“I used to be so smart,” my mother said to me, “but now I don’t know anything.” As she attempted to converse with me over dinner that night — about world events, about what she’d read in the morning newspaper, or even just what she’d done and seen that day — she struggled.
Her memory was failing her: she might remember the “what,” but she couldn’t remember the “who.” She began sentences but couldn’t finish them. She searched for the right words, and I tried to find them for her, like a game of charades.
She’d been wrong when she said that she didn’t know anything. She knew, and I knew, that she was succumbing to dementia.
A tragically tinged memory
A few years ago, Mom joined me for an impromptu drive to Charlottesville to return my daughter to UVA following the Thanksgiving break. A widow for more than 20 years, Mom lived alone, though her independence was flagging.
A lifelong student (she’d earned a Master’s degree in her 70s), Mom rarely passed up an opportunity to visit UVA since my brothers had attended the school 30 years earlier. And, I knew, the University had been the setting of one of my mom’s favorite, if tragically tinged, memories.
In October 1984, my sister, Molly, had returned home for the weekend from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was studying art and writing. She and my parents drove to Charlottesville to visit my younger brother, who was then a senior. Together, they enjoyed a spectacularly beautiful “Family Weekend,” memorialized in a photo my brother snapped with his pocket camera: Mom and Molly striding across UVA’s grounds, the two of them by all indications as happy as a mother and daughter could ever be.
A few months later, on a Sunday afternoon in late February, Molly ingested 200 sleeping pills, and though she panicked and desperately told her roommate to call 9-1-1, the frantic efforts of an emergency rescue team failed to reel her back from eternity. That picture taken a few months earlier at UVA came to be viewed as the photo that most represented the “before,” as Molly’s death cleaved our memories into all that came “before” and all that came “after.”
Each of us, my mother, my father, and my brothers, absorbed the impact of Molly’s suicide in our own way. But Molly, or at least our memories of her, remained unmistakably present in our lives, especially my mother’s.
Molly’s bedroom in our family home remained largely as she had left it when she returned to Carnegie Mellon for the last time. A photo portrait she’d had taken not long before she died was positioned on the living room wall, just inside the front door. You couldn’t enter the house without seeing it — and knowing what had happened.
Her place at the dining room table remained hers; whenever a guest joined us for dinner we quietly made sure one of us — a family member and not the guest — occupied the chair, which was otherwise left vacant, as if by some miracle she might just open the front door and walk right in, revealing the entire tragedy as nothing more than a terrible nightmare.
Repurposed grief
Mom led us in celebrating Molly’s birthday each November with her favorite dinner of ham, sweet potatoes, and cherry gorilla ice cream. We approached each anniversary of her passing with dread, wishing we might somehow skip right over that black day on the February calendar.
As well, though, Mom repurposed her grief and committed herself to empathy for other parents who’d lost children. For decades, she attended meetings of Compassionate Friends, a parents support group, and it became almost a joke in our family that Mom seemed to attend at least one wake a week, even for people she barely knew — and I suspect that was because the loss of her young daughter had so ingrained in her the value of consolation in the wake of tragedy.
For my part, I, too, absorbed and in many ways repurposed the emotional energy generated by Molly’s suicide. Almost like a tree that survives a terrific fire or the deep wound of a lumberjack’s ax, I proceeded to construct a life around the tragedy, maybe even with its emotional material.
I have for 38 years kept on my dresser the small eight-ounce juice glass that Molly used to wash down those 200 sleeping pills. I have carried in my wallet not only her photo, but also a copy of the four-sentence Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from February 25, 1985, bearing the simple headline, “CMU Student Takes Pills, Dies.” It’s as if I have spent 38 years poised to tell anyone who would listen, “Let me tell you about my amazing sister!”, while preparing to say in the next breath, “She died of depression.”
If the photograph of Mom and Molly on UVA’s Grounds captured the happy, innocent time “before,” then Pittsburgh and CMU were the place life pivoted and became more equivocal. Business brought me to the city, though I kept my distance from CMU until just a few years ago, about the same time Mom began her decline.
It was early January; snow and ice blanketed the city. I drove uptown to CMU, alone. I hadn’t been since the week after Molly died, when we boxed up her belongings and brought them home.
I stood outside Molly’s old dorm, in the cold, and I listened for echoes — of the scream of the ambulance as it made its way from Shadyside Hospital, of the cry of Molly’s roommate as the EMTs fought their losing battle, of a faint whispered good-bye from my sister that might have somehow, miraculously, survived. Mudge House, however, surrendered no sounds.
Lost memories
Over the nearly four decades since Molly’s death, trying to understand how Molly was overcome by the urgent need to escape from her darkness, I have discovered the importance of vocalizing empathy when others hesitate to speak, and I’ve come to recognize the healing power of forgiveness, as suicide leaves a room full of fault and blame that has no power to resurrect the dead. In the truncated life of my little sister, in other words, I have found purpose and direction for my own.
As my mom and I approached the Beltway, almost home from our day trip to Charlottesville, she thanked me for the outing and then asked, “Do I have a daughter?” I touched Mom on the arm and told her that she did. “Did she go to Virginia?”
No, I told her. “Your daughter went to college in Pittsburgh.”
“And where is she now?”
Keeping my eyes on the highway, I stole a glance at Mom. “Molly died,” I reminded her, “a long time ago.”
Over the next three years, dementia stripped away countless memories — not just the innocuous ones, but also the terrible ones. Even when it left some facts and memories intact, it stripped away the organizing structure that her mind had built from the layers upon layers of her life experience. “Look at the leaves,” Mom would say as she gazed out the dining room window to the mulberry tree that had supported Molly’s childhood tree house. “Aren’t the leaves pretty when the breeze blows?”
Up to the end, though, the scraps in my mother’s mind included her childhood home, a little bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland. This past April, I relented to her insistence that I take her “home,” as her parents, she said, “are probably wondering where I am.” Along the way there, Mom said “new” when we passed a new house, “old” when she recognized an old home, and sometimes she just pointed and said nothing.
She brightened at the sight of the old bungalow (though she tsk-tsk’d that it had been painted lavender). She was disappointed when I told her we couldn’t go in.
When we got back home — to the house where she’d lived for 61 years — I turned off the engine, but as I reached to open the car door, she gestured to me to stop and asked if we could remain in the car. She slowly looked all around — at the trees, at the sky, at the house across the street.
She was taking stock, I thought, of all we had seen during our 90-minute trip. Mom slowly turned to face me, looked at me with her soft green eyes, and, with utter innocence and simplicity, asked, “What is my future?”
Unmoored and lost
Her past almost entirely erased, Mom was unmoored and lost. And so was I. Sitting in my car that spring afternoon, Mom clung to me … but I felt empty, exhausted, and unequipped to fill in her blanks one more time.
Mom would not leave her home again. In the few days after our outing, she weakened considerably. She lost her appetite and slept almost constantly. And when she was awake, she lay in bed and gazed out her bedroom window, as she had 59 years earlier when she was confined to bed rest, trying to keep my sister from a dangerously premature birth.
When Mom died, three weeks after our drive to Chevy Chase and two days shy of her 93rd birthday, I held her hand, kissed her forehead, and thanked her for a lifetime of love. Relieved of the emotional strain of watching her mind and body slowly deteriorate over the last five years, I admit that my mother’s passing brought relief, for both of us.
In the months that have followed, I’ve organized Mom’s estate and with the help of my five brothers cleared our old home for sale. We sorted Mom’s clothes into charitable donations, keepsakes, and plain old trash. We sorted through Dad’s memorabilia. We sorted through hundreds of books. We sorted, and discarded, black and white photographs of faces we’d never known. We filled a dumpster and got to know the donation center volunteers by their first names.
Turning to Molly’s room, we found, and threw away, her moth-eaten Girl Scout uniform, as well as her running shorts, the elastic waistbands crystallized and disintegrated. Correspondence, including the box of condolence letters my parents received on Molly’s death and her letters home from college, prompted a recurring question, “What is to be gained by keeping this?”
The hardest scrap to process? A letter I discovered in a messy jumble of papers on mom’s desk. In my sister’s distinctive cursive a few months “before,” she wrote to her mother that she was trying to focus on her schoolwork, so as to “fight off creeping depression.”
But clear the house we did. It will almost certainly be a knockdown. The framed portraits, the empty bookshelves, the dusty bedrooms and empty closets, the dining room table and the nine chairs — in a few months, there will likely be no evidence that it ever existed.
An unexpected erasure
In the months since Mom died, though, it’s been a different erasure that has surprised me: the persistent, nagging grief over my sister that I’ve carried for almost four decades has finally and nearly completely vanished.
I struggle to understand how, and precisely when or why, that occurred. Has the years-long experience of caring for Mom up to the day she died restored some sense of order, my mother’s gradual, natural departure forming a counterbalance to the sense of having been suddenly, forcibly, and wrongly robbed of my sister? Has the knowledge that Mom is no longer nurturing her (our) grief for Molly released my own grief to finally burn off, like morning fog?
Has the recent birth of my first granddaughter, whom my daughter named for my mother, realigned my attention from the unresolvable past to the unknowable future? Or has the process of clearing an old house and hanging a “for sale” sign out front finally provided me with the tangible, irrefutable evidence that a chapter of my life, one full of both love and longing, has ended? There is probably truth in each of those possibilities.
I have no shortage of questions, and I’m tempted to search for the answers. After all, grief has been positively formative for me, so why not try to understand how losing my mother may have finally brought closure to the loss of my sister? But today I feel strangely liberated from the compulsion to reconcile how I’m able to draw inspiration from my memories of the lives of two women, whose struggles and deaths came to shape me so profoundly. After all, what is to be gained?
For the first time in decades, I no longer strain to hear voices in the winter wind. I have heard my own quiet call to ruminate on a different dilemma: how to retain the values that decades of grief, consolation and, now, recovery, have taught me, while I search for the answer to the innocent question my mom left me with on that fine spring day last April: What is my future?
Michael S. Moriarty is retired from a career in journalism and project management. He lives in Charlottesville, Va., and writes on Medium.
First Published: December 10, 2023, 10:30 a.m.
