God's generals

The great American humorist Robert Benchley once
stated, “Life begins at forty.” Yet it was in my fortieth year
that I began to die. Not rapidly or all at once, which is a
beautiful way to die, but bit by bit. Slowly, across the next
seventeen years, my body stopped living—each section
dying with agonizing pain.
I first noticed it one afternoon in my downstairs office
at the Boysen Paint Company in Emeryville, a suburb of
Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. I was almost
a fixture at Boysen, having worked as a printer and
typesetter for many years. It was my job to print all their
letterheads, catalogs, and paint-can labels. Behind my
desk were the two big multigraph machines. In front of me
was a big tray of lead type characters.
This particular afternoon the copy girl had just carried
a bundle of newly printed labels upstairs. I picked up my
tweezers and reached into the tray for some extra fine
type. But something was wrong. It was almost
imperceptible, yet my eyes were blurred and my hand was
shaking. I had to stab at the type with my tweezers in
order to pick it up. At the same time I noticed a strange
numbness in my hands and legs. Being a woman of great
resourcefulness, I was often assured by my husband that
there was no problem I couldn’t solve. Yet somehow I
sensed that this shaking of my hands, this blurring of my
eyes, this strange numbness were far bigger than anything I had ever faced before.

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