Coming Full Circle: A Letter from Daughter to a Mother Who Died Young

Ina, my mother, died 13 months after I was born.  For most of my life, I felt like a “motherless child.”  She became a ghost-like fantasy to me, which is probably why I liked fairytales so much as a kid. Maybe I was wishing for a happy ending. My father remarried when I was four (not a fairytale ending by any means)  and the stories and pictures of my mother were buried in the vault of the past.  Because Ina did not have an extended family, she got lost in the ether.  It felt to me that the only evidence […]