The Healing Journey

March 18, 2026

“I chose not to lose my mom and instead to gain an angel. In my mind, my heart, and my life, she is still completely present to this day — and as wise, compassionate and stubborn as ever.”
— Kevin Hart

Cynthia’s mother Betty lost her mother when she was only 7 years old. The youngest of nine children, she was raised by her three older sisters.

“Being so young, she had a very romantic, sentimental memory of her mother,” Cynthia says. “And she never really got over her loss either.”

“So my mother married my father at 19 years of age in 1947,” Cynthia recalls. “She just couldn’t wait to have children and be the mother that she lost so young.”

But there was more to her dream than that. She was also a child of the Great Depression, and like most Americans she suffered from the kind of deprivation that we’re not accustomed to today. As a result, she wanted to give her family so many of the things that she had been denied during that decade of our country’s history.

Cynthia says, “She couldn’t wait to give us a lot that she never had, including most of all, a lot of love! Since she suffered so many losses as a young child, she was always worrying about us.”

There was one more thing. She wanted to spare her children the pain of loss and keep them from witnessing death. “She never took us to funerals, ever,” Cynthia says. “I don’t think I went to a funeral until I was 23 or something.”

So many factors go into forming a parent’s love, so many parents want nothing more than to protect their children from a troubled world and shield them from what they, themselves, had to endure. They wish so hard they could protect them from the loss of someone they love, which is the hardest pain for a little person to endure.

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