By Renée Santos
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 2/10/26 – February 10 marks one year since my mother’s passing.
Anniversaries like this arrive quietly, but they carry weight. They ask us to look back—not only at who someone was, but at what they left behind. Not just in memory, but in work. In words. In traces of themselves that still want to be seen.
In 2020, during the stillness of the COVID lockdown, my mother and I reconnected in a new way. Like many people during that strange, suspended time, we found ourselves looking inward, reaching backward, and trying to make sense of what mattered. That was when she sent me a collection of her poems.
I had always known my mother as many things. What I didn’t fully know—until then—was that she was a writer.
Along with the poems, she included a handwritten note. It said, simply:
“Be careful. Don’t lose these. They could be famous one day.”
At the time, it made me smile. It also made me pause. As a writer and artist myself, I recognized something familiar in that sentence—not ambition, exactly, but hope. A quiet belief that words and art matter. That they have a life beyond the page. That they deserve a chance.
We talked about possibly publishing her work someday. Life, as it does, kept moving. The conversation drifted. Time passed.
Last year, while filing away my mother’s death certificate—a moment as practical as it was surreal—I came across her poems again. Holding them, I felt something rise that I hadn’t expected: not just grief, but responsibility.
I realized then that the writer in me did not appear out of nowhere. She came from somewhere. She came from a woman who sat alone with her thoughts and turned them into lines. From someone who, even quietly, wanted her voice to travel further than her lifetime.
My relationship with my mother, like many, was complicated. Love often is. What feels simple now is this: she loved deeply, she created honestly, and she believed her words had value.
On this anniversary, I want to honor that belief.
What follows is one of my mother’s poems, shared not as a revelation, but as a remembrance. It is offered with care, and with respect for the privacy of those who loved her alongside me. I am not telling her whole story—only letting her speak for herself, in the way she once hoped she might.
If words can outlive us, then this is a small way of saying: hers mattered. And they still do.
Some legacies arrive loudly. Others wait patiently in a file folder, in a drawer, in a moment we are finally ready to open. This one waited for a year. And now, it is time.
My Little Girl
By Marie T. Brault
My little girl sits crossed legged in her pretend world.
Her innocence bathed in the reality of truth,
Leaves the lie of my life standing grossly naked.
Just the fact that I bore her gives my existence an undeserved excellence.
Then all my depression drowns in her laughter,
And joy becomes victorious over the circulating sadness of my day.
