In his book “My Maggie,” Richard King writes a powerful, complex, and memorable love story about his childhood sweetheart and wife of 32 years. Diagnosed with hearing loss at the age of four, Maggie wore cumbersome hearing aids and felt the humiliation of being "different." Slowly, an insidious disease robbed her of vision. But she soldiered on, having fought three different cancers, changed careers in the middle of her life and fought to realize her dreams.
Underneath these great challenges, there was an incredible love shared by two people and it was cemented by adversity and reached a near perfect spiritual connection. They lived a classic old-fashioned love story, one of courage and devotion. Read an excerpt:
Chapter 7: The Miracle Worker
It was late when I sat down on the train back to Manhattan. My car was pretty much deserted. I felt like the depressed character in the Twilight Zone who was looking out a dark window to find peace and happiness of bygone times in a quaint village called Willoughby. Sick, tired, and lonely, I thought of my new life all the way back to Manhattan. It would be a new challenge meeting people who have had bad luck and struggle everyday. The last two weeks—leaving Maggie at the airport and the visit to the Helen Keller Center—had convinced me that there would be an element of sadness in almost every day of the rest of my life. It breaks your heart to see people struggling to see, to hear, to walk, or even to speak. It breaks your heart even more when you love someone beset with those problems.
I had to learn to live with a new set of standards. I had to learn to talk to Maggie and her friends just as I would want to be talked to in that situation, as a fellow human being. I realized it would not be an easy thing to do after hearing mournful groans from people with disfigured heads and faces. We all hope to avoid seeing such tragedy in our lives, but I had to understand it and not just give lip service to the basic truth that we are all human beings—whatever our configuration.
While I eventually did face it, on that particular night I could not. I stumbled and coughed my way back to the Plaza, which had an excellent bar off the lobby. The place was alive with people who were drinking, talking, laughing, seeing, and hearing. I took a seat at the bar and poured down more than a few vodka tonics. Within an hour, I was pretty much wasted. I stumbled to my feet, signed the tab, then took a drink to my room. Getting drunk was the only way I could have slept at all that night, and while I knew the worst thing you can do with bronchitis is drink booze, I really had no choice.
To know that Maggie was sleeping in the darkness at Sands Point while she should have been in my arms in a beautiful hotel room was eating me alive. The booze did manage to numb at least some of the pain from one of the lowest points in my life.
Chapter 15: A Second Life
Maggie was making new friends by the dozens. She went out with Marlene Fishman, the wife of her eye doctor. One of her support group members, Sue Cox was a regular, and the list went on and on. The closest “new” friendship she developed was with Karen McCulloh. Don Davia referred Maggie to Karen, who had also been a nurse. Karen had developed macular degeneration, hearing loss, and multiple sclerosis. She had the same maiden name as Maggie, Smith, and the same qualities Maggie possessed. Karen was extremely intelligent and a fighter. She was far more aggressive than Maggie in mixing it up with people for her cause. Like Maggie, she was also blunt and was not one to suffer fools.
When they first met, Maggie was still a bit depressed about her future. Karen told her there were about 500 different fields of nursing, and surely, there was one Maggie could explore. She lifted Maggie’s spirits, and the two became very close sharing their joys and fears. Together, they became quite a force for the cause of the disabled—particularly disabled nurses.
Maggie and Karen spoke to nurses at hospitals all over Chicago. They taught a class at the Loyola University School of Nursing, Masters Level. It was called Pioneering Health Care for Women with Disabilities. They were not two women to make it a superficial textbook class. The message they sent out was from the heart—from their personal experiences as women with disabilities. Maggie and Karen, combined, had suffered retinitis pigmentosa (progressive blindness), macular degeneration (also progressive blindness), hearing loss, breast cancer, and multiple sclerosis. It was a resume no one would want, but they had it and were determined to use it for the good of others.
Karen and Maggie laid it on the line about what it’s like to lose a job because of a physical problem. Not a great deal was known, particularly, about visual impairment. They conducted the class for five years, and at the end of each class asked the students if they would work with them to try to find work that disabled nurses could handle. The classes were usually silent. No one had been paying much attention to their former colleagues, but now Maggie and Karen had at least put the issue on the table.
As a result of the classes, Maggie and Karen got the nursing school at Rush Presbyterian Hospital to form a committee to examine the possibility of setting up a recruiting program for nurses with disabilities. It was a win-win situation. The disabled nurses who would get the jobs not only were earning a living again but gaining an enormous boost in their self esteem. The hospitals and patients also won because these new nurses brought with them a sense of appreciation and dedication even beyond the norm for the profession. Two determined women, given one bad break after the other, were able to forge ahead and achieve wonderful things.
If Maggie’s fingers were on these keys—and how I wish they were—she would be saying to others in a similar situation, “If I can do it, you can do it.”
Maggie received a letter of recognition from RUSH, which she would have loved because she was said to be an articulate speaker. She worked hard over the years to minimize her speech impediment and it showed. She had rock hard determination.
Karen and Maggie traveled all over the country lobbying for the disabled. They went to Springfield, Illinois to lobby the Illinois Nurses Association to set up a committee to study the issue of how to get disabled nurses back in the workforce. They traveled to Washington to the Josephine G. Taylor Institute, sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind, to push the issues of the disabled. Maggie and Karen were there twice, and the first time there were no considerations given to the hearing-impaired. Karen says Maggie had to give her FM system to the speakers at the various symposiums so she could hear what was going on. Maggie and Karen spoke up about the oversight, and the second time, special headsets were made available. They learned to push for everything. Karen told me that Maggie’s influence was greater with male lobbyists for a rather obvious reason.
“Let’s face it,” Karen said, “when a woman is beautiful in this country, she has more of a chance to have an impact. Maggie was gorgeous. When we went into meetings, she learned to use her good looks. It helped her to be assertive for the cause.”
Karen said Maggie was a hero among people with Usher Syndrome.
“She had the beauty, she had money, but she also had a big humble heart,” Karen said. “She represented hope, and that’s why people flocked around her like moths to a flame.”
Karen said the program she and Maggie pioneered to put disabled nurses back to work has flourished.
“We now have committees in seventeen states and have placed dozens of disabled nurse in jobs. Sometimes, I look at Maggie’s picture in my office and break down in tears. She should have been here to see this. She would have been thrilled.”
Karen then told me a story that epitomizes the work and the fun they shared together. Their travels for the cause became their lives, and they enjoyed every second of it.
“We traveled independently, together, and we were at the Marriott Hotel in Washington; I was her sighted-guide sometimes, and she was mine. We always said between the two of us we had almost one good eye, and I always stood on her left so she could hear me. We would go through the lobby first thing in the morning. We were all dressed up for our day on the Hill. As always, Maggie was impeccably dressed. She would pack full weeks worth of clothes in one carry-on suitcase; I would need a couple. Maggie always got on my case for checking bags at the airport. She promised to give me lessons on how to pack. One morning, we rushed down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee. She was quite the coffee drinker. There we were; I was acting as her sighted-guide, and I had my cane out. She was carrying two cups of coffee, and we were walking towards the elevator. Now, in my low vision, I could see two people coming towards me, and I was thinking, surely, they will see the cane in my hand, and they will step aside. All of a sudden, we rammed right into something, and we did not know what we had hit. The coffee went flying out of Maggie’s hands, and all over our outfits. As usual, Maggie looked at me and said: ‘You’re a great sighted-guide. Who did we hit?’
‘A mirror,’ I replied.
It was a mirror, and we had walked into our own images. Maggie and I laughed and laughed, as we dripped with coffee. We had to go back upstairs and change, and we laughed some more. Here we were, these so-called ‘leaders of the disabled,’ dripping with coffee in the lobby of a major hotel. It’s a sign of how happy and well-adjusted Maggie really was that she could laugh at herself.”
Reprinted from "My Maggie" by Richard King, HPH Publishing. Copyright (c) 2007 by Richard King. For more information on Rich and Maggie King, visit MyMaggie.com.