Marshall Mathers Jr. holds his newborn son in a 1973 photo. A year later, he left.
He left Debbie Mathers alone with the baby, in poverty, in Michigan. That boy grew up without a father, wrote about that absence in songs heard by the whole world, and became Eminem, one of the most influential rappers in history. Marshall was never there to see it.
In 2001, another photo surfaced: Marshall, now older, reading a magazine with his son’s face on the cover. It was the closest he had been to him in years. He died in Indiana in 2019, without having exchanged a word with the man that baby he once held had become.
