Tay Vaughan

I fell in love with Cecil in my own home in Richmond, Virginia over Christmas holidays of 1941. She had come to Richmond for the holidays with a classmate at the Erskine School in Boston, and my brother David had arranged a party to which these two lovely young women were invited.

We had just driven home from Philadelphia from the marriage of Vic Vaughan and Debbie Cloud, and needless to say, I was quite vulnerable to Cupid's arrows.

Cecil and I had a wonderful spring romance, which extended into summer, 1942. I was completely overwhelmed by my good fortune, a beautiful young woman who really cared about me! I proposed. She accepted. We married on December 19, 1942, when I was completing junior year in medical school.

We joined a number of fellow medical students who were married, lived in nearby apartments, and I began the rather total preoccupation with professional duties and challenges which eventually doomed our marriage.

We joined the army after a 1944 internship at the Brigham in Boston, during which time Tay arrived. Our army adventure led me into psychiatry, and was highlighted by the arrival of Christopher in October, 1945, following which we spent a cold winter in a cabin in the mountains of western Maryland, where I walked a mile every morning through the snow to work as a psychiatrist at the medical dispensary at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. What Cecil put up with! With two infants, a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, alone all day in the chilly woods. On reflection at this time, I can see now how incompatible were my professional life and her needs. She was a caring mother, wife, and a spirited woman, with great interest in social and political issues of the day. I just wasn't around that much. We parted ways in 1958.

In recent years we have shared many good exchanges, with mutual respect for each other and our travails, especially in relation to our third son, Todd, a University of California Berkeley graduate who was struck down with schizophrenia twelve years ago. Cecil died with the good news that Todd has just been accepted into a promising new treatment program in California. She, as well as I, have been active supporters of the nationwide Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Goodbye, Cecil! We both tried hard!

I guess we were "products of our times," as they say. You carried a terrible burden with grace and courage throughout your life - you have been a wonderful role model for all those with juvenile diabetes -

Click Image to See Dad's original notes...

From a thank-you note Dad wrote to Chiquita Sturgis, explaining that he had kept in touch with Mom's estranged sister Barbara, Dad wrote: "...Cecil tended to "cut people off," often for no good reason that any of us could understand."

Tay recalls throughout his life that Mom's relatives and friends would come into favor, then disappear again into a fog of who is important, who is not, who she loves, who she hates. With her relationships, Mom was never steady at the helm.