This is the story of my mother's life as she told it. Like all the stories of our lives, my mother's tale is tragic, joyous, and incomplete. It is incomplete not simply because it stops at my birth in 1961, but also because no biography can possibly capture every nuance or remember every detail or speak completely honestly about its subject. But even in its fragmented incompleteness, my mother's words still give us a strong picture of who she was, and arguably still is in the lives of those who knew her or shared her experience.