She spent twenty-three years learning. She spent twenty years largely alone. She spent the remaining decades of her life in Wisconsin, cared for by women who were not her family, visited in the later years by siblings who came to know her as an adult rather than as the child they remembered.
What did she make of all of it? That is the question the record cannot answer. Her letters from before the surgery — the childlike handwriting, the misspellings, the warmth and desire to please — give access to one version of her inner life, but they stop in 1941. The surgery took her voice in a way that made her incapable of producing any further written or spoken record of her experience.
The people who cared for her at Saint Coletta knew things about her that biographers cannot reach. The Sisters who walked with her on the grounds, who sat with her at meals, who helped her swim — they knew the texture of her days and the character of her moods in ways that have not been captured in any publicly accessible form.
What can be said is that she lived. She lived for sixty-three years after the surgery that was supposed to help her. She swam in the Wisconsin and Florida and Cape Cod water. She walked in the Wisconsin landscape, which by photographs appears to have been green and quiet and physically beautiful. She had caregivers who knew her name and her preferences and treated her as a person. She had siblings who eventually came back and sat with her at the end.