Vigil

When Sarah Pizarro, who had been shopping, returned to her small apartment on New York's lower East Side, she told her seven-year-old son Tony she had a pain in her chest, was going to lie down for a moment.

Night came and Tony's mother was still asleep. Tony's father was at sea on a freighter, bound for the Philippines. So Tony got supper of dry cereal and milk for his younger sister Judy and himself. Then they quietly undressed, crawled into bed beside their mother.

When they woke in the morning, they tiptoed into the kitchen, where Tony fixed cereal and milk for breakfast. He decided he had better stay home from school to take care of Judy. By the end of the long day he was wishing mightily that his mother would wake up. Judy and he had finished what little milk there was and all the cereal. When they climbed into bed that night they were pretty hungry.

It was late the next afternoon--though Tony lost track of time in the hushed rooms where the only sounds were Judy's and his voices--that he heard someone knocking. He opened the door. There stood his teacher, and the lady from across the hall. "Mamma's asleep," he told them uncertainly.

The two women came in anyhow, went into the bedroom. They told Tony and Judy to put their coats on. Tony was told that he did not have to keep his vigil any longer, that his mother was dead. Crying, lonely, bewildered, Tony and Judy spent that night in a shelter of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. A wireless was sent to their father.

Scarcely able to move, so weakened was she by pneumonia, 69-year-old Mary Kincaid lay in bed in her Wildwood, N. J. home while her husband Henry, 84, took care of her. Last week Henry, ill himself, lay down beside her, died. Desperately, Mary Kincaid tried to raise her husky voice in a cry for help, lay there helpless for two days, finally summoned strength enough to rise, totter to the window, beckon in a passerby.

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