Read it through once

To add to her burdens—her mother was taken suddenly and seriously ill shortly after the above letter was written, necessitating the most careful and vigilant nursing. Her complaint—spasmodic asthma—was so bad that, as the daughter recorded, “I have feared, night after night, that she would die in my arms.” Eventually she recovered, but meanwhile, of course, all literary work had to be abandoned, not only because of the constant attention which the patient’s condition demanded but by reason of the “working of the perpetual fear on my mind which was really debilitating, almost paralyzing, in its effect.”