By Michaela Gordoni
New York Times Bestseller Mary Higgins Clark’s favorite memories are bittersweet.
Clark died in 2020, but her legacy lives on through her fictional and personal stories, some of which she wrote in Guideposts in 2007.
It was just a couple of months before Christmas in 1964; Clark was widowed with five children and deep in her grief.
“I thought of my mother, who stayed cheerful and focused through all of her hardships as a widow,” she said. “I remembered one Christmas when money was tight, she decorated the whole house with holiday wrapping paper. Everywhere we looked, the walls announced ‘Merry Christmas!'”
Clark recalled her 12th birthday, on Christmas Eve, when her brother Joe was in the hospital from an infection he caught through a cut. The doctors advised a leg removal, but Clark’s mother insisted her son’s leg would get better and even bought him a hockey stick.
Joe needed a lot of transfusions. It seemed like everyone they knew who could pitched in to give Joe blood.
His friend, Warren Clark, visited Joe on Christmas day and drove Mary and her family home.
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“Seeing that our Christmas tree was still leaning against the wall in the foyer, [he] offered to put it up for us,” Mary said. “’I’m no St. Joseph,’ he apologized as he hacked at the trunk, ‘but maybe I can get it in the stand.’ He was helpful, and handsome, and he had a great sense of humor.”
And sure enough, Joe was given the chance to try a drug that helped him recover, and he graduated the following June on stage without even a limp.
He enlisted in the Navy and contracted spinal meningitis in training school.
Their mother said, “’It is God’s will. I couldn’t let Joseph go when he was sick the other time, but now God wants him even more than I do.’”
When Mary got a little older, she saw Warren and his family at church every Sunday.
“I made it my business to greet Mrs. Clark after Mass,” Mary said. “One Sunday she asked my brother, ‘Didn’t I hear that your sister is engaged to be married?’ John said no.”
Then Warren joked, “Who’d marry your sister?”
It turns out he would a few years later.
“Warren and I were married the day after Christmas. The rain was coming down in sheets and I was 22 minutes late. Warr’s first words to me at the foot of the altar were, ‘What kept you?’ For the next 14 years and nine months, we lived happily ever after,” Mary said.
In 1959, Warren developed chest pains. Doctors told him that he had advanced angina and his arteries leading to his heart were almost totally clogged.
Mary recalled, “I stopped at church and prayed. ‘Please, let him live.’ The answer I heard was, ‘Come, take up your cross and follow Me.'”
Warren had three heart attacks across the next five years, and the last one took his life.
After his funeral, she lay in her room alone. When her 5-year-old asked to sleep with her, she put her in bed with her and decided that she would be the best mom she could be and become a successful writer. She dusted herself off and started writing radio scripts before she published her first book.
Clark wrote 51 books in her lifetime.
“That night, if I had had a glimpse into the future, in my wildest imagination I could never have guessed how much happiness God had in store for me,” she said.
“I had always missed the joy and companionship of marriage, and that too was given back to me. Eleven years ago I was blessed to meet and marry my second ‘spouse extraordinaire,’ John Conheeney,” she said. “A definition of happiness is ‘something to have, someone to love and something to hope for.’”
She added, “All my life, in good times and bad, these essentials of happiness have been granted to me in abundance, and for that I am deeply grateful.”
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