Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft died on 24 May 1921, at Butler Hospital. Her death, however, was not a result of her nervous breakdown but rather of a gall bladder operation from which she did not recover. Winfield Townley Scott, who had access to Susie's now destroyed medical records, tells the story laconically: ‘She underwent a gall-bladder operation which was thought to be successful. Five days later her nurse noted that the patient expressed a wish to die because “I will only live to suffer.” She died the next day.’

Lovecraft's reaction was pretty much what one might expect: ‘The death of my mother on May 24 gave me an extreme nervous shock, and I find concentration and continuous endeavour quite impossible … I cannot sleep much, or labour with any particular spirit or success.’ Later on in this letter, written nine days after the event, Lovecraft adds disturbingly:

Evidently his aunts did not figure much in this equation. But it was a passing phase, as we shall shortly see.

What, in the end, are we to make of Lovecraft's relations with his mother? Susie Lovecraft has not fared well at the hands of Lovecraft's biographers, and her flaws are readily discernible: she was overly possessive, clearly neurotic, failed (as Lovecraft himself and the rest of his family did) to foresee the need for training her son in some sort of remunerative occupation, and psychologically damaged Lovecraft at least to the point of declaring him physically hideous and perhaps in other ways that are now irrecoverable.