1981
The Fatherless Girl
Born in Santa Maria, RS, Brazil.
My father died before I was born, leaving an absence I would spend years learning to recognize. His absence shaped parts of my story long before I had language for what I was carrying. Growing up fatherless became one of the first places where I learned that what is missing can shape us as deeply as what is present.
2004
The Widow
At twenty-two, I became a widow.
My husband died by suicide, and I found myself carrying a kind of grief I had no language for. His death did not simply bring loss back into my life; it changed the life I thought I was going to have.
I had to learn how to keep living without pretending that what happened could ever be undone. And perhaps the hardest part was realizing that something I had known all my life was now beyond my power to protect my son from: he, too, would grow up without his father.
