About this time in Fort Meade, Florida, an attractive, lonely woman sat on her porch, rocking and holding a worn photo of herself, with two little girls.
How many times had she looked at this photo, trying to remember? So many times, she had lost count. Tears of frustration and uncertainty ran down her face as she strained to remember who the little girls were.
She was there in the snapshot smiling, happy with her arms around the children who were bright with delight.
Are they mine? Are they my children? I know these girls, but how? Why can’t I remember!
From what she’d been told, she had been rescued from a fiery automobile crash, across the country in Idaho about ten years ago.
She didn’t remember the accident. She couldn’t recall anything about it.
They told her she had run a red light, causing a tanker to t-bone her car on the passenger side, shoving her across the intersection. The driver of the gas truck was able to climb down from his cab as flames from his engine spread.
With a broken arm and collar bone, he tried to put the fire out with his fire extinguisher, but he was too injured to be effective. As the fire spread to her car, she was rescued by an off-duty fireman and other brave souls, as they scrambled to get her out and away from the volatile situation.
Sirens screamed, as the first responders arrived, with an ambulance arriving seconds later. By then her car was fully involved and exploded into a ball of flame when the fire reached her gas tank. The acrid smell of smoke rose into the clear blue sky, chocking those nearby.
The fireman cleared the area and fought the fire valiantly. When it was determined they couldn’t save the tanker, they withdrew to a safe distance and fought it in a defensive mode, trying to keep the surrounding area from going up.
Too soon it erupted into a mass of flame and smoke, melting the accident scene into a molten mass of metal and asphalt.
With her head seriously injured, by the un-giving surface of her car, she had spent months in the hospital in a coma. Only a photo of herself and the two children had been found on her person.
This was all she had left of her past life, a life taken from her in fire and smoke a long time ago.
For months she had hung onto life, dying twice and being resuscitated by the medical staff. She spent years, four of them, learning to walk, talk and function as a human being again.
And in all that time, no one had come forward to claim her, no one missed her. She couldn’t remember anything and her missing life ate at her.
Was she married? There wasn’t a ring found. Where were her friends and family? What had her life been like? Had she been happy? Or was the life she had worse than the one she was now living? She had no idea and she longed to know.
Once out of her coma, she was moved to the Fairwinds Care and Rehab Center in Idaho Falls, where she struggled day after day to get better.
Marie Hollenbeck was one of her nurses and by her side through it all, caring for her physically, as well as spiritually - a good Christian woman, large, soft, with graying hair, and kind, gentle eyes.
Marie was alone in this world and filled her loneliness with this lost woman, encouraging her, reading to her, and becoming her friend and confidant.
Upon Marie’s retirement, she invited her friend to come live at her home in Fort Meade, far away from the nursing home and the life she was living.
With her hope gone of ever being found, after almost six years, she traveled with Marie to the southernmost state in the US, down an old country road, near the old Army base of Fort Meade, in the middle of the sunshine state.
Slowly rocking in the shade of the porch, the woman ached for identity. The woman with no past wiped the tears from her face, sighed and went into the house, walking with a permanent limp and leaning on her ever present cane.
Finding Henry