G. Marshall Brooks felt lost when her beloved father died; her mother’s physical and mental health then began to decline, essentially forcing 15-year-old G. to take on the overwhelming role of parenting a parent
Editor’s Note: The Reporters Inc.’s G. Marshall Brooks, continues chronicling her fascinating life with this next entry from “Life in the Key of G.” G. began writing about her life in hopes the stories would help her family better understand who she really is, and how she became who she is. G. also hopes these honest, heartfelt essays encourage and inspire others to share their personal memories and experiences with their own loved ones.
This third installment picks up where G. left off in her last column. In case you missed it, or need to refresh your memory, here are links to both that piece and her first one.
From February 2026: From the advances of a predatory pediatrician to the devastating loss of my father, my teenage years were marked by confusion and chaos
From December 2025: The Reporters Inc.’s new contributor shares vivid episodes from her fascinating life, in hopes of inspiring others to share their own stories
July 2026
I was 15 when my father died, and my life took a new turn. My mom got Social Security benefits each month, and so did I.
My father had been pastor of the Cass Street Church of God in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The church allowed us to stay in the parsonage with a discounted rent, out of respect for my dad. At least that’s how it was for a couple years.
Although I lived in the same house, my life was very different. My two oldest brothers and their families had moved to Indiana and Ohio respectively. My third brother and his wife lived in Detroit. My fourth brother and his family now lived in California. My fifth brother and my sister lived across town. If you’re counting, that only left me.
Once everything settled down, my mother turned around and didn’t know who I was. I’d seemingly grown up behind her back, so to speak. Her little girl was actually an independent teenager who spoke her mind. I wasn’t disrespectful, but someone had to be responsible and she was too crippled by grief to be that person.
She didn’t know how to write checks, so I did.
She had trouble talking to repairmen and the utility companies, so I did.
She had trouble dealing with the church deacon who would see to the upkeep on the house, so I did.
G. Marshall Brooks, the author of “Life in the Key of G.”
When he began coming in without notice early mornings while I was getting dressed, I didn’t bother her with it.
I took care of it by calling his wife.
In her defense, I have to say my dad took his love, protection and care of my mother to the level of co-dependence. She never had to learn to drive or pay bills. He took care of everything. He never wanted her to ever have any stress. He loved her with an unconditional love. However, his love made her dependent.
Being invisible made me independent. No one but my dad ever came to my rescue, so I’d learned to do things for myself.
And now, it seemed like my mother’s and my roles were reversed. It was more like I was the parent and she was the child. Her grief was so severe that there was no other way for us to survive.
Since I was the only child left at home. I was the only one who really saw what losing my dad did to her. After 33 years of marriage, she nearly lost her mind.
G. Marshall Brooks’ parents at Cass Street Church of God in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where her father served as pastor, in the mid-1960s.
I would come home after school and work to find her telling me how my dad sat in his chair and watched soap operas with her. She would describe his pajamas and all the things they talked about.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew something was very wrong. When I tried to talk to her about it, she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. I kept my bedroom door ajar at night because some nights, I would hear my mom crying.
But then, I swear I started to hear my dad walking at night. His habit had been to walk down the hall to the bathroom every night around 3 am.
My bedroom was right next to the bathroom and my parents’ bedroom was at the other end of the hall. I would awaken out of my sleep to hear footsteps going past my door and then the toilet flush.
I was afraid to turn around to look, even though I knew that I heard it. This scared me.
When I finally calmed down enough to go check, my mom was fast asleep.
That’s when I started closing my door at night.
I also began staying away from home as much as possible. I’d go to school in the morning and then straight to a work-study job afterwards. Then to my boyfriend’s house, and stay there until close to midnight. That became my routine. I was trying to avoid the specter of my dad in that house. Somehow I thought my mother was pulling me into her delusions.
I figured she couldn’t do that if I wasn’t there.
During my last year of high school, my mom started crying most of the night. She would call me to massage her left arm because she said it hurt. Some nights I didn’t get much sleep. This went on for a couple of weeks. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone that she was sick. I had no idea what was wrong with her, but between this thing with her arm and the ghost, I was about to lose my mind.
Since I couldn’t tell anyone or get help, I’d make phone calls. I called my aunts and my grandfather in Alabama. I’d call my brothers and some of my friends in other states. I was running up quite the phone bill, but it helped me stay sane in that house.
The only siblings that lived in the same city were my youngest brother and my sister. My brother would show up once a month to see my mom. My sister only came when she needed something. Most of the time I didn’t see anyone. When the phone bill came, I nearly screamed. It was almost $200! It took my entire SSI check to pay it, and I didn’t tell my mom until months later.
One night she was crying so bad that I knew I had to get help. I called the brother who lived in town and when he answered, I just started to cry.
He asked me what was wrong and I cried harder. He asked me if it was something to do with mom. I said yes. He asked if she told me not to tell anyone. I said yes. He asked if I needed him to come over. I said yes. He said he would be there soon. Then he promised he wouldn’t tell her that I had called him.
After I hung up, I cried even harder, because somebody was finally going to help me.
G. Marshall Brooks at age 16.
When I let him in the door, he hugged me and went upstairs to my mother’s room. I stayed downstairs because I was afraid she would look at my face and know that I had called him. About 20 minutes later, he came downstairs and told me to call an ambulance.
After a couple days stay in the hospital, my brother told me she’d had a mild stroke and she also had diabetes. When she came home, helping her watch her diet and making sure she took her pills everyday were added to my duties.
Several weeks later, three of my four older brothers came to town. By this time, things had gone back to the “current” normal. My brothers made a lot of noise about stuff that had already been resolved. My mom told them that I’d taken good care of her and everything was fine.
Then she slipped and told them about the phone bill. That started another round of noise. When she said I’d already paid the bill, it was like they hadn’t heard a word she said. The comments I got from these “never there when I needed them” brothers were (a) I needed my ass kicked (b) I should have known better, and (c) No wonder she got sick if I was doing “crazy stuff” like that.
Not one of them ever acknowledged that it was me, a teenager, who was the only one there and who’d done the best she could.
After the yelling was over, I became invisible again. I went to my room and wished they would all just go home. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t long before they did just that.
Wyoming is Not My Home
Brother Number Three was 10 when I was born. For a long time I believed that he seldom noticed me. Especially since he went straight into the Air Force after graduating from high school. He got married a couple years later
But then, shortly after Daddy died, it seemed like he did know he had a sister after all.
Everything had changed for all of our family, no matter where we were in our own lives. Momma was struggling to hold herself together and I was struggling to hold everything else together.
Daddy had been gone several months by the time I found out that someone had actually thought about how I was coping. Apparently, Brother Three and my mother had discussed this without my knowledge. So, one day during that summer after I turned 15 I was informed that I was going to “visit” with my brother and his wife in Wyoming.
Only later would I learn that the plan all along had been that I would live with them permanently.
Wyoming is nearly 1,000 miles from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where G. Marshall Brooks had previously lived.
My brother was stationed in Cheyenne, Wyoming and was living in family housing on base. I wasn’t given a choice but, at this point, I couldn’t have voiced an opinion if I’d wanted to. I was just sort of numb on the inside.
I have to say that there was never any malice in these things my family put me through. It wasn’t mean spirited. They just didn’t understand who I was.
On the outside, it seemed that I just rolled with the punches. But inside I was just a kid, trying to do what my Daddy told me to do when faced with a challenge.
He and I never imagined I’d face a challenge so big, or one that the rest of the family wouldn’t understand. It seems some days you’re the cowboy and some days you’re the horse, so to speak.
Anyway, off I went to Wyoming on a Greyhound bus. There was one little surprise within the surprise of this trip. I was going across the country all by myself.
My brother couldn’t get time off to come get me. And I guess it was too expensive for my mom to come with me and then take the bus back. So, I was off to Wyoming solo. Was I scared? A teenage Black girl on the bus all alone in 1968. You betcha! My mom must have been praying for me, because I sat next to a very nice White lady. She took me under her wing and more importantly, under her protection for the whole trip.
When I got there I discovered two things very quickly. First, Wyoming was a very hot, flat place in the summer. Second, there were giant horses everywhere. It seemed like at least once a week there was a parade. And the only things in the parade were horses, horse manure, and the clowns following behind raking up the manure. Coming from Grand Rapids, Michigan, it was like moving to a different country.
My brother worked something like four days on and three days off as security on the base. His wife was a nurse, but she worked a regular five-day week. I did not feel the love from her when I arrived. My sister-in-law was pretty blunt and opinionated. I felt like she was always mad at my brother, and it was always because of me.
On the days he was off, my brother and I had a great time. He showed me around the base and the city, we ate out, and we laughed like crazy. This was the first time I’d actually gotten to know him as a real person. He was so much older than me and had left home so soon after high school that he’d been more or less a stranger to me. We were just getting to know each other for the first time.
His buddies on base were buzzing around me a lot. They were very friendly and I was built like a woman much older. My brother was constantly reminding guys that I was only 15. I liked the attention and didn’t really get what the problem was. I wasn’t thinking a lot about sex yet.
I think my brother wasn’t too bothered that his sister was attractive at 15. However, he was very clear that I was off limits to them and they were off limits to me.
My sister-in-law would come home from work on the days that he’d been off and was so not happy. They’d been married just a few years, so I guess it was still kind of new. Then to have a 15-year-old sister come to stay, it might have been a bit much for her.
Now, I think she might have been kind of jealous of the fun we were having. At that time though, I didn’t understand any of that. I just thought she was mean. I often wondered how my brother could love someone who seemed angry at him all the time. It seemed to me that she never seemed to be happy. The only marriage I’d really seen up close before was my mom and dad’s. And they were never like these two.
My feelings then were that I loved my brother and did not like my sister-in-law. She sort of tried to mother me and that didn’t go over well. Mostly because she didn’t know how to be a mother yet. Then of course, she wasn’t my mother and I didn’t like her. I didn’t mind listening to my brother and made sure she knew I didn’t want to listen to her unless he told me to. After all, I was a teenager whose life had been upended a few months before. And coming there hadn’t been my idea. That doesn’t excuse my attitude towards her, but it didn’t excuse hers either.
Some weekends, my brother worked and she was home alone with me. These were not good days. I didn’t know her and all she ever did was fuss. There were no girl talks or easy conversations. I’d always end up saying something that offended her. Then she’d fuss at my brother about it when he got home. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to talk to me.
I felt like I was in the way, and not only a burden but some kind of pitiful charity case. Not a good feeling for anyone. I began to feel very homesick. I’d never been away from my mother for more than a weekend. And I’d never been somewhere so different. Even though I loved my brother, he and his wife were actually strangers.
My mother had impressed me with almost extreme ideas of privacy. I never saw her unless she was completely covered.
As for the functions of a woman’s body, I never saw that either. We never discussed such things in our home. It was assumed you took care of your body privately in the bathroom or your bedroom.
But you would never mention it unless there was an emergency. Everything of a bodily function nature was private.
So, living in this small apartment made it hard to be normal about my body’s functions. What my brother and his wife laughed off made me very uncomfortable. Not understanding this, they unintentionally discounted my feelings.
Then, after I’d been there about a month, my period started. I was embarrassed and ashamed because I’d stained my sheets or my underwear or something. That ended with me having a complete meltdown. I told them I wanted to go home.
But I think I didn’t really want to go home, I just wanted them to talk to me. To help me understand this new reality. I really didn’t have a voice back then.
G. Marshall Brooks’ brother and his wife in their wedding photo.
Once I’d put it out there though, I had no way to take it back. The fuss I made convinced my sister-in-law that this wasn’t working and never would. They decided to send me home to my mother.
My brother was very sad. He’d finally managed to connect with his little sister. We really had a lot of fun together. But I think his wife was relieved to be rid of me.
Eventually, as an adult, my brother and I found a lot to laugh about whenever we were in the same room. He was very mellow in his personality and tried to understand other people. He was also very compassionate. He had a couple of light strokes a couple of years ago. Now when I call, he says hello and hands the phone to his wife. She’s in a wheelchair and doesn’t speak harshly to me anymore. They just celebrated their 60th anniversary.
The brother I knew when I was young, the one I knew when I grew up, is no longer there.
I’m sorry to this day that I didn’t stay in Wyoming. It was an enormous opportunity. I guess it just wasn’t the right timing.
G. Marshall Brooks is busy writing the next installment of “Life in the Key of G” so be sure to sign up for our e-newsletter below to be alerted when it’s published. G. can be reached at msgrmb@yahoo.com.
Click below to read G’s previous installments:
From February 2026: From the advances of a predatory pediatrician to the devastating loss of my father, my teenage years were marked by confusion and chaos
From December 2025: The Reporters Inc.’s new contributor shares vivid episodes from her fascinating life, in hopes of inspiring others to share their own stories
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