She was just fourteen months old and she was playing around in the kitchen, like little girls do. So we just sat there. I was reading aloud to the family. All at once -- she had a little nursery chair in the kitchen and the bottom round wasn’t four inches from the floor -- and I glanced up and thought she was going to try and climb up on it, but she put her foot and it went through, it slipped off of the round and she fell backwards and bumped the back of her head on the linoleum floor.

It sounded so hard and Frant picked her up. She cried a minute or two and then she got down and played. It didn’t show up any mark, not even a bruise, on the back of her head. When it came time for her to go to bed, why we put her to bed.

When she was born, Glenna was so thrilled to have a little sister. She kept after me and after me. She said, “Momma, can’t she sleep with me?” I said, “Oh no, she’s too little for that.” She said, “Well, we’ll wait and see.” By the time she was a year old she convinced me to let her sleep with her and so she’d sleep up there. She would never sleep through a night in her life. She would wake up and play at two o’clock -- even after she got through of her two o’clock feeding at night -- why she would wake up and wake Glenna and they would lie there and play and we could hear them, then they would go back to sleep again.

But this morning after she had bumped her head, why we woke up in the morning and I said, “Well now that’s funny, that’s the first night she has ever slept through all night” an were were just lying there talking and we heard the most terrific scream you ever heard. Glenna and Carolyn were sleeping upstairs in the room just above ours and the boys were in another room. She said, “Run and tell dad and mom the baby’s dead,” and so I ran up there and picked her up but she was cold. She had finished her bottle and just pushed it out with her tongue. It was lying right to the side of her cheek and the mark was still on her cheek where the nipple had been, but she had passed away.

There wasn’t a drop of blood or a stain or any mark of any bruise, but the doctor said that she had perforated that main artery that runs in at the back of her head and had just bled internally, just a drop at a time and she died quietly without a bit of suffering or anything. He told us then, “A baby can stand a lot of bumps, hard bumps, on the front of her head or any place.” But he said, “When you have a bump on the back of the head, watch carefully.” The old wive’s tale always said “Don’t let the baby go to sleep after they’ve had a bump on their heads.” He said, “That’s false -- they need the rest and the sleep -- but make sure they’re thoroughly awake every hour. Wake them up and circulate around and let them go back to sleep again.”