WINCHESTER — Growing up, Susan L. Durling wanted to be a grandmother.
Now that she is one, she’s focusing on leaving the world a better place for her 11 grandchildren.
It’s not an easy task for the
60-year-old Winchester resident, but one she is embracing, in part by
tracing her family’s genealogy and fighting the Northeast Energy Direct
pipeline.
She wants her grandchildren to
know their ancestors, and not see their corner of New Hampshire torn up
for construction of a pipeline to transport fracked natural gas from
northern Pennsylvania to eastern Massachusetts, she said.
She is so passionate about the
latter that she moved from Harrisville to Winchester in the past year to
live with her daughter, Sarah M. Lounder, and Lounder’s fiance, Rick
Horton, who are also fighting the estimated $5.2 billion project being
proposed by a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan.
And she has been doing all this
while adapting to a life dictated by Parkinson’s disease — a diagnosis
she received in 2011 that forced her to retire from her job as a nurse
in the intensive care unit at Concord Hospital.
It was a job she began later in life, but one she loved.
Durling was born in Concord and
grew up in Methuen, Mass., the eldest of five children. She graduated
from high school and attended college for a year before marrying “a Navy
man” and moving to Nantucket, Mass., where he was stationed for a time.
They then moved to San Diego, Calif., and after that spent many years
in the Jacksonville, Fla., area, with the exception of two years her
husband, Wayne Hartford, was stationed in Philadelphia.
Durling sought to be the best
Navy wife she could be, including helping other wives who had just
arrived at the base to get settled, and learning how to bake bread, she
said.
She also raised three children and worked odd jobs around the base; that included cleaning house to Navy standards.
She later worked in a daycare center.
“Where I landed, I made lemons into lemonade,” Durling said. “I could only do so much with a high school diploma.”
Then, at age 40, she graduated
from the University of New Hampshire with a bachelor’s in nursing, after
her family moved to Hillsboro in 1989 to be near Durling’s parents. Two
years later, Durling’s husband left the Navy. They divorced in 2005
after 30 years of marriage.
Nursing runs in Durling’s family,
but as a teenager and young adult during the feminist movement, she
didn’t want to go into the field because that and teaching “was what
women did,” she said.
She fought it until she decided there was no reason to.
She began her nursing career in
the intensive care unit of New London Hospital before taking a position
in the ICU at Concord Hospital, where she stayed for more than a decade.
She loved the pace of the job,
being a part of efforts to save people’s lives, operating the machines
used to monitor and help in the care of patients, and learning about new
technology and techniques to treat patients. The subject areas of
anatomy and physiology, and microbiology fascinated her, she said.
In an intensive care unit, the
focus is on saving lives, she said. But for those whose lives can’t be
saved, the question becomes how do you prepare them and make them
comfortable, Durling said.
“There is a sacredness to it,” she said. “It’s like being born; you only go through it once.”
In Concord, she was able to take an interest in that aspect of ICU care, she said.
Meanwhile, something was
happening with Durling’s own health. She was slowing down, she was
dragging one of her feet, and she felt exhausted after her shifts, she
said. She chalked it up to stress and aging.
That was until one night when,
while caring for a patient, she had to call another nurse for help
because she had trouble opening a vial.
The next morning, Durling went to
her supervisor saying she didn’t know what was going on with her, but
she knew that she wasn’t safe working. She met with a neurologist and
learned her diagnosis.
At first, she said, it “is almost sort of like death.”
She added: “You have plans to do
things, then all of a sudden you have to rethink them because there are
some things you now can’t do.”
Parkinson’s is a chronic and
progressive movement disorder affecting about 1 million people
nationwide, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation. There is no
known cause of, or cure for, the illness, which results in neurons in
the brain malfunctioning and dying. Symptoms include tremors, slowness
of movement, rigidity or stiffness, and impaired balance and
coordination, loss of smell, sleep or mood disorder, and low blood
pressure while standing up, according to the foundation.
Durling said she lost her sense
of smell years ago, and the most prominent symptom for her has been the
slowing of her movement. She takes medicine daily and plans each day
knowing that she might not get everything she wants to done. Simple
tasks take longer to complete, she said. Even her clothing and
accessories are thought out — no buttons or jewelry.
She relies on a dictation tool a lot when composing text messages and using her computer to research and write.
Moving her fingers across the
screen of a smartphone is a struggle, and her movements are methodical
and paced as she stands up and sits down. Her speech comes across clear,
but slightly labored.
That is one of the symptoms that
bothers her most, she said, because she’s an intelligent person, and
doesn’t sound as such anymore.
While working in the ICU, she and other nurses used to joke about how the job caused them to need to be in control, she said.
“Now here I am out of control trying to control it,” she said.
Durling said she believes each chapter of her life has prepared her for the next.
Enter the Northeast Energy Direct
pipeline, which is being reviewed by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission that has the power to approve or deny the controversial
project.
Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. LLC,
the Kinder Morgan subsidiary developing the 419-mile interstate
high-pressure pipeline, hopes to have the project approved by the fourth
quarter of this year so construction can start early next year.
The pipeline is slated to pass
through 18 communities in southern New Hampshire, including the Cheshire
County towns of Fitzwilliam, Richmond, Rindge, Troy and Winchester.
Durling said she first found out
about the project from Lounder and Horton. As she learned more she
became increasingly concerned about the possible effects the pipeline
could have on her children and grandchildren, as they live near the
proposed route. She said she is also worried about the community and all
of its residents.
Specifically, she has focused her
research on primary source documents that examine the possible effects a
natural gas pipeline and associated infrastructure could have on human
health.
“Being a nurse taught me to the look for the facts and where they come from,” she said.
Durling said she had planned to
eventually move in with Lounder and Horton to help care for their
children; the move just happened a few years sooner than planned because
of the pipeline.
Durling’s sister, Cheryl L. Barlow, said that, growing up, Durling was the supportive and protective big sister.
“I remember times of her just
being there for me,” Barlow, who lives in Harrisville, said. “Whenever I
was frightened or hurt, she was always there to pick me up, dust me
off, and say that everything was OK. She’d make sure nothing happened to
me.”
Before the pipeline, Durling had
no history of activism, and Barlow says she was surprised when Durling
first became involved in the anti-pipeline fight.
“She has always been
compassionate as a nurse, and a caring person, but her concern and
determination to fight this battle with big money and the oil industry,
it’s amazing and something she has never done before,” Barlow said. “I
think she grabbed onto it like a mother bear at first because it came so
close to one of her children’s homes. Then she started asking questions
and investigating more and just took it on.”
Leaving a legacy for her
grandchildren’s generation is important to Durling simply because “why
wouldn’t it be?” she said. They are the future, and the ones to inherit
the world left to them, she said.
She has spent years tracing the
family’s history so that they can have clues about where they came from,
and know who their ancestors were and how they, too, contributed to
making the world a better place, she said.
“Honestly, I don’t think of myself as anybody special, but I hope I have made a difference in some people’s lives,” she said.
Meghan Foley can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or mfoley@keenesentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter @MFoleyKS.
