My lung cancer has finally spread to the other lung, so I’m worried I’ve run out of time to get my stories together into a neat little book, so I’ll have to share what I have so far.
I acquired a box of my sister’s journals and her hospital files after my mother’s demise, and in that box I found many things that no one in the family ever knew about. They sat in a box that was never opened for the next 40 years.
There were letters Marilyn had written to both Johnny and Nancy, her brother and sister, who lived for decades beyond her. Neither Johnny or Nancy ever knew those letters existed, never knew that Marilyn had tried to reach out to them, was thinking of them.
My sister was severely neglected throughout her life. When in elementary school she was bullied by all the school kids, for having wrinkled clothes, tangled hair, and unbrushed teeth. Myrtle the Turtle they called her as they ran from her and warned their classmates not to drink from the same fountain that she had, or sit in the chair that she had.
“Don’t drink from that fountain” someone would shout and all the students would line up at every other drinking fountain. Marilyn would giggle and try and pretend that this didn’t hurt her deeply ..
Marilyn never told me, or anyone, that this was going on in her elementary school. She did not start writing about it until a few months before her suicide.
I was being passed around from foster to home to foster home at the time, in my teens. Despite that there were maids, five days a week, from sun up to sundown, my siblings went severely neglected, while our mother lay in the bed, bottles of tranquilizers and sleeping pills, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and empty coke bottles littering her bedside.
There was another witness through those years that informed me many years after the fact. In that box I found a number of letters, and even a telegram, that Marilyn had written to President Carter, the FBI, a handful of generals in charge of military experiments. She explained to them that she was hearing voices and asked them why they had used her in their experiments. She was angry with them. Some of those letters she signed as “Myrtle the Turtle”.
‘the family’ never discussed Marilyn after the first few months following her death, not for the next 40 years. It breaks my heart to discover now that she took her life to be with her family, that the information lay in a box, undiscovered, for four decades after her death.
She explains in her journal that the aliens have replaced her family on this earth and that her real parents and siblings were living in the afterlife already, waiting for her. She took her life in order to be with them. She wrote more than one note indicating this and gave her notes to the healthcare workers who dated them and then stuffed them in her files, without even recognizing what she was saying, only to hand them to us the day after her suicide.
To know that the information was there all along and no one searched through that box for 4 decades is to realize that she was neglected in death just as badly as she was neglected in life. I thought it was important information for the few people who remember her or who once heard about her. I am attaching her note and will have many more to share with anyone who has the civility to contact me and wants to hear the true story. There are many untruths that have been passed around while I’ve stayed silent with the family for all these years. It’s my turn now, and I’m short on time.
I have so many stories about my sweet siblings and care takers in life, who deserve their stories be told.
Oikos 