Late Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley’s mother Nancy Layne McCallum remembered discovering her son’s body in 2002 in a new Seattle Times article.
The article states, “When she went to the third floor, she found the mail stacked up and could hear Staley’s cat, Sadie, meowing on the other side of his door.”
She called the police who came and knocked down the door. They discovered Staley’s body, and recommended she not go in.
“I promised that I would always be there for my children,” she said. She sat beside him on the couch, where he looked so tiny.
“I told him I was sorry this was how it turned out.”
The police didn’t like that McCallum had gone in, but she didn’t care. She wanted to do it her way.
“Society thinks mothers are weak and whiny,” she said. “But women go to war, we have babies. This was my war.”
Nancy Layne McCallum discussed her son’s birth in a recent Northwest Music Scene interview.
“Layne was my first child and I was just 19 (when he was born). When he was in the delivery process and he could see all the bright lights, you could hear him cooing, which is kind of unusual, because babies usually were screaming. Then they propped me up and laid Layne in my arms. He was watching the lights and his little mouth was in an O and he was cooing. And I looked down and said, ‘Hi Layne, I’m your mom.’ I think it’s unusual that he was that natural from the very moment he was born.”
She also discussed Layne as a child, “Layne was quiet. That was his nature. He was a child with a very long attention span. He was also very sweet and very shy. He loved music, and by (age) two, his first very favorite song was ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.’ It was so totally adorable to hear him singing that in the back seat of the car, because he really didn’t know the words (laughs).”
“As he got older, he wrote down in his Dr. Seuss book, ‘All About Me,’ that he wanted to be a singer. He was nine when he wrote that, and I thought, ‘Well, every kid wants to be noticed, like a fireman or policeman, or a singer or an actor. So, I didn’t take that much note of it, because we all sang around the house and acted very silly. He was hysterical. He was one of the funniest people. My mother was like that, too.”
