Whether she experienced the arrangement primarily as liberation or as loss is not accessible through the record. Both experiences could have been true simultaneously. She continued to perform, continued to have a career, and also continued to be present in the family’s orbit — present as a sister, watching a child grow up in a household that maintained a specific fiction about who that child was.
The cancer that killed her in 1963 came when she was in her early forties. Liver cancer in that era, before the treatment advances of subsequent decades, was typically a rapid and often painful death. She was forty-four or forty-five years old when she died. Jack was twenty-six.
At his age of twenty-six, he was already in California, already working in the margins of the film industry, already building the specific kind of experience that would eventually produce Easy Rider and everything after. He had been living away from the East Coast for several years. His relationship with June in her final years — how often they spoke, whether he visited, what they said to each other — is not documented in the biographical record in specific terms.
He mourned her death as the death of a sister. That is what she was to him. The reality behind the presentation would not become known to him for another eleven years.
Extended Section: The Wider Pattern — Families Who Made the Same Arrangement
The arrangement that the Nicholson family made in 1937 was not an invention. It was a practice with a long history in American family life, one that operated across different racial communities, different religious backgrounds, and different geographical settings, though with specific densities in working-class urban and suburban communities where the social pressures around illegitimacy were most acute.