Oh, dear love, let us not say goodbye
                        But instead let us know we will meet again ...
                            from “Let Us Not Say Goodbye,” by Mabel Cunningham
One day in 1958, I got home from teaching school and I found Elaine’s music stand upended where she’d been practicing. She was gone, and Taylor was gone, but in a little bit the phone rang and it was Captain Potter. He was a member of the Old Christian Church and he was chief of the fire department in Kansas City. He said Elaine was with him and that Taylor had a heart attack and was in the hospital. He brought Elaine home, and then he took us both out to the hospital to see Taylor.
     I was scared to pieces.
     While Taylor was in the hospital recovering, I tried to teach school. Elaine and I went out on the bus every night to see him. When he came home, he took nitroglycerine tablets when the pain started.
     He was hospitalized three times with heart attacks. He was in a wheelchair for a while, and then on a walker, and he had to use a cane. He was forced to take early retirement when he was fifty-nine and go on Social Security Disability. I always thought he might have lived longer if he could have been calmer, but he would get so agitated.
     Slowly he got better. He could still drive a car. And we traveled. We went places. Usually our trips were connected with church conventions or arranged through our church.
     After I retired in 1970, we did volunteer work at the home for retarded children in Marshall. That was a special education school. The parents didn’t want to have to take care of the children, they were ashamed of them, and put them in the home to get them out of the way. Taylor and I would take all the children out to church. The home asked for people to bake cookies, and I volunteered to do that. Sometimes I baked six and seven hundred cookies at a time. I made caramel corn and cupcakes. Taylor and I bought the supplies with our own money, and after I’d done the baking, Taylor would take the stuff up to the home.
     May 25, 1976. That morning, Taylor and I went over to the church. The Old Christian Church was publishing a directory and Taylor’s and my pictures were going to be in it, so we went over to look at the proofs to see if we wanted to get any copies for ourselves. We decided that we didn’t; we didn’t like the pictures.
     When we were leaving the church that last day, we were walking up the steps and Taylor was using a cane. Someone tried to help him, and Taylor shrugged him off and said, “I’m all right. I’m not dead yet.” In an hour he was.
     We came home. After I retired, Taylor and I had bought a house in Marshall, Missouri, at 119 East Marion Street, a big, nine-room house with a full basement. Taylor went out on the porch. We had a porch there as long as the whole length of the house, with screened windows. A neighbor woman stopped by and talked to him for a while.
     I planned to go down to the high school later in the afternoon to see the students put on a pageant commemorating the Centennial of the Constitution of the United States. I fixed something for us to eat, and went out on the porch to call Taylor for lunch. He said “I’m not hungry. I don’t feel good.”
     I said, “Maybe you’ll feel better when you eat something.”
     He came in the house, but then he sat down in his green plastic chair, one of those recliner chairs, and he said, “Would you pray for me? I’m afraid.”
     I prayed. I tried to, but I was scared. Any time Taylor had an attack, I gave him one of those nitroglycerine pills. I was just torn between two fires, whether to stay with him and pray, or run and get the pills.
     And just like that he was gone. He died in his chair. He’d just turned seventy-five on February twelfth.
     I ran and called Brenda Heckbert, but she wasn’t home. A lady (whose name I can’t remember, but I know she had a little boy) came over, and she went to work and called Vesta Rawlins who came up to the house and notified everybody.
     Taylor was taken to the hospital. It was his fourth heart attack, but this time he didn’t come home. I put his body with the Marshall Funeral Home. The undertaker came to the house, and he said, “We wondered if you wanted us to get him a new suit. Or what?” I said, “He’s got enough.” We picked out a whole new outfit of clothes. Taylor had seven shirts still in the packages. Still hadn’t been opened because he never liked white shirts, he always wanted the colored. Then the undertaker asked for his dentures, both upper and lower.
     My sister Lorraine called Elaine and left a message on the answering machine that her dad had died. My daughter had just been to see us and had gone back to New York City, and now she came home again the next day, and all the rest of the relatives came too, mine and Taylor’s.
     Taylor belonged to the Odd Fellows, and they wanted to give him services, too. Taylor wanted that. I said he had two funerals. The Odd Fellows had one, and then the next day I had the regular memorial service. Vesta Rawlins recorded the whole service, what people said, and afterwards she typed it up.
     I buried Taylor in the cemetery in Albany, Missouri. Albany is one hundred and forty miles from Marshall. I’ll be buried in the same cemetery. I had a short graveside service for him. I said that was his third funeral.
     If he had lived until August the twenty-first, we’d have been married thirty years.
     After Taylor died, I cried for hours and hours. I’ll tell you what. Now it’s almost twenty years he’s been gone, and I think the reason I cried so hard and so much when he died was the fact that down the street was Ramona Webb. Her husband had a stroke and laid in a bed for seven years connected to ropes and pulleys so that he could turn himself from one side to the other. Ramona took care of him. When Taylor was sick from his heart attacks, I said that if he got like Ramona’s husband, I didn’t know if I could take care of him for seven years or not. Then he died suddenly, and I cried because I felt guilty. That’s what I figured out since.
     With Taylor, I wasn’t afraid to have a seizure. You might say it was terrible, but what I prized so much about Taylor was that he would have fought for me right or left if anybody who knew about my disability would criticize me. And he never held it against me, that I had that. After all I’d been through before I met him, it’s hard to say how much that meant to me.

     I lived alone in our house in Marshall. When Taylor and I were getting married, I had lied on the application for our marriage license. I said I didn’t have seizures, and after his death that lie started to bother me. I felt I had done something wrong and I worried about it all the time, until I finally wrote to the license bureau and told them the truth.
     The days passed. Sometimes I felt life wasn’t worth living. I felt that nobody liked me because I was an epileptic, that I was just a loner, and that nobody wanted me around. I thought about suicide, but I was afraid to kill myself because I thought I’d go to the bad place.
     On June 4, 1976, about, I woke up in the morning and I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t get up. I grabbed hold of the side of the bed and pulled myself up and got out, and I called Brenda Heckbert. She got hold of the ambulance, and I was taken to the Fitzgibbon Hospital.
     I was so despondent and so discouraged in the hospital. Then one day Oral Roberts came up on the television. I couldn’t see the set, but I could hear him from my bed. He said: “This day a miracle is going to happen to you.” Somebody in the room said, “Mabel, get up and walk.”
     I got up. Until then, I couldn’t walk, but something let loose in that leg and I could. I got up and walked around the bed. Those nurses were astonished. They said, “Mrs. Cunningham is up walking!”
     I got better. I had physical therapy and I was able to walk.
     A while later I had to go into Columbia Hospital. That was a mental hospital. After a while I was able to get my mind back to order. While I was there, I put everything I owned into my daughter’s name, gave her control of my money. She’s my only heir. She put the house in Marshall up for sale, and everything in it except a bed and some of the furniture that I was going to keep, and my clothes and my papers.
     My family found an apartment for me in Albany, Missouri. My brother and his wife rented a U-haul truck and took all my stuff. A young man lived next door and he planted some flowers for me. The rent was fifty dollars a month. The apartments had been built for senior citizens. I had a five room efficiency on the ground floor. It was a good one, except that when every time it rained, water came underneath the door.

     One day I went out to get the newspaper and I fell. Two women tried to help me up and I ended up with fractures. I was hospitalized with a pair of bones up my back. When I got better, my twin sister came to the hospital with a car to take me back to my apartment. People at the hospital said to me, “Your daughter is here to get you.” There I was, in my seventies, and people mistook my twin sister for my daughter.

     In Albany, I kept having seizures. Sometimes I’d have maybe two in a day. I’d have one and then another. I’d wake up, come out of a seizure, and I’d call my sister and I’d say, “I’ll not be going to church this morning, so don’t come by and get me.”
     Those seizures kept on, and then I started having strokes too. Five strokes. I was used to the seizures, I could handle them, but I was afraid of the strokes.
     After one stroke, my family took me to a hospital in Kansas City to a doctor who gave me shock therapy to get that deadness out of my head. I think he gave me about thirteen treatments. I wasn’t unhappy about that. When I was having those strokes and those seizures, I felt that if I would die and go to heaven it would be wonderful.
     My head was crazy. I knew something was wrong. I tell you, I’d get up in the morning and I’d feel so bad that I thought I was going to die. I thought that both God and Satan ruled my mind. I’d try to help myself. I’d say to myself, “Satan, only God and I rule my mind. Now I’m going to be all right.”

     On August 19, 1978, my daughter brought me to New York City. She took me to her apartment on East 82nd Street, a five story walk-up. I thought I was visiting just through Christmas. I came to New York with the idea that I would get out of the relatives’ way for awhile. I had been having those seizures and those strokes, and my family was always having to take me back and forth to the hospital for outpatient treatments. Well, my family had other ideas. They were afraid to have me living alone by myself in Albany, and in October, my daughter told me that I was going to be living with her.
     That December, a taxi knocked me over in front of Grand Central Station. We were on our way up to Yonkers to spend Christmas with some family. I got out of the cab and I went behind the taxi, thinking the driver would move forward. Instead, he went into reverse and knocked me over.
     I didn’t think anything about whether or not anything was broken, I just got up as quick as I could. The cab hit me on the back, but I wasn’t really hurt, just bruised. We went on into the station and caught the train.

     The strokes kept coming. That year I had another, and when I came to, my head wasn’t right. I had the idea that my mind was controlled by demons, and yet God was speaking through my mind too. I thought: “If I can just get out of this danger. If I can just get out of this danger.” Something said to me, “Just keep waiting. You’ll come to the end of the tunnel.” Eventually, I did.
     I had visions. I was filled with inspiration. I wrote prose and I wrote poetry about it. I thought I was going to save the whole world. After I had that stroke, I felt the power of the Holy Spirit come upon me, and it said, “I want you to speak to all mankind.”
     When World War II started, I wrote The Peacelovers. That book was about the changing policies of the nation, about how the different countries ought to work together in peace and harmony, written in poetic form. I wrote hundreds of poems that were inspired by my religious feelings and ideas, and many poems where I tried to express what I saw, my experiences, and the troubles and sadness I knew because of my disability.
     After that stroke, when the visions started, I wrote another book, The Holy Spirit Speaks to North America. It was easy to write. The words just came to me, poured out. In that book I went back to the beginning of time, the creation of the different races and the creatures, on down to the present day. I wrote about the nuclear bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and I told about all the things that were going to happen and how the world was going to be destroyed by fire if people didn’t change and start being good instead of evil. I sent the book to a publisher, but no reply came. Finally, I wrote to them, and they claimed they didn’t know anything about my book. I guessed then that there wasn’t anything new about it.
     My daughter took me to the Paine Whitney Clinic, and the doctors said I was crazy, that I had lost my mind. I agreed with them sometimes, and I took treatments as an outpatient, and gradually I got my mind back. I still don’t understand why it happened to me, or what it meant. During the months while I heard the voice and I had the visions, those experiences were so real. I can’t explain it. The voice kept saying, “You are going to be tested. You are going to be tested.”