“Unraveling Secrets of the Heart: Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s Journey in ‘Lost Found Kept’ Reveals the Power of Redemption”
DDK: I’m happy the metaphors worked for you when you read it. The Mitchard book was a coincidence, I found several copies of the book in the clean-out, so it must have spoken to my mother—the main character is absorbed in her grief and it’s about family loss which I think was one of the causes of my mother’s hoarding behavior. On a surface level, the ocean was always deeply meaningful to my mother and my family—we are beach people. When we finally got inside the house, I kept describing what we found as an “ocean of stuff.” Scattered everywhere were endless numbers of seashells that my mother had collected which reinforced that image. Coincidentally, I met Jackie during a Ragdale residency not long after I started working on this version of the memoir. Over coffee, she asked the razor-sharp question I mention in the book. “How was it that you didn’t know about the hoarding sooner?” Her comment stuck with me, and I tried to keep that focus as one of the central questions of the story. In Jungian psychology, water imagery is a maternal archetype and represents the unconscious and what’s underneath—a whole other world.
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