Friday, November 19, 1999

She's faced disease and endured

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BY JOHN JOHNSTON
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        Most of the three dozen dolls in Shirley A. Wigglesworth's apartment have happy, smiling faces. Some she bought, and some she made herself.

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed. Stories appear on Fridays.

        “I don't want one that's got a sour face,” she says. “I like to have happy things, and I like to be as happy as possible.”

        Her own face, framed by short gray hair, is not a bit sour. Cheerful is more like it.

        “I have my good days and my bad days,” she says, sitting in her motorized wheelchair, a small cross hanging from her neck.

        She is 61 years old, and says she has had 46 operations “from head to toe.”

        “I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the Lord. I'm a Christian, and he's pulled me through all these operations for a reason.”

        She doesn't know the reason. But maybe it has something to do with facing a lifetime of challenges, and still being able to smile. Shirley A. Wigglesworth knows something about that.

        She was born with spina bifida, a birth defect that weakens the lower limbs.

        She remembers walking with difficulty until she was 12 or 13. She wore braces for a time, but they rubbed her legs raw. She sometimes pushed herself around in a little red wagon.

        As a child growing up in Ripley, on the Ohio River, she remembers frequent trips to Children's Hospital in Cincinnati, where she once spent 11 straight months. Her parents, who were farmers, visited on weekends.

        She remembers watching her brothers and sisters — she was the youngest of 11 children — go to school while she stayed home. The state paid for a private teacher to come three days a week, and she made it through eighth grade.

        She says she does not remember ever holding out much hope for a miracle cure. She knew her situation and accepted it.

        When she was 30, she encountered more health problems. Bladder cancer. Doctors told her parents she had less than a year to live.

        “And so,” she says with a satisfied look, “here I am.”

        While she was in the hospital, she met a man through a mutual friend. “It was love at first sight,” she says. Seven months later, in November 1968, she married Richard Wigglesworth.

        He was a lay minister who worked for a bank, as a courier. He encouraged Shirley to go back to school, which she did. Through a federal job-training program, she earned credit for completing ninth and 10th grades, then the program's funding ran out.

        He also encouraged her to learn to drive. The state paid for her training and the special hand controls she needed. She enjoyed motoring downtown and meeting Richard.

        “We had a very good marriage,” Shirley says. It lasted 22 years. But on Christmas Eve 1990, Richard fell down a flight of marble stairs at the bank. He died nine days later.

        Some people would wallow in self pity and ask, “Why me?”

        “I guess to a certain extent I did. But I just took it as it came. That's the way I do today. I have my health problems. I was in the hospital in July for five days, and I've got congestive heart failure. But see, the Lord says not to question. So, I don't question all that much. I figure he'll take care of me.”

        Supported by Social Security, she lives with her black poodle, Dolly, in a retirement home in Clermont County's Miami Township. She gets help cleaning her apartment, but she cooks for herself. She enjoys visiting her siblings, five of whom are still living.

        “I tell everybody, let me do what I can do for myself, and what I can't do, I'll ask that it get done.”

        She still drives, but her specially equipped 11-year-old minivan, which she bought two years ago, is not running, even though she spent hundreds of dollars on repairs recently.

        At home, she enjoys crafts. She crochets. And makes latch-hook rugs. A couple of years ago she began assembling dolls from parts. She gives each of them brown eyes, like hers. Also, a smiling, happy face. It's the way Shirley prefers to meet the world, on the good days, and the bad.

       

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