The Story of Mary Smith
I’m exhuasted but having a difficult time falling asleep. Earlier this evening I read a story that struck an emotional chord with me. Within the last week, four people were killed in a North Side apartment building fire. Mary Smith of Chicago has been charged with their murders, as well as aggravated arson, after a police department investigation determined that she started the fire to keep warm.
The story I read paints a picture of a woman unhinged. Smith grew up on Chicago’s far South Side. Friends and neighbours remember her as outgoing and ” … a vivacious beauty, with long, black hair and lovely features.”
During the ’80s Smith’s mother passed away. She was a teenager then. ”When her mother died, she took it hard because they were close. Mary never talked to herself before, but she started talking to herself and answering herself,” Denise Tandy, 42, said.
Eventually Smith stopped bathing regularly and became maladjusted. According to the Chicago Tribune report: “Weeks ago, before a fatal fire in Wrigleyville lifted her from the anonymity of homelessness, Mary Smith headed to the neighborhood where she grew up, looking for a bite to eat. She rang Jetty Gregory’s doorbell, just a few doors down from Smith’s childhood home near 94th and Throop Streets and found an old neighbor. “She was hungry. She asked for some money, and I gave her something to eat,” Gregory said, remembering Smith filthy and disheveled. “I know she was not well. We knew Mary had an illness.”
I remarked recently to a friend that I feel myself coming unhinged. I don’t talk to myself and I bathe regularly but my mind races at a pace that I can only describe as manic, more so now than ever before. I need professional help but haven’t had time to make an appointment, much less actually see a therapist. Smith may not have had the luxury of having insurance to cover visits to a mental health professional, but thankfully, I do. Even so, it isn’t that cut and dried.
Lately and with increasing frequency I have had to stop myself from crying. I haven’t had time to cry and the tears never come when I’m alone. I am angry and I am pained. I wish dearly that my mother weren’t dead. I don’t want to accept that for the rest of my life I will be without her. Memories of my mother occur to me without warning or coherency, and they are becoming more difficult to experience. She did more for me than I realised at the time. It may be that I never know how much she loved me. I wish I had known when I was a child what I know now. In the month since a box containing photos both of my mother and my mother and I arrived here, I’ve not yet been able to open it. It is my Pandora’s Box. I don’t know if I’ll open it ever.
I doubt that in the weeks after her mother’s death, Mary Smith knew that in 20 years or so she’d be sitting in jail charged with murder and arson, and awaiting a psychological evaluation.
My parents died in January. I don’t know what will become of me in 20 years. I don’t care.