Born and raised within the city limits of Philadelphia: three sisters.
The last survivor, Mimi, passed away recently, nearing the age of 100. The Philadelphia sisters are now just a piece of my past. Maybe ‘just’ isn’t the right word. Kept safe in photographs and film from childhood through their long lived endings, they were pivotal during my formative years and beyond. They still are. Their children, grandchildren and others, may have apposing stories and remembrances of these formidable women. Judy, the eldest of the three, was my mother. She passed away first, two weeks into her 91st year. It was her sister Jeanne, who got Mom out of the hospital where she lay miserable and helpless, to be able to die at home, surrounded by comforting familiarity. As thankful as I am, it came well after the disintegration of what I thought would be a lifelong link between the sisters that was unbreakable.
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In the early 1960’s, Jeanne, who was born six years after Mom and was the youngest of the three, moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, (bordering the town of South Orange, where the other sisters were living), with her husband, my Uncle Paul, and their three young sons. Completing the family shtetl, all three sisters now lived within a few miles of each other, raising their children,
of which I am the youngest, as a village. When the grandparents came to visit by maroon Cadillac from Bala Cynwyd, PA, it was a feast of delight, particularly because of the memorable visits I had with Grandma Reggie (pronounced with a hard “g,” like girl). She died the summer I turned 12. With an illogical, fantastical mindset, I have thought she has been my guardian angel and protector. She died early in July, 1971. I was away at music camp for the month. Suffering from a severe ear infection, most probably from swimming in the lake on which the camp was situated, I had what I stubbornly call a vision that Reggie came to me right before she died. I wasn’t even made aware that she was ill. I telephoned home that day for two reasons. First, to ask my father, who himself was an MD, if he approved of the ear drops the camp physician had prescribed, and also, to see if Grandma was okay. She had died that morning. I would not be told of her death for a couple of weeks, when on visiting day, my parents gently gave me the news in the room of their Middlebury, Vermont, Bed & Breakfast.
For years I was angry with my mother for not bringing me home for the funeral services, let alone for not telling me of Reggie’s death. It would be more than fifteen years of my verbally blaming Mom for this infraction before she finally said, “My God, Andrew. Enough! I’m sorry. I did what I thought was the right thing at the time. I was wrong.” For whatever reason, that’s what I needed to hear. I immediately let it go. The reasoning behind Mom and Dad not retrieving their 12 year old son was steeped in the reality that I was staying more than a six hour drive away in central Vermont. They would have had to interrupt my time at camp, bring me back to our home in New Jersey, in order for me to attend the funeral which was held in
Philadelphia, another two hours south, and then return me to Vermont. I understand that pathology and accept it as something parents of a pre-teen believed was the best thing to do. Particularly taking into account that in the Jewish faith, the burial is to be held within 24 hours of death. At 12, being typically narcissistic, I hadn’t even considered the fact that Mom had just lost her mother.
Also in the Jewish tradition, there is an “unveiling” of the grave stone. A ritual that happens approximately one year after someone is buried. When my Uncle Manny (Mimi’s husband) read the 23rd Psalm aloud at the grave sight ceremony, I cried inconsolably.
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Like all who are honest about it, the three sisters had their festering, unresolved issues with their mother. I won’t go into examples for which I have been made aware in confidence. That was between Reggie and her daughters. What I will voice is an invisible hostility between the sisters for infractions, real and perceived.
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My mother was the first to live a more privileged married life, once my father’s medical private practice became established. But as a child, I wasn’t aware of any disparities in how my siblings and I, versus my cousins, lived each day. Whatever disdain my aunts may have felt about my mother’s social and financial position, I traveled between the three homes not recognizing any differences beyond location.
My Aunt Jeanne’s back yard was a stone and floral fairy tale. It had been landscaped and manicured by her own hands. And the rooms in her house had the most beautiful furniture you can imagine. Back then, she would go to “junk shops” in Orange, New Jersey, and find decaying orphans for a few dollars that needed refurbishing, repair and refinishing. In her detached garage, she brought these gorgeous wooden relics back to life. From an elegant dining table and chairs to the enormous role-top desk in Uncle Paul’s office, the vintage pieces were gems.
I practically lived at my Aunt Mimi’s house. I never thought our home or lifestyle was much different from hers. They had a house keeper. They had a colored tv years before we did, and they would take enviable vacations. Her family also embarked on a one year sabbatical to the Netherlands, due to my Uncle Manny’s tenure as a teacher.

Though we were in a very comfortable financial bracket, my parents didn’t drive fancy or flashy cars. At a certain point in the mid 1960’s, all three sisters drove variations of the same Chevrolet station wagon. Eventually Uncle Paul and Aunt Jeanne would raise their annual income considerably. Jeanne told me that once she had substantial money in the bank, Mimi began treating her differently.
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Not surprisingly, the three sisters had individual personalities, priorities and demeanors. Mom was loving and warm but later in life fought debilitating depression. She could also become high strung and would lose her patience and explode in anger in ways that scared the shit out of me.
I’m not sure this will make sense: I was scared of her anger, but not of her.
Jeanne appeared to be — and probably was — the most nonchalant of the three sisters. Though I consider them all to have been very attractive, in my opinion, when Aunt Jeanne was young, she was gorgeous on the level of a cover-girl. She couldn’t have cared less. She never held her beauty with any arrogance or gave a damn what others thought of her looks. Her husband, my Uncle Paul, was quite handsome. They were a hell of a striking couple. Excepting the physical gift of genetics, later in life she would reveal to me a deep sensitivity she had not displayed when I was young. Jeanne had worn her inner strength like armor, which sometimes was mistaken for a brazen heart.
Aunt Mimi, the middle child, was two years younger than my mother. Mom told me that Mimi was the most intellectual of the sisters. To me, she was simply my second mother. When I became older and reflected upon the make up of my aunts and cousins, Mimi appeared to have been innately unhappy, as if she felt she had always missed the boat, so to speak. I didn’t love her any less or think of her as anything other than my loving aunt whom I could always count on.
I remember my mother once telling me that when she was a teen, Mimi told their mother, Grandma Reggie, that she wasn’t like her sisters and to stop trying to get her to be a more gregarious person. It wasn’t her nature.
At the time Jeanne and her family moved to the area, she and Mimi were in similar financial situations. Though not impoverished, they both had to be very careful with money, struggling to make ends meet. Yet according to Aunt Jeanne, my grandparents regularly helped Mimi and her family with money, but never offered a dime to make things easier for Jeanne. They each had three children. Both had homes that were relatively the same size and design. My theory is that Jeanne always came off as being self sufficient. Where Mimi often appeared to be sad and seemed under water.
My grandparents purchased Mimi a house in cash in a “better” South Orange neighborhood than the one in which she and her family had been living. I don’t know for sure, but I believe Mimi resented the gift. She had been comfortable in their first South Orange home, on a street with neighbors that lived in houses where front doors were left unlocked and the population was community based. I loved visiting there as a young boy. There were countless amounts of kids, all from different backgrounds, playing together in the front yards and paved driveways. I can’t say if my grandmother strong-armed Mimi into moving to a more “appropriate” neighborhood, but in my unasked-for opinion, Mimi should not have moved her family off of the diverse and thriving Audley Street.
I’m not privy to what the relationship had been between Mimi and Grandma Reggie. I’m guessing Reggie thought she was being helpful. It may partly be that Reggie didn’t want any of her children thought of as “less than” by living in an area that didn’t carry the panache certain parts of South Orange and Maplewood offered at that time. It’s easy for me to say Mimi shouldn’t have taken extravagances from her parents for which she held a palpable resentment, but from what I have been told, for Mim, arguing with Grandma was useless. When Reggie made up her mind, there was no point in fighting her overbearing logic. This character is nothing I witnessed or knew about. Then again, I was a child.
Something else I wouldn’t know for a number of years was the disdain Aunt Mimi held toward my mother. I don’t think she loved Mom any less, but siblings have complicated relationships. And clearly there had been discussions and a choice made by all three that the Philadelphia sisters would live near each other and raise their collective ten children together.
There are things Mom told me (obviously from her side) that had happened where Mimi verbally eviscerated Mom. I presume Aunt Mimi felt relief afterwards, but it left my mother emotionally flattened. Maybe my mother should never have shared these sister to sister outbursts with me, since I held Mimi in contempt for behavior that was not thrown at me. I don’t know if it’s because Mom was very protective of Mimi, but she never fought back during these tirades. Maybe, like me, Mom avoided confrontation and just put up with Mimi’s venting. What I will say from my view is that whatever anger Mimi unleashed on my mother didn’t seem to be based upon anything Mom intentionally did to hurt or get at her sister. But I don’t know the entire history. Mimi’s anger appeared to be something she felt was warranted and justified. I’d say these were one sided, blinding verbal explosions.
Even so I know for sure that these three sisters loved each other, and considered themselves to be the best of friends.
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In her older aged days, I became much closer to my Aunt Jeanne than I had been growing up. Like my mother, she was a screamer when we kids were young. She was always yelling at her son, my cousin Glenn, who was a year ahead of me. When I brought the subject up to her decades after the fact, Jeanne had no recollection of being short tempered. I couldn’t help but smile and tell her what I had witnessed for years. I saw it as being similar to when my mother reached her late 80s, and said something about her never caring that I was gay. I started laughing. She metaphorically had had a nervous breakdown when she was confronted with my
sexuality.
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What these three women shared was not replicated by their children. None of the offspring from any of the three families have the close camaraderie shared by my mother and her sisters. My oldest brother has three daughters. I don’t know their intra-relationships up close, but I think they love and like each other very much. In the case of my siblings, I genuinely trust them all with my life but I don’t feel a connection with them that would have me wanting to live within their neighborhoods in order to be geographically closer. When I was growing up, the aunts would drop by our house at any hour of the day without notice, and Mom would do the same in return. It was accepted and possibly even expected. And not a day went by when they didn’t speak to each other on the telephone.
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The rift and separation between the sisters came toward the end of their lives.
I had always hoped that the three sisters would take care of each other until the end. With my father being the last, all of their husbands had died. I fantasied that perhaps the women would get a three bedroom place and live together, hiring a cook and if needed, a care taker. Between them, they had the finances. Instead, they all went their angry, individual ways. Prior to my
Uncle Paul and my father dying, Jeanne moved to a sprawling condominium in Florham Park, NJ. When Paul died, Jeanne left the state all together, taking a one bedroom space with a small garden in an assisted living facility in the Pennsylvania countryside. Mimi moved to an apartment complex in Philadelphia and then back to South Orange, where she took an apartment near the Village’s train station. My mother stayed in the last home she shared with Dad in a two bedroom condo in West Orange, NJ.
This split between the sisters was a sad final chapter. I don’t know what I had been thinking.
There is a complexity to all of this. Earlier, Aunt Jeanne convinced Mimi to buy into the Pennsylvania assisted living facility, years before Jeanne lived there. Mim never moved to the facility, forfeiting the large, non-refundable deposit, money she could not afford to lose. Jeanne was furious at my mother because Mom refused to make any decisions about moving while my father was still alive. Jeanne eventually did relocate by herself to the Quaker run assisted living housing in Pennsylvania, about forty five minutes from the train station in Hamilton, NJ. Mimi moved a final time into an assisted living facility in West Orange, NJ, where she lived out her last days, lost in a gentle but debilitating dementia. The last time I saw her, she didn’t know who I was.
I only visited Jeanne one time in Pennsylvania. I selfishly wished she would have taken up residence someplace more convenient for me. The traveling to see her took more than 2 hours each direction. Between subway, rail and car service, it cost about $100 round trip. And not that this is the point, but I had commuted from the east side of Manhattan to New Jersey for nearly 11 years visiting my ailing parents once a week, which in itself was an emotional drain and though done with love, was still an obligation.
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Whatever my feelings are about each of the sisters individually, I wish that they had stayed as I had known them. A chosen, cohesive, bonded sisterhood. And while Jeanne was vital in making Mom’s transition to death much more humane by getting her back home, the life long safety the three sisters formed decades before had been permanently torn.
Still, I will always be grateful to Judy, Mimi and Jeanne for giving our families a village to rely on. Supportive, steady, loving, sometimes infuriating, always there. Living their adult lives by each others’ side, the Philadelphia sisters stood as an example of what family can be. Even with all of them gone, I think of the three sisters daily and am thankful to them for helping to make my good life what it is.