[Note: December 2023, Heather Roller, Gretchen’s niece, found this untitled essay among Gretchen’s voluminous files—on thumb drives, external hard drives, computers, and on paper. A number of Gretchen’s many texts organizing her thoughts and findings on her great-aunt Hertha Gretsch’s trip around the world were assembled by Heather and myself into a book Gretchen Elsner-Sommer’s The Book of Hertha, published in late 2022. Most of  Gretchen’s writings on Hertha were completed before 2008 but many of them were not discovered until after her death in August 2020. DWC]

July 15, 2008, Tuesday, 5:23 pm

Garden House

Yesterday afternoon, I was lying on my side on an examining table while a technician  was taking an ultrasound of my heart. I suddenly realized  that Hertha was in the room, Hertha and her friend Cecile. I could see  Hertha clear as a bell but I never actually saw Cecile. Hertha, my grandfather’s youngest sister, was standing off to the side of the table over by the medical cabinet and the sink on the wall. She was looking at me and laughing. She and Cecile were talking back and forth exchanging some kind of joke. A joke I wasn’t in on but whose merriment made me laugh nonetheless. They were trying to make me relax with their banter and their laughter….and I did relax, thinking about them there with me. 

The technician didn’t notice the other women in the room. But as she gently moved my breast around to find my heart, she noticed, I’m sure, the dark scar which ran across its width. She couldn’t have missed it. She probably noticed too that my breast was red ,only slightly burned, from the six weeks of radiation therapy that I had just finished. She didn’t say anything. She probably didn’t notice that I also had a scar on my left breast too which was decidedly white when viewed next to its pinkish partner. That breast scar also from breast cancer surgery is old now and has shrunk and faded in the ten years since it first appeared.

In February, when I learned that I had cancer again, this time in my other breast, I remember lying on my bed and worrying. Hertha sat next to me then and told me that she would stay with me. . .whatever happened, she would stay with me. She told me that she wouldn’t leave me. She said that I had followed her around the world in my research and that she would stick with me now as I began my journey with this latest cancer.

Now after five months, two surgeries, radiation and the beginning of new medication Hertha was keeping her promise. It was the latest stage of my treatment that really worried me, the new medication that I would take everyday for five years. It worried me so much in fact that I thought I might be having a heart attack after my first day on the medicine. 

So here, I was having my heart checked out and there Hertha was right by my side. It wasn’t strange at all to see her there in the room with me. I was quite comfortable in her presence. I had spent years trying to find the little bits of her life that she had left behind. I had spend months and months thinking of her and imagining her. So I was quite comfortable in her presence and, after all, she had promised to stay with me through all of this terribly medicalized process I found myself in. Later, though, I realized the strangest part of the whole afternoon.

It wasn’t just that Hertha died fourteen years before I was born. It wasn’t that I could visualize her so easily when, in fact, I had never met her. The strangest part was remembering that Hertha had rheumatic fever as a child and it had damaged her heart. Her damaged heart in fact led to her early death at the age of 45. Hertha, much more than me, had been in need of all of this medical attention I was getting. Hertha would have benefited from the ultrasound and the stress test. She could have been spared if she had had access to this medical treatment.

Both of us were together in that room, Hertha with her damaged heart from rheumatic fever and me with my heart perfectly strong but wounded nonetheless from fear and worry. My wounds started long ago when I was an infant and lost my father. . .before I was fully grown my mother got sick and died. I don’t think I ever felt safe as a child. These machines, the ultrasound, the treadmill, couldn’t help me but they could have helped Hertha. Now the only thing that keeps her alive is my writing her story. Hertha, though, could help me in a way these machines can’t. She gives me a sense of peace and comfort. With our wounded hearts, we have much in common.