...And Never Let HerGo

exceptionally pretty little girl with her beautiful eyes, a spattering of freckles, and dark golden hair. Brian and Kathleen were ten and eleven, and their mother made them promise to hold Annie’s hand on the way home from school—not only across the busy Concord Pike but all the way home. They hated that, but they did it. For extra protection, their mother always let their dog, Butch, out so he could be waiting on the corner to see them home safely.
    Rather than say all six of their names when she referred to them, Kathleen had long since divided her children into two groups: Kevin, Robert, and Mark were “the three boys,” and Brian, Kathleen, and Annie were “the little ones.” Theirs was a safe, warm circle, with their mother the center of their lives; and then everything changed for the Faheys in 1974. Kathleen Fahey became ill with symptoms that seemed innocuous enough at first—but which got steadily worse. Unbelievably, tragically, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was just in her early forties, and she still had five children at home to raise. Only Kevin, who was twenty, had left.
    Anne Marie was eight, and too young to understand how sick her mother was. She knew that she went to the doctor a lot and sometimes was confined in the hospital for a day or two, but her mother always came home, each time a little thinner and paler. Family and friends helped with meals and took care of the children when Kathleen was too weak to do it. Anne Marie was still cosseted in the bosom of the family she had always known, and she was a happy little girl.
    Toward the end, Kathleen Fahey was in the hospital for almost two weeks before she was allowed to come home. And then she lay in bed all day, forcing a smile when her children tiptoed into her room. Of all of them, only Anne Marie seemed unaware that her mother had come home to die. No one realized that their little sister was worrying in silence. She asked her best friend, Beth Barnes, if her mother was going to die, and the two little girls tried to reassure each other that, of course, mothers didn’t die and leave their children.
    But on the gray day of March 16, 1975, Kathleen Fahey
did
die. Her older daughter and namesake, Kathleen, was fourteen, and would remember that day twenty-four years later: “The day that my mother died, our universe fell out from [under] us.”
    Anne Marie was two months past her ninth birthday when she lost her mother. Her father didn’t want her to see her mother’s body being carried from the house, so her uncle James, a Catholic priest, hurriedly took Anne Marie aside and tried to distract her long enough for the hearse from Mealey’s to carry her mother away. As a priest, he had spent most of his life comforting the bereaved, but it was a terrible thing for him to accept that his sister, so young, was dead, leaving the little girl behind.
    Ann Marie’s brother Brian, who was thirteen when their mother died, has always believed that for a long time Anne Marie didn’t realize their mother wasn’t coming back. As her funeral arrangements were being made, the older children huddled upstairs. “The next day, none of us went to school,” Brian said. “But you know, she was outside playing with her friends like it was just a normal day. So I don’t think she understood.”
    Whether she grasped it or not, Anne Marie had just suffered a loss so profound that it would change the course of her life, casting a shadow over a future that had held so much promise. The changes would be subtle at first, at least for a nine-year-old girl, but the pain was already deeply ingrained. When she went back to school, the teacher made an announcement to the class that mortified her: “Anne Marie’s lost her mother. Be nice to her.”
    Beth Barnes, who would remain Anne Marie’s best friend for many years, recalled that she didn’t want anyone to talk to her about her mother or ask her questions. “I remember how scared she was that we would look at her weird.”
    Jennifer Bartels was in Anne Marie’s class, too, and she and Beth tried to make things better for her. Like Beth, Jennifer would always be in Anne Marie’s life and always be her friend.
    All of the Fahey children grieved for their mother, then watched their lives metamorphose from a secure middle-class existence to desperate circumstances, in which they would often go hungry. For as long as they could, her sister and brothers tried to keep Anne Marie safe from the bleak