When I was young, everytime I would take a bubble bath, my plastic dinosaurs filling up with lukewarm bathwater, I was met with the black and white image of a towel-wrapped woman, standing in front of a mirror and a fireplace. She would give me a coy smile, eyebrows lifted, eyelids drooping. Her red lipstick shined through even in the black and white photograph. Her hair was tightly wound in the same shade of white towel that she draped over her body. Her full arms and bare shoulders were on full display, the slightest peek of upper thigh on either side of her white towel. She held the white terry cloth fabric in such a way so as to seemingly incite disappointment in the viewer. One slip of the hand and this woman was on full display for me—with my rubber duckies and cheap dinosaurs—to see. 

I remember friends coming over, using the bathroom and then coming out to ask me if that lady in the towel up on the wall was my mother. I become embarrassed at their line of questioning. I couldn’t answer them. For one, I didn’t know who the lady up on my bathroom wall was. It very well could have been my mother. From another life maybe. A time before she had her children. A time when she still felt she was beautiful. Despite the fact that my mother never wore makeup and more so resembled Mrs. Corleone in The Godfather, my mother and the woman up on the bathroom wall were the only two women I had ever seen in such a state of intimacy as being in nothing but a towel. I was only logical at the time to connect the dots and see the two women as one in the same. 

At that time, I also gathered that there was something wrong with the way that woman on the wall looked. There was a reason my friends had a look about them when they exited my bathroom—a mix of wide-eyed astonishment and disgust. I guess I had a similar look whenever I laid eyes on the towel-bound woman. That woman I saw everyday when I went to brush my teeth with bubblegum flavored toothpaste. The way she looked at me sent an odd and unfamiliar feeling through the top of my head to the tips of my toes. The older I became, the more often I averted my eyes away from her seductive gaze. My younger brother and I would discuss our shared fear and disdain towards the woman on the wall. 

Something about her terrified us and allured us at the same time. We didn’t know who we were laying our young eyes upon. All we knew was we couldn’t look at her in her towel and not be interested in what was lying underneath. My father was the one who eventually took the poster down, replacing it with one of his unassuming seascapes. Years later, by osmosis of culture and finally paying attention to my mother’s interests, I would learn that the woman on the wall was Marilyn Monroe. That was my introduction to Marilyn Monroe. Barely clothed in black and white, hung in front of the chipping green paint of my bathroom wall.

It’s funny. Now when I step out of the shower on visits back home, I feel an absence in that bathroom. I wonder if my mother, the one who put that poster up in the first place, misses her presence like I do. I wonder if my mother liked stepping out of the shower and for one brief moment treating that poster as if it were a mirror. I wonder if my mother practiced Marilyn’s droopy eyed smile, trying to position her hands over her scratchy, bleach stained towel in the exact same way Marilyn had. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think of my mother and myself, both in front of our dusty, fingerprint smudged mirrors, doing what Marilyn had done time and time again—practice being Marilyn, practice being something, someone you are not and you never will be. 

Just like my mother and me, in our failed bathroom mirror imitations, Marilyn Monroe was never really Marilyn Monroe. She was always Norma Jean Baker, she just did a better job of hiding that curly-topped brunette whose full cheeks and sad eyes still showed when she smiled for the cameras. Marilyn inherited her naturally dark hair, high set cheekbones, and downcast blue eyes from her mother. Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, spent a majority of Marilyn’s life in and out of asylums and hospitals. Marilyn would follow suit in her mother’s struggle with mental health, struggling with depression, anxiety, and drug abuse, eventually being hospitalized for depression disguised as “exhaustion” in June of 1961. The passing of a month and a year from this hospitalization would find Marilyn dead of an overdose on barbiturates in her L.A home. 

For some, I can understand how difficult it might be in wrapping your head around why the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, at the height of her fame and career, would take her own life. I can understand why some people want to put blame on anyone, anything, but Marilyn herself. I can understand why people want to say it was the Kennedys covering up for the alleged affair between the actress and the president or the CIA ousting her for her alleged ties to the Communist Party or the doctors who provided her the barbiturates that would kill her. But people kill themselves. Happy looking people, beautiful people who smile and are successful and have families and friends who love them kill themselves all the time..  

The day my mother found my hoard of razors hidden in her old music box that she had handed down to me was when I told my mother the truth. I told her that I had spent most days and nights of my adolescence pondering whether or not to down any handful of pills, just as Marilyn had, and hope for that unbearable aching of unknowable origins within me to cease. Instead of holding me, telling me it would all be okay, that she would get her baby girl through all of this, my mother told me a story. With held back tears, she sat down next to me on my bed and  told me how one night when she was a teenager, she went to bed and hoped that she wouldn’t wake up in the morning. She prayed to God— Just stop this, please. When she woke the next morning, she found out that her neighbor across the street had died in his sleep. She took this as some sort of sign that she had to go on, that death was not meant to strike her at this time. The story sounded a bit silly to me—-Why the neighbor? What does he have to do with anything?一 but the death of this man kept my mother alive. Perhaps the fact that I still remember this story, it in some small way kept me alive too. Maybe the magazine cutouts of Marilyn Monroe on my mother’s childhood bedroom walls, the poster in our bathroom helped us too. 

I don’t know if my mother has had any other instances of suicidal ideation, depression or anxiety, but I have inklings. I know depression and mental illness can be hereditary. I know that my mother becomes incessantly nervous before she makes innocuous phone calls and when we take walks together on a track she insists we walk from the inside lane, the middle lane, and then the outside lane and back again. Two times, six laps in total. If I stray too far away from her desired lane, she becomes upset with me. I have seen my mother have panic attacks in public spaces. I have seen my mother cry for days on end, a constant burgeoning of tears ready to fall from her face. There’s no rhyme or reason for these actions, but I know what it feels like because I have experienced all of the same things: incessant sadness, loneliness, isolation, paranoia, panic, anxiety. This is what my mother has passed on to me. This is what Gladys Pearl Baker passed onto Marilyn. Four women. Four lifetimes. All of us, stuck in our own heads. My mother was able to cope with it. I was able to cope with it. Marilyn and her mother just couldn't cope as well. Marilyn’s mother would have to live the rest of her life with the knowledge that her baby girl was dead. Although I couldn’t find a viable source, there are stories of Gladys escaping from her sanitarium a year after Marilyn’s death by tying a bunch of her clothing together to make a rope, climbing out of her second story window in the nice hospital Marilyn paid for her to stay. She was found miles away in a small church, praying. What mothers of dead daughters pray for, I can only imagine. 

I often think about how Marilyn could have been saved. When I read her diary entries, they sound a lot like my own when I was at my loneliest. In one of her earliest archived notebooks she writes, Alone!!!!!!! I am alone I am always alone no matter what. I’m sure I wrote essentially the same thing when I was fifteen years old, writing with no hope for a future, just for an end to the loneliness that I thought was infinite and inescapable, except through death. How was I able to be saved and she wasn’t? I know the answer to my question is quite simple— I was given the medical and emotional care I needed. My life was extended and bettered with the help of tired EMTs, emergency room nurses on the night shift, therapists in cramped offices, my mother and father’s watchful care. Marilyn did not have access to all of that. What she did have access to was the sleeping pills and barbiturates that ended up killing her. No one thought Marilyn Monroe could die and so no one bothered checking in to see if the star in her was fading out. 

It’s clear from her personal writing that Marilyn Monroe wanted two things out of life: she wanted to dedicate her life to working on perfecting her craft as an actress and she desperately wanted to be loved. She wrote, Working (doing my tasks that I have set for myself). On the stage—I will not be punished for it or be whipped or be threatened or not be loved or sent to hell to burn with bad people feeling that I am also bad or be afraid of my being or ashamed exposed known and seen… Acting was her one escape from her own personal hell. To put on a mask made of red lipstick and bleached blonde hair was Marilyn’s way of hiding from herself, from the monsters that resided in her head. I’ve had my own fair share of masks meant to hide the monstrous thoughts behind my eyes. I’ve put on a smile when I wanted nothing more than to destroy the body that I inhabited, the body that I believed was my greatest flaw. I had to realize that my body was once inside my mother’s body, that I am a carbon copy of my mother. To take care of my mother, to heal her, I have to take care of myself. 

When my mother and I watch Some Like it Hot, when we see Marilyn stand on stage in a sequined mesh gown the same color as her pale skin, leaving little left to the imagination, we see our own body up on the screen. When she smiles as she sings “I Wanna Be Loved by You” she shows the slightest hint of a double chin. Her arms are full and take up space as she spins on stage. Her stomach isn’t flat and sticks out in her skin-tight dress, along with her breasts. She is all curves and skin and flesh. She’s gorgeous. She’s the most beautiful woman to ever live. When I look at her and take note of the intricacies of her body, her smile, the way she moves, I can’t help but see my mother, in a terry cloth towel on my bathroom wall. My mother’s body is what I imagine Marilyn would have looked like if she had lived past 36 years old. It is what I imagine my body will look like when I reach my thirties. When Marilyn sings “I Wanna Be Loved by You” it feels as if she’s not singing towards a man, but to us, to me and my mother. Two women with similar bodies and similar minds. We feel loved by her and in return we give it back. 

I think Marilyn accomplished what she always wanted. She was able to be seen without shame. Loved with no bounds. She is remembered as one of the defining actresses of the 20th century. We still watch her movies and laugh and cry and dazzle at her presence on screen. We dress up as her for Halloween and dye our hair Platinum Blonde to look more like her. We read and write about her, over and over again, trying to fill in the blanks of someone who impacted our lives and our culture and yet we still barely know. We’re still searching for a happy ending for her. For me, I find her happy ending in my own extended life, in being able to watch her films with my mother, both of us alive and amazed in watching an artist, a comedienne, a bombshell, a star, an icon, a girl who was able to achieve her dreams. We watch her shine, with our own hopeful eyes.