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This morning the box containing my paperback copies of SHEPHERDS OF LOST THINGS finally arrived. It finds me not in the place I thought I would be. For all the box does this morning is remind me that my mother is gone. She died unexpectedly last week. Leaving her family to pick up the pieces of a life in motion that came crashing down around her.

In short order household items were sorted, packed and donated. Furniture found new homes. But paperwork? That could only be stacked for further review. She was never a collector. Never into “stuff.” However, in going through the many stacks of paperwork I have found that she was a pack rat when it came to papers. We should have bought the woman a flatbed scanner a decade ago.

Mom apparently held on to everything from paystubs from 30+ years ago, manuals for devices she hasn’t owned in over a decade, report cards from her high school, and writing… more personal writing than I ever expected to find.

Through a divorce, multiple moves, and a recent downsizing – Mom carted a briefcase containing the most important of her papers. Army records regarding her brother who died in Vietnam. Her parent’s wedding license and death certificates. Letters she wrote high school boyfriends. Notes between classmates in school. Postcards from traveling friends.

And… diary entries.

At least they read like things that would go into a diary. Some are handwritten. Some are typed. The paper they’re written on so faded and weathered that the rubber bands that held them together has dissolved. Mixed in are poems and even a few short stories. All appear to be from when she was a teenager in the 1970s. If there’s anything written after she met my father, it doesn’t appear to have been saved. It’s unclear if she stopped writing because her life took another road, or if she thought the whole thing a childish exercise after the fact. I can’t ask her now.

Even if she stopped writing herself, she was a voracious reader. Sue Grafton’s alphabet books were always stacked somewhere in the house when I was growing up. She did her best to instill that same love of reading in her children. So it would surprise no one to know that my sister is also a published author. Yet, my mother and I never talked about writing. Certainly nothing beyond the expected parental platitudes of “Proud of you kid.”

In going through her apartment this week I was struck by what wasn’t in any of the boxes: A copy my book. A review of her Kindle didn’t show an ebook copy. Leaving me to wonder if she ever read it. I struggle to remember if I had told her I’d mail her a paperback copy of SHEPHERDS when this box arrived. That sounds like something I would have said. The last few weeks were so busy getting ready to launch the book, meeting with designers about an upcoming house remodel, and helping Mom get setup in her new apartment.

The more I think about it the more I’m sure that she never read SHEPHERDS OF LOST THINGS, because there’s no fucking way Mom wouldn’t have called me the moment she got to the first page where Wendy Bataille made her appearance. Other than the color of her skin, everything about the aging detective is a not so subtle homage to my mother. The cane, the bad knees, the Buick, and the hesitation to retire gracefully? That’s all Mom.

She loved detective stories, especially Agatha Christie’s stories featuring Hercule Poirot. Putting Mom into my supernatural thriller novel as an aging detective who doesn’t know how to retire felt right. I wish she had gotten a chance to read it. I think she would have had a good chuckle at the thought of her Buick in a life or death car chase.

But it wasn’t in the boxes she left behind.