Patricia Highsmith and her ashes were interred in its columbarium. She left her estate, worth an estimated $3 million, and the promise of any future royalties to the Yaddo colony, where she spent two months in 1948 writing the draft of "Strangers on a Train". Highsmith bequeathed her literary estate to the Swiss Literary Archives at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag, was appointed literary executor of the estate. Highsmith was a resolute atheist. Although she considered herself a liberal, and in her school years had gotten along with Black students, in later years she became
Patricia Highsmith that she had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine, although a biography of Highsmith indicates Jay Plangman tried to persuade his wife to have the abortion but she refused. Highsmith never resolved this love–hate relationship, which reportedly haunted her for the rest of her life, and which she fictionalized in "The Terrapin," her short story about a young boy who stabs his mother to death. Highsmith's mother predeceased her by only four years, dying at the age of 95. Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read at an early age, and she made good use of her grandmother's extensive library.