Who Is Singing Me Lullabies?

Her childhood was sort of desolate,” he says. “Orphaned, alone, she had been sent away (from Ireland) to America to live with a rather forbidding maiden aunt. She had no conscious memory of the first five years of her life. No memory of her mother, of Ireland, of home.” Mrs. O’C confessed to Dr. Sacks that she had lost all conscious memory of her mother. “She had always felt this as a keen and painful sadness,” he says.