The missing family

Barb was the youngest of her large Irish Catholic family - a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in suburban Pittsburgh, his family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday nights, college games on Saturdays, the Steelers on Sundays. Dad was an engineer, mom was a housewife, and Barb was the family mascot, blonde and adorable, watching her siblings finish school and pursue their careers.

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Barb was the only stay-at-home child in the 1980s to watch the seams of her parents' marriage fall apart. Her father almost left and her mother withdrew into herself, sitting quietly in front of the television, always smoking, often with a cocktail. Something had caught up with her, though we didn't know what. Barb watched all this with a certain detachment; her parents were older than most, and her sisters and brothers provided more than enough parental energy to make up the difference. So in 1990, when Barb was 14 and her mother was told she had breast cancer and died within months at the age of 62, Barb was broken and bewildered, but also protected. His siblings had already intervened, three of them living at home. Together they came to a common understanding of the tragedy. Their mother could have lived longer if she had cut down on her drinking sooner, gone to see a doctor, or not smoked.

Six years later, Barb was 20 and in college when someone else in the family needed help. Her sister Christy was the second born, 24 years older than Barb and the star of the family in many ways. She had traveled extensively as a pharmaceutical company executive while raising two children with her husband in a beautiful suburban New Jersey home. But where Christy was once able and professionally ambitious and socially conscious, now, at 44, she was alone, her clothes scruffy and torn, her hair unwashed, her marriage over. names to protect their privacy). Depression was the first suspected diagnosis, followed by schizophrenia, although neither seemed...