The words below were written just weeks before my sister put a gun in her mouth. She was trying to convince her psychiatrist to release her from the hospital.
Her journals and therapy notes lay in a box for 40 years after her death. Now that I’ve found them, there is no one left alive who cares to learn about the reasons she took her own life, which are profoundly painful.
Suffering from schizophrenia, and stimulated by heavy doses of marijuana, she believed that her family had been taken away from this planet and replaced by martians. She believed her family was waiting for her in the after-life and she was going to join them. And no one ever knew this is why she took her life.
Her suicide note was signed, dated and placed in the hospital files, never to be looked at again until 40 years after her death. No one in my family cares except me. So, I try to share it with anyone and everyone.
thank you for listening to a sad tale that will never have a joyful ending
I don’t know why I continue to share her stories. Except that for 40 years, and in fact through all of her life, she was ignored, the most neglected child that I ever saw, and the sweetest.
In that same note to her doctor, trying to convince him that she was cured, she explained that she realized the roots of her illness came from the bullying that happened to her in elementary school. She never spoke of it before. In all her years of struggling with the voices, it never occurred to her that the bullying in her childhood might have damaged her psychologically.
She had just come to the realization that the bullying during elementary school might have something to do with her mental illness shortly before her suicide, it seems. I don’t know if there was a connection. I will never know.
She also mentioned a man from her childhood, a babysitter that Mom used for them, a bachelor who made them take off their shirts and run around his apartment. Marilyn said she wanted to explore the possibility that something more may have happened but that Mom assured her there was no reason to go down that avenue.
What caused this rapid decline in my sister’s mental status? I was so impressed with her strength and stability when i first moved to Austin. She still struggled with voices, silently, but you could not tell it from her demeanor. In her letters, she raged at military generals because she had not had a peaceful moment in her head for three years and she was convinced that they were responsible.
At the age of 14, Marilyn was incarcerated in the Carlsbad City Jail for a full 45 days, under the charge of “a minor in need of supervision”.
I could not help her because I was stuck in the neighboring state of Texas, serving a year of probation for a crime that my big sister had committed and that I had nothing to do with. I served the sentence without a fight at the request of ‘the family’.
My probation officer was so cruel that he hesitated to allow me to travel to New Mexico to attend my step-brother’s funeral, a young man who I thought the world of, that had a died in an accident on an oil pulling rig.
If I thought that was cruel, I was stunned when I got to the funeral and learned that Marilyn had been informed of her big brother’s death when a guard threw a pile of clothes on her cot in her jail cell and said, “Get dressed, Taylor. You’re going to a funeral.”
If anyone thinks that was harsh,
Oikos 