Almost thirteen years ago, after my sister Marian's death, I found a box of letters…
This one’s for me.
(photo L to R: Marian, Rosamond, Russell Lawson) Marian Averill Lawson was the third woman to bear the name. The others were also premature deaths. Her paternal grandmother was taken by cancer at the age of 48. Her aunt succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 49.

She didn’t buy a gift for any birthday, rarely visited a godchild and never sent a holiday card or letter, to my knowledge. Yet, in 1981, when on December 23 my wife and I had lost our first child and couldn’t bear the holiday, it was Marian who showed up at our house on Christmas Eve with a scraggly fir tree stuck on the top of her 1968 powder blue Mustang.
Yes, Marian loved profusely and without prejudice. She invented funny and unique love names for her family: Squee, Mayne, Pigboob. She would tell stories about her adventures in a hilarious shorthand she invented on the fly. She disposed of a minor fortune on lavish gifts for friends and lovers, endless and incomplete home improvements, hundreds of bootleg concert tapes from the Dead tours. She did time. She befriended and suffered at the hands of dangerous criminals and a series of bad (and perhaps fraudulent) money-making schemes among her acquaintences.
She could disappear for months or years. When you next heard from her, it was as if you had just talked the day before about music or Jesus or recovery. She pursued sobriety and even caught it a couple of times. She walked with the Lord. She passed over to the other side with precious little left of her plentiful gifts: some clothes her family bought for her in the last six months, a few worn pieces of furniture, a barely running old Volvo and an elderly Labrador named Monkey.
Why did you leave, sister mine? When will we see you again?
Marian Averill Lawson – 4/24/58 – 3/8/09