Companions
Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thompson was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Anne and John, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.
Anne Sullivan died in 1936 after a coma, with Keller holding her hand. Keller and Thompson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thompson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960.
Winnie Corbally, a nurse who was originally brought in to care for Thompson in 1957, stayed on after her death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.
Read more about this topic: Helen Keller
Famous quotes containing the word companions:
“To coöperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or coöperate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)