’s death. “How could any competent physician miss such a diagnosis in someone with whom I spent so many hours, so many days?” she wrote. “There’s no excuse.”
She sold their house, gave notice at Philadelphia General, and spent the next ten months traveling in South America.
There are few surviving letters or journals from that time, but I was able to piece together that she spent the majority of her time in Peru and Colombia studying medicinal plants and shamanism. Though a disbeliever in the spirit world and all things supernatural, Helen took a keen interest in the role psychoactive plants played in healing the sick. The trip also, one would assume, sparked her interest in the role the mind and psyche played in overall health.
She returned to the States a changed person. She went back to using her maiden name and returned home to Vermont, where she’d grown up and attended medical school. She left surgery behind and began a residency in psychiatry.
“The tragedies we endure shape our lives: we carry them like shadows,” Dr. Hildreth wrote in a paper for the American Journal of Psychiatry in May of 1971.
One must wonder how Dr. Hildreth was changed by the stillbirth of the twins, the death of her husband; how much these events shaped her, what shadows she herself carried.
Lizzy
August 20, 2019
SKINK AND I crossed West Main and headed for the long pier that ran along the west side of the downtown area. There were dozens of boats moored there, a little shack selling fried seafood. We passed tables and kiosks selling keepsakes to tourists: jewelry, paintings of Vermont landscapes customized with your name, a guy who made funky animal sculptures out of cut-up old tires—a monkey hanging from the awning of his stand, a dragon the size of a Labrador retriever sprawled on the pavement. As we walked past, the rubber animals all seemed to watch.
At the end of the pier, beside the soft-serve ice cream shop （Best Maple Creemees in Vermont promised the sign）， three kids were sitting at one of the picnic tables pounding energy drinks in huge black cans and smoking cigarettes: a thin boy with bleached-blond hair and bad skin, and two girls dressed in black with dyed black hair to match.
“Yo,” Skink called.
The blond guy nodded at him.
“This is Lizzy, the lady I told you about.”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” the guy said. He squinted at me. “You look different, though.”
I smiled. “This is me without a crew to do my makeup and hair,” I said, taking a seat at the table.