On fancy occasions, I wear a topaz ring—a large, pale-yellow gem in fine filigree setting. My paternal grandmother had purchased this ring for herself. I, being the oldest grandchild and also sharing her birth month, received this treasure as a young adult.
Grandma Fogarty had died when I was only five. When I was young, I remember waking up after naps at her house to find M&M’s waiting for me on the bedside table in a small plastic medicine cup. She was quiet and kind. I vividly remember her wake, in a dim room with plush red carpet and fancy furniture. A crowd of solemn-looking adults dwarfed me. I recall a shiny wooden casket with a satin lining and kneeling to pray in front of her lifeless body. Her face was waxy, and her hands were wrapped around a rosary.
As I learned more about her, my admiration grew.
Grandma Fogarty was a registered nurse in my hometown.
The second of five children, the second daughter, she and her siblings grew up on a farm in the Connecticut hills. Her parents were Polish immigrants, part of a small wave of Poles who had settled in the area to create farms from the rocky land.
As a daughter, she had responsibilities at home, and as a farm girl, even more so.
I would love to know the story of how she enrolled in the St. Vincent Hospital School of Nursing in Bridgeport, an hour’s drive away on today’s roads in one of the largest cities in Connecticut. How was it for her to live on her own, so far from the farm, and learn the fundamentals of nursing?
Later, when she married my grandfather at the “old age” of 28, she moved to “town” and continued to help at the farm, doing the cleaning and cooking to assist her father and brothers as well as the employed farm hands. In the 1940s, rural areas had no electricity or indoor plumbing. She cooked the farm meals on a woodstove, polished the glass globes for the gas lights, and hauled in wash water from the pump outside.
Later, when her children came—first my aunt, then my uncle, and finally my father—she worked the night shift at the hospital so she could care for her family, both in her own home in town and “up on the farm.” She held down three nursing night shifts per week, often walking from home to the hospital if no one was available to give her a ride. Sometimes her children accompanied her to the farm.
Thinking back on her life, I recognize the grit it must have taken her to develop her nursing skills, even in the face of being needed on the farm, and then continuing her full-time work as she raised her family. I carry her dedication to her patients and her reputation within the town as inspiration in my own practice.
Colleen T. Fogarty
Rochester, New York