Linda’s Haunting Vision
By CARL BAKAL
Life
began for Linda Buritsch on September 10, 1945, on Staten Island, New
York. When she was two, the Buritsch
family, which also included Linda’s older brother, Kit, moved to Riviera Beach,
Maryland. Although Linda was born with
a heart murmur, she lived a completely active life—swimming, fishing, and
playing tennis. When she was a child,
she dreamed of becoming a gym teacher, but as she grew older her interests
turned to music, art and writing.
She
wrote poetry and stories, some of which were published in student
anthologies. Death seemed to preoccupy
her. “What is death?” she once
wrote. “Death is eternity—but how can I
be sure?” Was it her awareness of death
that made life so precious to her? “I
love life,” she wrote. “I wait for
life. Will life wait for me?” She was
always falling in and our of love.
Although some of her attachments were serious, none was lasting, perhaps
because the love she ultimately hoped to find existed only in her dreams.
This is suggested
by a rather curious incident. One
afternoon in 1963, just after she finished high school, she suddenly sketched a
portrait—the first she had ever done.
It was of a boy of about her own age who bore no resemblance to anyone
she ever known.
“Who’s
the boy?” her mother, Polly, asked.
‘My
dream man,” said Linda.
“Oh,
come off it,” Polly said. “Where did
you get such an idea?”
“I don’t
know,” said Linda. “I just had an
impulse to draw somebody, and that’s who I came up with.” Then she walked into her bedroom, removed a
photograph from a frame, and replaced it with the portrait.
Linda
attended Hoot College in Frederick, Maryland, where she majored in English,
continued her writing, and edited the school literary magazine. Upon graduation in 1967, she taught English
at Annapolis junior High School, and became one of the most popular teachers.
She had
begun getting headaches while she was in college. But because they usually occurred at exam time, they were
diagnosed as migraines triggered by pressure.
Neither Linda nor her parents were alarmed.
In the
spring of what was to he the last year of her life, she went on vacation to
Puerto Rico and took several weekend trips to New England with friends. She was sparkling at her brother Kit’s
wedding in May and, after school was out in June, she dated almost every night.
“It now
seems she sensed her time was running out,” her mother recalls. “She kept going constantly.” At one point she surprised everyone by
thoroughly cleaning her room, throwing away old love letters and other
mementoes. But she saved the portrait
of her “dream man,” removing it from the frame and carefully placing it in a
portfolio with her other sketches.
She was
still troubled by occasional headaches, but the attacks did not seem to incapacitate
her. Or it may be that Linda was simply
not one to complain. Otherwise, she
seemed in perfect health.
The end
came with terrible suddenness. On
Sunday, July 21, Linda came home from a weekend trip complaining of an
unusually bad headache. Despite
continuing pain, she worked at her temporary summer job most of the week, but
on Thursday night she became violently ill, and threw up. “She may be allergic to codeine.” The doctor
told Polly over the phone, and prescribed another painkiller. It enabled Linda to sleep through the
night. But Friday morning Linda was far
too sick to go to work. And during the
day she started throwing up what appeared to be blood. Seriously alarmed, her mother phoned the
doctor, who told her to take Linda to nearby North Arundel Hospital. “Oh Mom,” Linda cried on the way, “I feel
terrible. I think I’m going to die.”
Almost
the same time, 400 miles away in Charleston, South Carolina, another
22-year-old faced tragedy of a different sort.
If Linda might be described as the All-American girl, George [Woody]
Johnson, Jr., was in many in many ways the All-American boy. Like Linda, in his growing-up years he had
wanted to be a gym teacher and then—again like Linda he found his interests
turning to reading, drawing and music.
But
Woody was always plagued with poor eyesight, and when he was twenty he learned
that he was suffering from keratoconus, a rare disorder that may markedly
distort vision and is characterized by bulging of the membrane covering the
front of the eye. At first, contact
lenses flattened out the bulge in the left cornea and enabled him to see
normally. Later, as the disease
progressed, the lenses no longer did the job.
By the spring of 1968, the aliment had progressed so far that Dr.
William Vallotton, a prominent Charleston eye surgeon, told the boy a corneal
transplant was needed to save his eye.
Woody
agreed to the operation. Now the
problem was to obtain an eye from a donor with little delay. Dr. Vallctton, who had performed several
hundred such transplants, filed his request with the South Carolina Eye Bank,
which in turn contacted the nation’s other eye banks.
When
Woody got home from college at the end of June, he was told to leave word where
he could be reached at all times (corneal transplants must be performed within
72 hours of the removal of the eye from the donor). All that remained was for someone to die
When he
arrived at North Arundel Hospital, Linda was barely conscious. That evening a diagnostic spinal tap
indicated some pressure on the brain, a condition the hospital wasn’t equipped
to handle. Linda, now in a coma, was
sped by ambulance 15 miles to University hospital in Baltimore. There she was rushed into surgery. Not until 1 a.m. Friday night nearly five hours later—was Linda brought into the
recovery room.
The
surgeon was grim and gray with fatigue.
“Your daughter had a brain tumor,” he told Linda’s parents. He added that he had done everything he
could; that what happened now was up to God.
Linda
never regained consciousness. At 1:45
a.m. Monday morning, the phone rang in the Buritsches’ bedroom. “I knew immediately what it was.” Recalls
Polly—“the hospital telling us it was over.
In the
dazed confusion that followed, she recalls only hazily being asked if Linda’s
eyes could be donated to the eye bank.
“I agreed,” she says. “I felt
Linda would have wanted me to. I
remember once when we were discussing heart transplants, she said, ‘I wish I
could give my heart.’ She knew that she
couldn’t, because her heart wasn’t that good.
But she said, ‘I’d really like to leave something. It would be great to leave something.’”
Shortly
after Linda’s death, her eyes were delivered to the Medical Eye Bank of
Maryland. At the top of the bank’s list was the request of Woody’s doctor in
Charleston. Within minutes, Woody, who
was working as a lifeguard at a Charleston swimming pool, got a message to
phone his doctor. “We’ve got the eye,”
said Dr. Vallotton. “It’s being flown
in from Baltimore. I want you at the
hospital by six this evening.”
By 11
a.m. the next morning, the cornea of Woody’s left eye had been replaced with
one of Linda’s.
During
this week of convalescences, Woody’s thoughts kept covering the same
ground. How lucky he was to get a
cornea so soon. Who was it that had given
him the gift of sight? Was he ever
going to be able to tell the donor’s family how grateful he was?
Although
he knew that the identity of the donors is kept confidential [all he could
learn from the hospital records was that his donor had been a 22-year-old],
Woody wrote to the medical Eye Bank of Maryland in late August 1968 “If in your
judgment, there would be no offense taken, I would like to say a humble
‘thanks’ to the family. If they would
care to know, I am also a 22-years of age, and I am a junior majoring in
psychology at the University of Tennessee.
The operation went very well and I’m recovering beautifully.”
Frederick
Griffith, director of the eye bank, had in the previous five years shipped
perhaps 3000 corneas to all parts of the country. This was only the second time he had ever received a thank-you
letter. Moved by Woody’s sincerity, he
phoned the Buritsches and read them the letter. Almost as an afterthought, he asked if they would like to meet
Woody. They said yes.
On
Saturday, October 6, Woody flew to Washington to be Buritsches’ guest for the
weekend. He was nervous and
apprehensive. After all, in his head
was a piece of tissue that had once lived in the daughter of the people he was
going to visit.
Woody
and the Buritsches hit it off instantly.
“What surprised me,” recalls a friend who was present at the meeting,
“was that though these people had never met before, they felt comfortable and
warm with each other. It was not at all
like an encounter between strangers.”
Polly Buritsches
brought out Linda’s portfolios and scrapbook and told Woody of Linda’s many
interests. He peppered the Buritsches
with questions about Linda. That
night—Polly had put Woody in Linda’s room—Woody found her books as she had left
them scarcely two months before: D.H.Lawrence, e.e Cummings, Emily Dickinson,
Rilke, Shelley, Hemingway, Hegel—many of the books he also had read and loved.
At
breakfast, Woody said he would have only black coffee. But looking Polly’s pancakes, he changed his
mind and filled his plate with a towering stack. How strange, thought Polly?
Linda, too, would have done that—first refusing and then changing her
mind. Polly noticed other similarities
between this boy and her daughter. They
had the same contagious laugh and bubbly way of expressing themselves. It was astonishing to think that anyone
else—and particularly this boy—could be sitting her place at the table.
Before
leaving, Woody gave Buritsches a photograph of himself, which Polly promptly
had framed and placed on the living-room table. As the months passed, she would catch herself staring at it for
no apparent reason. Why did she feel
drawn to it? Was it because of the
unique events that made Woody’s life inextricably part of her own? But, no, it was something about the
photograph itself. Where had she seen
it before?
In the
spring of 1969—six months after Woody’s visit the Buritsches decided to publish
Linda’s poetry and sketches as a memorial to her. Going through her things, Polly came across a sketch she hadn’t
seen for years—a portrait of a boy.
“My God,
I can’t believe it!” she cried out. She
called her husband. Who is this?” she
asked, showing him this sketch. “Why,
it’s Woody.” He said. Polly rushed to
the living room and placed the portrait next to Woody’s photo. The resemblances were astonishing. The portrait was the one Linda had made,
five years before death, of her dream man.
In the
some portfolio, exactly where Polly had found the sketch, was a fragment of
Linda’s verse:
Of anguish, none is greater
Than the passing of two hearts
That never knew each other.
