Killing Maureen Bauer was THE WORST mistake that a soap ever made bar none (even worse than hiring Stern & Black for ATWT)! The four days that followed her death were riveting, but the show quickly threw away any mileage they could have gotten out of it by moving on to stories like Nick and Melinda.

Not only was Maureen the emotional center of the show, she was the continuation of the line of fierce mothers created by Irna in such character as Nancy Hughes and Bert Bauer. To make matters worse, they had gone a long way towards cememnted her position as the center of the show just prior to her death by such things as trapping her with Roger Thorpe during the blackout. She was the only person who gave Roger a chance, but would call him on any little fib he would tell. As Roger says at her tombstone, she was the person whose opinion of him mattered to him. They had also strongly established her as Vanessa's best friend, giving her a talk to and one of those rare soap friendships between women. Of course she was directly connected to Bridget, Ed, and Michelle, but she was Fletcher's unrequited love, Alan-Michael's aunt, and the model as the perfect wife and mother to the young married women like Blake and Eleni.

Her death also meant the end of the last Doug Marland-created Reardons, a sad passing in and of itself.

Guiding Light has never recovered.