Lucille Teasdale. Deborah CowleyЧитать онлайн книгу.

      We are the only doctors here and we work with outmuch rest from morning till evening. The needs are so great. We do just about everything, from pediatrics to malaria and wounds inflicted by elephants and lions – Lucille Teasdale, January 1962

      Lucille was glad to be back with her friends at the hospital. Yet as she slotted back into her earlier routine, she found it hard to concentrate on her work. Every minute of the day, she found herself thinking about Piero and about the time they had spent together in Uganda. She missed him terribly and finally admitted to herself that she had fallen in love With him and wanted to share the rest of her life with him.

      Piero was still in Italy but about to leave for Uganda. Lucille telephoned him the night before his departure. “I am calling to give you my answer,” she explained.

      There was a brief pause while Lucille tried to remain calm. “The answer is yes,” she said. “Yes” she would marry him and “yes,” she would return to live with him in Africa. Piero was ecstatic.

      Lucille had never been happier. She was deeply in love and thought about Piero constantly. She wrote to him almost daily in carefully penned letters written on flimsy aerograms.

      “How can I carry on without you?” she wrote. “… I have decided I do not want to do anything without you. I love you, Piero. I need you.” And later, she said: “Do you remember the day I left you at the station and you thanked me? Well, it is I who must thank you for having saved me from myself, from a life of solitude. You have given me so much happiness. You are such a good person, much better than I. I hope that, with time, I will become worthy of you.”

      In order to feel closer to Piero, Lucille began to go to Mass again. “I did it, not yet by conviction, but because it brought me closer to you. It was also very nice to sit and think of you without any distractions.” In a later letter, in a surprising revelation of her feelings of inadequacy, she confided: “Piero, I am not the strong, independent and cold woman that I have given the impression of all these years. I am a little girl who has forgotten to grow up, a little girl who has finally found someone who can take her hand and walk with her through life. If you only knew how helpless I am without you.”

      The flurry of letters continued. Piero was now back in Uganda, and when he had finished his long days work in the hospital, he would sit down and share his thoughts with Lucille. On 5 October, he wrote: “All I want is to love you Lucille. To have you by my side during my life’s journey, to have you beside me in the hospital, in my home, in my car, in my bed, to live with you for the rest of my life.”

      During this period, Lucille became consumed with the idea of motherhood. “No one wants a child more than I, and how I long for you to be the father of my children,” she wrote to Piero. “But I have always had a great fear that a child of mine might have the same awful feelings towards me that I had towards my own mother … Often I wonder if it is better to abandon the idea of motherhood for fear of having children who would hate me…”

      As the weeks progressed, Lucille decided to withdraw from her course in Marseilles. She also went to Paris to cancel her internship. During the meeting, her professor used the occasion to challenge her decision. Why are you giving up the position? Why are you leaving France? What country are you going to? What type of medicine will you be doing there? She became so flustered by all the questions that she burst into tears. The same night, she wrote to Piero: “For many years, I did not know how to cry,” she admitted. “I tried to convince myself that it was not a good thing to cry, but now I believe that deep down, I missed out on something. I believe that you can live more intensely when you are able to be moved, even by small things. It is through you, Piero, that I have rediscovered the soul of my childhood.”