SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 70 (of 78)
Loss of the Last Sibling (1904)
Chapter 70
Loss of the Last Sibling (1904)
On August 31st, 1904, less than three months after Livy was laid to rest, my sister Pamela died. Pamela Moffett was just short of reaching the end of seventy-seven full years of life and strife, love and loss, happiness and its antidote.
And thus, in the span of less than a hundred days I lost the two women closest to me—those of my generation, anyway.
I had known my sister Mela—we in the family always called her Mela—longer than any other person. As she was older than me, I had known her from birth, as I had my mother; but mother had been gone for fourteen years when Pamela died.
I don’t know why providence had provided me so amply with brothers and sisters, as I seemed to keep losing them. I started losing them as a toddler, and have kept it up all of my life until now.
I will lose no more wives, because I will not marry again. Nor will I lose any more siblings. They are all gone now, Margaret having died in 1839, Benjamin in 1842, Henry in 1858, Orion in 1897, and finally Mela in 1904. I thus became the last of those particular Mohicans, so to speak—the last child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Pamela named her son Samuel (born 1860) for her brother. Samuel Moffett became a respected writer himself, but mined a far different vein of literature than his uncle had. Pamela’s other child, Annie (born 1852), married Charles Webster in 1875, whom Twain hired in 1884 to run his publishing company. Twain later soured on Webster—to put it mildly.
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As the pronunciation of Orion’s name was different than what most might expect (with the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second—like so: OR-e-’n), so was Pamela’s, but in the opposite way—the emphasis was on the second syllable (Pa-MEE-la—and sometimes Pa-MEEL-ya), thus making “Mela” (pronounced MEE-la) a sensible shortened form of her name.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.