So much of my life feels like scattered fragments—moments and memories that never quite form a whole. It’s a painful kind of disconnection, one that can feel not only overwhelming but deeply unjust. My mother was taken from me, and I’ve had to live with the haunting question of whether my father was the one who tore her away. When she was gone, it felt like my heart forgot how to beat.

I waited—frozen—for my lungs to remember how to breathe. I was paralyzed, trapped in what felt like an unending nightmare.

I divide my life into three chapters to make sense of it all.

The First Chapter is my life as a little girl and the young woman I became.

The Second Chapter is the life I live now.

The Third Chapter is what lies ahead, centered on uncovering the truth about my mother’s death and living with whatever I find. It’s the final chapter, unfolding as I approach my 72nd birthday this August.

The Third Chapter remains unwritten as I write this series—a mystery, suspended in uncertainty.

I can only hope for the strength to face whatever comes. I don’t expect justice. I don’t know if the truth will ever surface. I have no control over the outcome, and that’s a devastating reality to live with. Once again, I find myself feeling like collateral damage. My mother is gone. My father may have taken her from me.

And I’m still here, alone, trying to carry the weight of it all. I’ve imagined every possible outcome, turning each one over in my mind, and no matter how I frame it, no version offers peace. If my father is not responsible for my mother’s death, which, deep down, I struggle to believe, I’m still left with haunting possibilities: Did someone else take her life? Was it suicide? If someone else killed her, I may never see justice. If she took her own life, my heart would break all over again.

And if I uncover truths about either of them—things I never knew or believed they were capable of—I’ll have no choice but to find a way to live with that knowledge. The weight of that truth is crushing, almost too much for one person to carry.

The harshest reality is this: nothing I learn will bring my mother back.

She is gone—forever—and I never truly got to know her.

The sorrow of that absence runs deeper than words can express.

Someone recently asked me how I make sense of my life when I take a quiet moment to reflect on everything I’ve been through. Like many others, they couldn’t quite grasp how I’ve managed to carry so much and still move forward with purpose and success.

When I sit with that question in stillness, one feeling repeatedly rises: my life is divided.

There is my life before—and then, everything came after.

That split defines the way I see my life story.

In the “before,” my life as a little girl and young woman was marked by a kind of controlled chaos—navigating careers, motherhood, relationships, and school, all while carrying the weight of unprocessed grief and unanswered questions surrounding my mother’s death.

“Before” is a map of California etched into my memory—San Bernardino, Concord, San Mateo, Los Altos, Milpitas, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Lompico, Santa Cruz, Aptos, Soquel, La Selva Beach, Watsonville, Salinas, Monterey, Pacific Grove.

Before, we had our little home on Pumalo Street with our mother. After her death, George and I stayed with Aunt Connie in Concord. Five months later, our father moved us to San Mateo to live with his parents and grandparents. San Mateo became the terrain of our survival—two heartbroken children trying to make sense of a world that had fallen apart, searching for solid ground in the aftermath of unbearable loss.

Why were we never brought back to our home in San Bernardino?

Why did we never see our animals again, or retrieve any of our belongings?

Why couldn’t we stay with our Aunt and Uncle in Concord, where things felt familiar and safe?

Why were George and I sent to live with our elderly grandparents in San Mateo—people we had only met once?

When would we see Grandpa George, Aunt Dorothy, or even our father again? And where was he living?

Most painfully, why were we forbidden to speak of our mother to anyone?

The answers will slowly reveal themselves in the telling of this story—some clear, others still wrapped in silence.