Sunday, March 22, 2009

Mary Tyler Moore Still Makes Us Smile

From the Drudge Report: "The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.
He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations."

Tragic, as all suicides are. If you have personally experienced the horror of a loved one committing suicide, you know that a certain level of guilt will remain behind with the survivors. It is human nature to believe the surviving loved ones could have saved the person. Deep down, we all think we can rescue another human being. If only that were true.

In Sunday's edition of Parade Magazine actress Mary Tyler Moore was spotlighted. She spoke of still not being able to forgive herself for her son's suicide. Her son Richard, her only child, died at the age of 24 by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That was in 1980. She still blames herself for poor parenting.

Moore lives in Greenwich, CT with her third husband, a physician 18 years younger than herself. She has written a new memoir, "Growing Up Again" and it is about her life as a diabetic. Proceeds go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. She is international chairman for the organization.

As a political junkie, the most interesting portion of the article was her proclamation that she would have campaigned for John McCain for President had he just asked her. She said she watches "a lot" of Fox News. She likes Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly. So, of course, the interviewer, Kevin Sessums, asks the question: "Is Mary Tyler Moore a right-winger". How probing. She said she is more of a libertarian centrist. Maybe the brilliant interviewer didn't realize there are a large population of people in the Republican party that identify as such.

I grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore on television. She still makes me smile. How refreshing.

3 comments:

Jolene said...

She is an inspiration to all diabetics and such a lovely person.

srp said...

She is such a wonderfully funny lady and so real... Diabetes is a horrible disease whether you are a child or an elderly person. Yes, indeed she still makes us smile!

T-Dogg said...

Her son didn't commit suicide. Those were rumors that Moore repeatedly refuted in interviews and in her book.

It's interesting that she professed to wanting to campaign to Mccain, considering that his platform wasn't very Libertarian nor is most of the stuff discussed on Fox News. In fact, most of it "Libertarian" from solely a fiscal corporate stance while highly intrusive and constraining on social issues and the lives of those involved.

I guess most Republicans are fiscally Libertarian while pro-Big Government for everything else.