When I returned to live in my mother’s house at age 17, after a 5 year absence, I was shocked at the neglect I witnessed of my younger siblings. Mom had gotten her first job after the divorce. Things had changed. In my childhood she had lived in her bedroom, buried beneath a thick quilt, but managed to come out and join us for supper every evening. She said she didn’t need the job but it kept her out of the house. She considered herself the world’s first liberated woman and domestic work was beneath her. She came home from work every day, went straight up the stairs and disappeared into her room for the rest of the evening, not joining or supervising the children during dinner or anything else.
Every evening for supper, my two little sisters, aged 8 and 10, would push the kitchen chairs up to the pantry, climb upon the chairs and look through the cans to pick out their supper.
Mom had maids at the house for five days a week, from sunrise to sundown, waking the children, dressing them, taking them to school, bringing them home, doing all the grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning. Although the maids did their best to get everyone dressed, groomed and ready for school, I learned from my youngest sister that our sister, Marilyn, had a reputation for going to school with dirty, tangled hair and wrinkled, ragged, stained clothing.
The kids made fun of 10 year old Marilyn, for her poor grooming which was the result of obvious neglect, at this upper class all-white school, calling her Myrtle and Turtle and reminding everyone to stay away from her and not touch her because she was dirty.. When she drank out of one of the water spigots out on the playground, her classmates would alert everyone else not to use it, explaining to their fellow bullies, “Don’t drink out of that one, Myrtle the Turtle drank there!” Our youngest sister said that Marilyn would giggle and pretend it didn’t hurt her to the core.
Marilyn never told me or anyone else about that experience, but she did sign one of her last letters, at age 19, as “Myrtle the Turtle”.
Marilyn had a heart of gold and never had a bad word to say about anyone for her entire 19 years of living.
It is now 40 years since her death and I’ve just come home with a small box of all her journal writings which had been sitting in Mom’s storage room, forgotten and neglected just as Marilyn was in life. It doesn’t appear that anyone ever opened this box in all those 40 years. One of the most painful things to find in that box were the letters she had written to brother, Johnny and sister, Nancy. Both of them now deceased. Neither of them ever knew about the letters, never knew that Marilyn had written them multiple letters just weeks before she took her life.
There were letters that Marilyn had written to President Jimmy Carter and the FBI as, being schizophrenic, she was convinced that the U.S. Government had planted something in her brain to cause the voices. Those letters were sealed and had never even been opened. In one of the letters to Jimmy Carter, she signed it as Myrtle the Turtle.
There is a receipt for a telegram that she sent to the Whitehouse. There were no computers, or cell phones or email back then. The text of the message sent to the Whitehouse is not shown, but it’s easy to imagine that it was similar to her letters.
I’ve only read 1/5 of her writings and have never cried for so many days. She talked about how much she loved life. She named five different subjects that she wanted to major in. She wanted so desperately to be free of her voices and to get well. She was working diligently on Algebra, in preparation for college, just hours before her death.
This is 3 years later and I still have not looked through the entire box …. hospital notes were also placed in that box. A small file, with notes from both Marilyn and her therapists, dated and signed by her therapists. Marilyn explained very clearly, in her notes, the reason for her suicide and none of us never knew or realized the reason because no one bothered to look through the box.
Marilyn believed that her entire family had died and been replaced by alien creatures. She believed that her family had been taken to an afterlife and she stated that she knew the only way to join them would be painful, but that she had to do it in order to join her family again.
To do this day, no one in the family has read her final suicide note, along with a few other notes just days prior to her death. Most members of the family are not great fans of the truth, preferring to entertain a false narrative instead.
Oikos 