For years leading up to this day, I was on the lookout for her.

I’d watch Unsolved Mysteries, then later Sally Jesse Raphael, Maury Povich, other miscellaneous talk shows for her.

These were the days long before the internet, and I had convinced myself that I had a mother who loved me and missed me and desperately wanted to be reunited with me but just did not know how.

Who was she? Did we have anything in common? The same laugh? The same sense of humor?

I watched my friends’ moms scoop them up, squish them, tell them they love them “to the moon and back” (I hate that expression to this day and I know it’s just because I didn’t have it). They were maternal, nurturing, caring, understanding.

They taught them how to shave their legs, how to use tampons, that boys were stupid.

My biological mother, in my imagination, became the highlight reel–the best of the best–of all of my friends’ and TV mothers.

So I was a little shook, the summer I turned 15, when I spoke to her on the phone for the first and only time since leaving Florida when I was a baby.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”, my 15-year-old-self wanted to know, excitedly.

“Do you have a car?”

“Do you smoke?”

Yes, yes and yes … which resulted in my stepping outside myself for a moment to say out loud, “I guess that’s probably not something you discuss with your mother.”

I had to beat a conversation out of her. She seemed off and aloof. She didn’t ask me about me like my friends’ moms did.

We were living in Ohio at the time, but I learned she and my dad had gone to Lake Michigan and she dipped her toes in the water and it was so ice cold that she couldn’t stand it.

Every time I go to Lake Michigan I think about that, like a time machine. Her and my dad on the beach together and probably bitching about how cold the water is. haha

I had that one phone call with her when I was 15 and never again.

Long before the days of caller ID, I remember Frank had told me that you had to call, let the phone ring a couple times, hang up and call back in order for anyone to answer the phone.

It was in the days of long distance calls being super expensive. Frank had given me a phone card so that my parents wouldn’t lose their minds over the cost of the call.

I was insanely nervous but I did as instructed by my big brother. Those calling cards made you punch in all kinds of numbers. I did it once, let it ring – what was it, two times? Three times? Probably doesn’t matter. I bet Frank remembers.

I hung up, punched in all of the calling card numbers and tried again.

“Hello?” a man asked.

I was surprised to hear a man’s voice.

“Hi. Um, is Lori there? This is her daughter, Christina.”

“Laaawwwwrie! Come get the phone. It’s your daaawwwwghter.”

“mmHello?”

I learned her boyfriend’s name was Tony, she drove a rust colored Pinto, she smoked, and she had dipped her toes in Lake Michigan at one point in time in her life.

Fast forward to this day in 2000…

I was at work. I was a student working for the State of Michigan, building out an IT HelpDesk. I was primarily handling software and hardware upgrades for Windows machines and plugging in PCs that were unplugged inadvertently by their user.

I have all of the detail of that one phone call but the detail of what I learned on this day is lost in my memory.

I don’t remember if Frank called or if he sent me a message on the TCC BBS.

However it happened to be delivered, the details I recall clearly. He was in Florida for a computer show. He stopped by the diner where he knew she worked washing dishes. It was a buffet. Or he was standing at the buffet.

Whatever. He was holding a plate at the buffet, piling on food and asks a nearby employee if Lori Anderson still works there.

She tells him she’s dead. She died about a year ago.

I went outside, walked around the building a couple times. Came back inside, told my boss I had to leave, I had just learned that my biological mom had died.

My grief was notably different than when my mom (Bonnie) died.

I couldn’t grieve a life lived and known with Lori. I had a 10-minute call with her as a memory to grieve, and the romanticized version of her that I had built up in my mind.

I was devastated.

And here’s the point in my life when I learned that you shouldn’t go asking questions you don’t really want to know the answers to.

I knew she was young. How did she die? What happened?

Well with the Freedom of Information Act, you can get records on next of kin and that’s what nosey Tina did.

2000 was earlier days of internet so I didn’t have it super freely at home, but I had it readily accessible to me at work. It didn’t take much for me to find the State of Florida and start making some calls.

In some ways I wish I could go back to the days before the envelope came with the contents of my biological mother’s death certificate in it.

Some unknown medical condition killed her. She had had spinal meningitis and some other malady in her childhood that had led her family to move to Florida/warmer climate. It wouldn’t have been a stretch.

My mom (Bonnie) had died the previous year of a freak thing. It just would have become a normal thing for me to expect people to randomly drop dead for no apparent reason.

But, no.

Cause of death: inhaling substances.

Do you know that the old film reels are actually extremely flammable? In reading those words, that highlight reel exploded in a spectacular fashion.

Blown to smithereens.

If learning of her death was devastating, I don’t know if I have a word for the next level of pain it caused me to learn she died doing something so incredibly stupid.

Lori Mae Anderson died May 10, 1999 inhaling substances.