...And Never Let HerGo

popular. I can picture her running in the hall on the second floor of our dorm, shouting and laughing. She was very athletic, and she was always on the go. She had lots of friends—she was very social and vivacious. I remember that she was always smiling.”
    And Anne Marie
was
happy at Wesley; but during the times when she felt discouraged or anxious, no one but her very close friends ever knew it. She had long since mastered the art of keeping an ebullient facade, no matter what was churning beneath the surface. With her scholarships and loans, and by working whenever she could, she managed to complete the two-year program at Wesley.
    Robert Fahey Sr. had continued to live with Brian at the apartment in Newark for a while, but then he’d moved to live with Kevin and Robert at their house. His health wasn’t good; years of drinkinghad aged him before his time, and his heart was in bad shape. He had also been diagnosed with leukemia. Once she no longer had to live with her father or depend upon him for the necessities of life, Anne Marie had made a tentative peace with him, although neither she nor her sister, Kathleen, could forget the bad years.
    Robert Fahey Jr. came home on the evening of March 24, 1986, and found his father dead on the floor; he had succumbed to a heart attack. He was sixty-four. It was eleven years to the month since Kathleen Fahey had died. Now, with both her parents gone, Anne Marie was bedeviled by ugly memories that brought back the pain and the emotional chaos of living in a family dominated by alcoholism. She had repressed the recollections for so long that she had almost forgotten them, but they were there in her psyche, curled up and waiting to spring out. It was the beginning of a very difficult time for her.
    At the end of October 1986, Anne Marie transferred to the University of Delaware in Newark so that she could get a four-year degree. She was twenty now, and while she had been happy at Wesley, the university, with an enrollment ten times that of Wesley, overwhelmed her. It may have been that the bigger college intimidated her, or it may have been that all the difficult experiences of her young life had worn away at her for so long that her carefully constructed defenses finally crumbled.
    That semester at the university was a bad time; Anne Marie felt alone and isolated and fell into a depression. It grew harder and harder to paste on her perpetually happy mask. She stopped going to class, and the darkness of winter and the holiday season, fraught with remembrances of better—and worse—times, found her almost immobilized.
    She didn’t return to the University of Delaware for a second semester; she dropped out and moved in with her brother Brian in the house he’d bought on Van Buren Street. Her depression lasted about six months, and she sought professional therapy to help her out of the black hole that trapped her.
    Still, there was always a core of strength in Anne Marie that began to surface when hopelessness gripped her. She thanked her grandmother Katherine McGettigan for that. Nan was still there for Annie, showing her as she always had that people didn’t quit just because things got a little tough.
    Gradually, Anne Marie worked her way up out of her despondency. She realized that she really missed Wesley College and Dover, and she decided to move in with friends there. Her decision worriedher brothers and sister because she didn’t have any firm plans about finishing school or getting a job. “It was hard right after she left,” Brian recalled. “But after we got over that, we stayed in touch the same way we had before. I went down to visit a few times. She came up on weekends once in a while.”
    It took Anne Marie a little time to pull things together, but she did it, and they were all relieved when she found a job as a waitress.
    Wesley had become a four-year college, and that worked out perfectly. Anne Marie re-enrolled and it proved to be a good decision for her, even though she would have to work to pay her way and it would take her longer than the average student to get enough credits to graduate.
    Anne Marie had a gift for friendship; she had friends that she had known since she was a girl, and she made more in college. Her best friends from grade school, Beth Barnes and Jennifer Bartels, were still close to her. Another really good friend was Jackie Binnersley, whom Anne Marie had met in the seventh grade when Jackie moved in four or five houses up