Late Morning, Sunday, May 11, 2025 (Mother’s Day), Miami, Florida
Mother’s Day has long been a complicated holiday for me. My mom, Beatriz Diaz-Granados, has been gone for nearly a decade, and while time has softened the sharp edges of grief, her absence is still deeply felt. I internalize these feelings, rarely speaking or writing about them. Yet, today—on the 10th anniversary of the last Mother’s Day she celebrated—I find myself reflecting on her presence, especially in the moments that shaped me as a writer.
She would have been thrilled that I finally published my first novel, Reunion: Coda. Mom, like many on her side of the family, was an insatiable reader. Even now, I can picture her reclining on her bed in East Wind Lake Village, reading glasses on, absorbed in the latest Danielle Steel or Stephen King novel.
As I wrote in the Afterword of Reunion: Coda:
Completing this novel is the realization of a dream born one summer morning in 1978. I sat at breakfast with my mother, gazing at her with all the solemnity a fifteen-year-old could muster, and declared, “Mom, someday I’m going to write a novel like Stephen King does.” She smiled, perhaps pondering whether I’d remember to put my socks in the laundry basket before chasing literary fame.
Back then, I imagined my first bestseller emerging before I turned thirty—an epic tale of war or space adventure, inspired by A Bridge Too Far and Star Wars. Life had other plans. It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I wrote my first novella, Reunion: A Story, and not until 2025 that this novel—the one you’re holding—came to fruition.
Because I started writing stories at ten, my mom witnessed my evolution—from an uncertain “wannabe author” to a student journalist, prolific online reviewer, and freelance writer. She was the first to read the story that would eventually become Reunion: A Story. Years before her illness, she told me it was the best thing I’d ever written, and she hoped I’d publish it someday.
She lived long enough to see me self-publish Save Me the Aisle Seat in 2012. By then, dementia had begun to steal her ability to read, but she kept the book by her side until her final day. Even if she couldn’t engage with the words, she still understood I had published a book—and she was proud.
I’d like to think she would have been just as proud of Reunion: Coda. Not just because I wrote it, or because I fulfilled that promise I made at fifteen, but because it’s a good story. Not Hemingway good. Not Eudora Welty good. Maybe not Stephen King good. But the feedback so far—from my Beta reader, from early Amazon reviewers—has been reassuringly positive.
I dedicated Reunion: Coda to my mother. As I wrote at the end of the book:
“Finally, I want to honor my mom, Beatriz Diaz-Granados, the first reader of Reunion: A Story and my unwavering supporter. She loved the novella and celebrated my writing with the warmth and pride only a mother could provide. Although she passed away in July 2015 and didn’t get to see me fulfill the promise I made to her at 15—to write a novel—her love and encouragement have stayed with me through every word I’ve written. Mom, this one is for you.”
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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