I am and always have been a spiritual person, believing that my faith is my greatest life resource.

Born and raised in Stockton, California, I attended college and received my Bachelor's degree in music. During that time, I married and moved to Sacramento where I was a professional musician , and my husband taught music in the public schools. I became pregnant and gave birth to a son. A year later, my husband died of congestive heart failure. I then found myself alone with massive medical bills and sold nearly everything to pay them. For a short time my son and I were homeless, sleeping in the car until a kind lady where I worked discovered this and offered us a bed at her home. In about four months, I was able to save enough to get us a place of our own.

During this time I was active as a volunteer with my church junior high youth group. I started with four kids and watched it grow to nearly fifty in two years' time. This helped me decide that going back to school, to seminary, was the best opportunity for me to answer God's call and strengthen life for my son and me, so off to Chicago we moved and I began full time studies on my master's degree. I still had to work full-time to support us so I took two jobs - as a faculty assistant and a teacher of English as a second language. Sometime during seminary, my gifts as a counselor became clear. After doing a required internship in Minnesota, I returned to Chicago to complete my degree, and also began to name an illness that had been plagueing me for some time - depression. I graduated in May of 1988 and began my pastoral care residency. By November of 1988 it became very clear to me that I needed some serious help with the illness of depression that had at that point seemed to take over my life, and was hospitalized for a month before I was pronounced healthy enough to return to my life. This was the conscious beginning of a journey with depression that continues today.

After my residency, I was offered a supervisory training position in Houston where we lived for, what were for us, two difficult years of a stifling climate and culture and couldn't wait to leave and return to Illinois. There, in the Quad Ciites, I began to work as a chaplain supervisor in a local hospital. After four years, it merged with the Catholic hospital in town and I knew my job would be a casualty, and it indeed was. At that same time my mother died. Then a couple of months later, I fell down and broke my foot, and a couple of months after that, my late husband's mother also died and as her only living relative a lot fell on me. After seven years with no problems, I was hospitalized for depression a couple of months after the death of my mother-in-law. Unfortunately, after this hospitalization, to medicate myself, I used alcohol more heavily than I had ever done before with the result that in September, 1996, I spent 28 days in a treatment center and by the grace of God, have over 11 years sobriety at this time.

These past 11 years I have tried to find a career path again and went back into counseling, this time with an emphasis on addiction and had several years of success. Then I met Bob. For 9 years, we lived together; I loved his family as if they were my own. I maintained my career and we had a farm. About two years ago I became ill, first with kidney stones, then heart problems, and finally an appendectomy that led to the discovery of a cancerous growth on the end of my colon. Partly due to my illnesses, I wasn't working, and that began to bring about the deterioration of our relationship. The end result was that when I came to Ensenada, Mexico to bring a friend back to work on the farm, Bob saw his opportunity to end the relationship and did so while I was in Ensenada.

Yet, I have so much for which to be grateful. I have a wonderful son Paul and daughter-in-law Grace. My father is 86, and still lives in the childhood home in which I grew up. My younger brother lives in Tucson, Arizona and younger sister Lynette, lives in Sacramento, California. God has provided incredible friends here in Mexico in both church and community, and a wonderful family here who has honored me by adopting me as their daughter. I still play the clarinet, saxophone and sing, and give lessons, too. I love to do all kinds of stitiching, sewing, and quilting and have found women here in Mexico who share this hobby. I can understand and read Spanish, and my speaking ability is better everyday. In the midst of a very difficult life, my life's greatest resource is indeed my faith in God and , as a Christian, in Jesus Christ. There is no doubt, I am in the best part of my life right now.