A Thought for Carly Simon on Losing Both of Her Sisters Within 24 Hours

I cannot begin to fathom what Carly Simon is feeling in her heart at this moment. Both of her older sisters died within 24 hours of each other. 

Eldest sister Joanna Simon passed away of thyroid cancer at the age of 84 on Wednesday while Lucy Simon died on Thursday of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 82. Her younger brother, Peter Simon, a photographer, died of a heart attack in 2018 at the age of 71.

While Carly Simon is hardly alone in feeling grief at these losses, yet she is now the last surviving member of her immediate family. While I cannot presume to know what she is thinking it would only be natural to think of one's own mortality especially when one's last two surviving siblings die one day apart.

Simon and her siblings grew up in the lap of luxury as their father Richard L. Simon was the co-founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster. While Carly Simon gained global fame in the early 1970's for hits such as "That's The Way I've Always Heard It Should Be", "You're So Vain" and "Anticipation", her older sisters were successful in their own right.

Joanna Simon was an acclaimed mezzo-soprano opera singer who performed on stages all over the world for nearly a quarter century until her retirement in 1986. Lucy Simon and younger sister Carly began their careers as a folk music duo in the early 1960's scoring a modest hit with an adaptation of the poem "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and also had their own interpretation of "Turn, Turn, Turn" before The Byrds made it into an international hit. 

After Carly's pop success, Lucy tried to follow in her footsteps releasing two solo albums in the mid-1970's - Lucy Simon and Stolen Time to little acclaim. In the early 1980's, she and her husband David Levine would win Grammy Awards for two children's albums In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record and In Harmony 2. Simon would find additional success in Broadway composing the score for The Secret Garden which earned her a Tony nomination in 1991 and later scored a musical adaptation of Doctor Zhivago.