Thanks, AI for helping me find A Little Girl’s Gift about Canadian leukemia victim and eye donor, Janis Babson. I read the book in Catholic grade school many years ago and it stuck with me ever since, but I couldn’t remember specifics. Every so often, it would bug me enough to try and find the book.
Reading it was the first time I learned the word “pothole,” which I thought was pronounced “poth-ole.” I had no idea what a pothole was, but I knew it was something in a road. Boy, did I feel dumb when I found out what they really are. We have plenty of them in northwest Pennsylvania.
I also remembered the image of a stump pushing down into the little girl’s back having been used to describe the pain Janis experienced over her two-year battle with leukemia. So, potholes and a stump. . .
About ten years ago, I had a good lead in the middle of the night but lost whatever clue I had captured. Then, a few weeks ago, I wondered if AI might be able to help. After a few fits and starts, it helped me identify A Little Girl’s Gift. Its description came close to what I remembered, although I had thought it had been a memoir by the girl’s mother, rather than an expanded Reader’s Digest article by Lawrence Elliott, American author.
The 50th anniversary edition (2011) came today, and it is most certainly the book I read as a child, updated with a foreword by Elliott and a preface by a family member.
Memories are often faulty, but the potholes are present several times as I remembered them causing Janis’s pain when was brought home from the hospital. The “stump” was less accurate, but a proof. “It’s as though someone were dragging a rough old tree branch through my back and pushing it down into my legs,” said Janis to describe her severe back pain. As a child of no more than twelve, that kind of suffering obviously had a profound effect on me.
Janis was sick from 1959 to 1961 in the days when leukemia was a definite death sentence. She was part of a large, loving family and it pained her to be away from her siblings during her many hospitalizations. But she was filled with faith.
She eventually found out what the cause of her blood ailment was and accepted the fact that she would die much better than her heartbroken parents were ever able to do. After two years of pain, Janis was ready to go to heaven and said that she would ask Our Lady to console her family. In her last moments, she tried to sit up. Her eyes were wide and staring “as though she couldn’t see enough of what stretched out in front of her.” She asked if what she was seeing was heaven.
Several years before, Janis had heard about the relatively new procedure of corneal transplants that were giving sight to the blind. She vowed to become a donor before she became sick and insisted that her parents honor her wishes after her death. Her wish was fulfilled and the news stories that followed resulted in a dramatic increase of corneal tissue pledges to the Ontario Eye Bank.
I’m so glad I finally found the book that affected me so much as a child. It taught me an early lesson about the fragility of life, the strength of faith, and the love of family.
