Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff’s account, which draws on her aunt’s memories of caring for Rosemary, gives some access to this otherwise invisible dimension of Rosemary’s life. From her book and the descriptions drawn from it in accessible sources, a picture emerges of Rosemary as someone who was genuinely known by the women who cared for her — not as a case or a famous patient, but as a person with preferences and moods and habits and a name.
The caregiving relationship between Rosemary and the Sisters of Saint Coletta lasted decades. Some of the women who began caring for Rosemary when she arrived in 1949 were still at Saint Coletta when she died in 2005. Whatever Rosemary’s experience of those relationships was — and again, that question cannot be fully answered from the outside — she had consistent human presence in her life during the decades when her family was absent, and she had caregivers who knew her as an individual rather than as a problem to be managed.
This is not a small thing. One of the consequences of the family’s twenty-year absence from Rosemary’s life was that the women of Saint Coletta became, in a practical sense, her people. They were the ones who knew what food she preferred and what sounds she found comforting and what routines made her feel safe. They were the ones who walked with her in the Wisconsin landscape that surrounded the institution, who helped her into the pool, who were present on the ordinary days that make up most of any life.