Frances Irene Moore at 6 months
I don’t really know what happened to my grandmother after she lost custody of my mom. I do know she was forced into the situation by economic conditions, by the general chaos that accompanied the end of a super flood at Memphis and by a conniving and exploitative Georgia Tann who needed the perfect baby sister for my adoptive grandmother’s little boy.
So I imagine how my grandmother coped –
Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer,
yet that is how I coped, I didn’t talk about the pain, it didn’t go away.
The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died, or that you
lost custody of your child, it is that you can’t talk about it.
You just want to run away, but you don’t know where you can run to.
There isn’t any where to go.
My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air.
It leaves no room for anyone else.
After 3 years, Lizzie’s husband, JC Moore divorced her with no contest from her. My guess is that she couldn’t face him again after losing their child. She did remarry but she didn’t ever have another child. He remarried too but he was past fathering more children by then.
At least neither of them died alone. Such a sad and romantic and tragic story.
Missing Mom 