My Precious Sister: A Rejoinder to Nan & the Blame Squad
Copyright © 2022, Jonathan Goldin
Part One
When Barbara, my older sister committed suicide at the age of 18 almost 19, there wasn’t yet even a term called teenage suicide. It was 1965 on the cusp between the conformist 1950s and the sudden explosion of openness of the 1960s. I have often stated that if Barbara could have survived a few more years, perhaps the cultural shift would have given her something to overcome the loneliness. In fact she showed an attraction to the “beatnik” then in its infancy in Georgetown.
Barbara was the first of four. We moved up the food chain from a rental apartment in Prince Georges County, MD, in 1955 to a house in Silver Spring MD, Montgomery County outside of Washington DC. From a young age Barbara showed incredible aptitude and focus on classical piano and was destined to become a professional classical pianist. She was set to go to Academy outside of Baltimore in the Fall of 1965. But she never made it because on April 12, 1965, feeling trapped and broken and betrayed and not listened to, at about 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon she took her own life by lying down on commuter train tracks in Silver Spring, a train traveling at a high speed and unable to stop. It was heading to Washington, DC and the train engineer expressed deep remorse in his inability to brake the train in time.
This much is known for sure. Ofcourse there are many other mysteries and many other factors. The knee jerk thing for those who knew Barbara and loved her, including two first cousins approximately the same age, one whowas physically attracted to her, as she was beautiful and stunning in her late teens, was to blame my mother for her death. One off them still holds to that mantra and when I called him to report my mother’s death, at almost one hundred and two, he expressed scorn and condemnation.
Aside from the viciousness of this allegation, it is an attempt to rewrite history through the blame cycle. It also happens to defy contemporary knowledge of psychiatry, genetics, and evolutionary biology. There is virtually no school of thought in psychiatry today, that believes parents cause children to commit suicide, unless perhaps the dynamics have been so extreme in the realm of physical, emotional, and mental abuse.
Some well-regarded famous people such as my sister, Nan, who has never been a mother, hold to the notion that my mother,is the main culprit for Barbara’s death.
I’m writing this essay to set the record straight on my family, the Goldin family because for years, Nan’s voice has dominated the narrative, and I have been outraged at not only her distortions, but the “artiste” culture which has blindly accepted these with no verification of doubt.