2006年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-Storycorps : Moved to Write, After So Muc

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Time now for Storycorps, the project that's collecting an oral history of America, stories about you, your friends, your family can be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Excerpts¹ are played here on morning edition.

Nora Percival is 91 years old, she met her late husband Herman Gun in college in New York city. They were both aspiring² novelists. Here, Nora Percival shares her story with her granddaughter Emily Wynns.

Oh in 1936 I had many dreams. It was the Depression and it was very hard for young people then to get their lives started, but we did get married and we finally got jobs, and we were very happy. But soon after that, in 1939, Herman was diagnosed³ to have acute⁴ leukemia and the doctor did not want the patient to be told that he was not going (to) recover. But it was very hard for me not to tell Herman such an important thing because we told each other everything. The day that he died, the doctor was there, gave him morphine so that he would sleep into a coma⁵. But after a couple of hours of that he woke up, very bright, bushy-tailed, talking and laughing and, made me lie down by him, and held me, and talked for 3 hours before he lapsed⁶ into unconsciousness. It was the best gift he could have given me. I couldn't imagine how I was going to live in a world that didn't have him in it. But life has a way of demanding that you live it and I was pregnant⁷, and I was determined⁸ that I was going to have his child in spite⁹ of the advice of all my elders who said I was only 24 years old and I was going to make my life so difficult to raise a child alone. It never occurred to me to think about aborting¹⁰ the child. He was born in the following February, and has been a joy of my life ever since.

Tell me about why you became an author at 88.

That was an ambition that began in my 20s, and because my life changed so suddenly, it made it hard for me to think about when to write, but when I got older, and things eased up, then I realized that there was one more active resurrection that I needed to do, and I wrote a book, using the letters that Herman and I had written to each other, hundreds of letters that I have kept in a sealed box for over 60 years. I opened that box and I told our story, so that the words that he should have put into novels and books if he had lived could now be in a book, in fact, I put his name on the cover as the co-author because half the words were his.

What are your hopes for me after you are gone?

I hope that you are going to find somebody that you can love as completely as I loved Herman Gun, because there's nothing in the world as wonderful as two people in love, there is nothing better.

Nora Percival, with her granddaughter Emily Wynns at Storycorps in New York. Nora Percival's book was published last year, to learn how to record your story, and to listen to more Storycorps interviews, go to NPR.org

Major funding for Storycorps comes from the corporation for public broadcasting.
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bright-eyed and bushy-tailed
happy and full of energy
acute leukemia
急性白血病
resurrection
the Resurrection
the return of Jesus Christ to life after his death on the cross, which is one of the main beliefs of the Christian religion
2
formal a situation in which something old or forgotten returns or becomes important again
a resurrection of old jealousies