Marilyn (Molly) Marcus, 1942-2026

Some things I learned — and still hope to learn — from my mother

My mother passed away late last week. I have cried a lot. It was unexpected and shocking, but peaceful and with dignity. In her final days she was literally surrounded by people she loved, and who loved her deeply in return.

My mother inspired love like nobody I have ever met. I don’t really think I grasped the degree to which that was true until last week, when family, friends, and neighbors, from near and far, gathered on very short notice, flouting hospital visitation rules, and surrounding her in an impromptu celebration of song, prayer, and memories. I dearly wish she could have had another decade or two, but she went out with grace and amid so much love.

She was also, as I once put it in the acknowledgements of one of my books, to her eternal joy, “a lifelong student of human behavior.”

This essay is about some of the many things I learned from her - including one that I have maybe only just now started to fully appreciate.

“We are all more human than otherwise,” one of her favorite quotes, from the psychotherapist Harry Stack Sullivan, was a guideline that she taught me and that gave her endless empathy for humanity. The point is that for all the superficial differences between humans, we share a tremendous amount and to a large degree face the same struggles, and should be kind to each other. To the extent that I know anything about AI, it’s mostly because I studied human (and animal) cognitive development for decades. And, in many ways, that itself can be traced back to her love of human psychology, both in her profession (she was a therapist working with underprivileged youth) and in her personal life, when she took an incredible and maybe unmatched interest in the lives of others. (My first exposure to statistics, a tool that has served me well across many careers, was also through her, when she took a class in it when I was about ten.) If my father taught me about science, my mother taught me about humanity.

The whole world is worth your notice. Every time I went out to events (plays and concerts and baseball games and so on) or enrolled in a new school, or took a summer class, she wanted to know who was there. Baltimore, where she spent the last 60 years, was a richly multicultural place, and she wanted to know anything and everything about it. And she wanted every event to be open to everyone, regardless of race and class and religion and so on; it was a good thing, in her eyes, if some event had drawn people from across Baltimore’s many strands, and a letdown otherwise. More than that, she didn’t just want me to watch some show, she wanted me to take in the world surrounding it. She happened to work as a therapist and social worker, but could just as easily have been an anthropologist.

Every life matters. Long, long before “Black Lives Matter” became a phrase, my mom fought for social justice and treated people as equally as humanly possible. My own first exposure to the fact that the many people of Baltimore lived under very different conditions came from her time (when I was a child) as a survey researcher, going into Baltimore’s poorest communities and interviewing people in their homes about how they lived. She loved that work. In cooperation with my late father, she gave me a middle name that is in part in memory for a slain Black Panther. Her friends were truly from all walks of life, without regard to race, class, religion, gender, profession, or much of anything else; she just wanted to surround herself with good people. This was obvious in her final moments, by the array of people who came to pay respects and the company she kept, and obvious throughout her adult life. Her concern for social justice for all humans has always been an inspiration to me. Without doubt her values have influenced my stance on AI and how it should develop.

“Money isn’t the only variable.” I don’t know if my mom coined this phrase or not, but she taught it to me, and lived by it, and I try to live by it, too. She was not rich, and did not aspire to be; she had a good, interesting life, centered around friendship and travel and adventure up until the very end. Money was never the point for her, not even a little bit. She had rich friends and poor ones and didn’t give a damn which was which.

Write, about your feelings and your stories and those you love. Write for yourself, first and foremost. My mom never became a professional writer, but she loved to write stories for her family and friends. (She also wrote journals, every day, for decades, entirely for herself.) Her stories were personal, not necessarily meant for broad public consumption; many were written to help her cope with traumas of growing up with parents that lost their own parents in the pogroms. Some were to celebrate the joys in life. Many were ultimately about forgiveness. For years, she led services in her Jewish group, centering in part on her memories and those stories. My own writing is — with the deliberate exception of this essay — quite different, but my decision to spend more and more time on my own writing surely started with her. This very essay is both a reflection of her influence and an homage to it.

Quietly support those you love, and stand by them even when others might not. This is the lesson I haven’t yet fully metabolized, and only started to really appreciate in the last several days. I am in my 50s; she just passed. And yet I realize I still have something to learn from her, even now that she is gone. Over the last week, I was simply blown away by how many people felt deeply supported by her. A cousin of mine recalled being 21 and pregnant, fresh from a breakup and about to be a young single parent in an era when that was ostracized; she felt like my mom (her aunt) was one of the very few people who supported her fiercely and without judgment. (The fact that I am able to write this at all at this moment is in no so small part because of the amazing support that same cousin gave me over the last few days.) A day or two later an old friend of my mom’s told me that my mom was the most supportive person she’d ever met. “If I told your mom I had murdered someone, she would have paused for a moment, taken a deep breath, and then said, ok, let’s talk about what you should do.” A childhood friend of mine texted to say that ever since his mother (one of my mom’s best friends) had passed away unexpectedly in the fall, my mom kept checking in on him. He was truly touched. And my half-sister (not my mother’s daughter) who met my mom maybe a dozen times told me how much she was truly moved by each encounter, and by my mom’s genuine interest in her.

I always felt like my mom “had my back,” but I now know that I was very far from alone in feeling that way.

My mom had a really rough childhood; and yet in her generosity to the world, she may be unmatched. And she did all this quietly, too. She was simply there for people, and asked hardly anything in return. It’s just who she was – and who she made herself to be.

She deserves every bit of the love that her friends and family and neighbors have been showering her with.

Rest in peace.