Framing a Life

On a blustery Maine day, thirty-nine-year-old Roberta Kuriloff found herself standing on a plot of land purchased with her former partner, holding a couple of wood stakes to mark off exactly where her new house would sit. No longer their land. No longer their dream. Now, just hers. Immersed in a world of blueprints, materials, contractors, and critters, Roberta confronted the major losses shed suffered in her lifein particular the deaths of her mother and aunt from cancer and her separation from her father and brother during her placement in an orphanageand to try to understand how those losses had shaped the woman, lawyer, and activist shed become. As she cleared land, hammered nails, lifted beams, and shivered in her rented mobile home, the answers began to come to her. Roberta soon found love again, with a woman named Nancy . . . only to lose her abruptly just one year later in a car accident. Her grief over Nancys death, and the psychic and out-of-body events she experienced following that loss, led to an eight-year spiritual quest where she explored her Jewish roots, the Kabbalah, Buddhism, and reincarnation. As she healed, new love beckoned with Berniceand at long last Roberta found that intrinsic sense of self, that unshakable foundation of heart and soul, that home, that shed been searching for all along.