Two decades ago I went through 40 years of photographs, separating out all those of my former step-children and their father, intending to send them to his daughter if I could locate her.

I’d divorced their father, an abusive alcoholic, in 1974 and hadn’t seen his daughter, S, since.  A couple of years after the divorce I moved to Minden, Nevada, into a small rental house of my mother’s, located next door to the larger house she shared with Tom, my stepfather.

My stepson, M, would occasionally visit me in Nevada.  Ten years younger than I, he had suffered drug and alcohol problems since his teens.  When his father and I divorced he was 24 years old, immature and confused.  He was also strong and a hard worker.

When he would visit he would stay next door with my folks, helping them out with yard and house maintenance.  He ate with them and in the evening they would sit on the porch, talking, smoking, having an after dinner drink–wine for my mother, bourbon and water for the guys.

Sometimes he would stay a month, sometimes six or eight months.  He would eat and sleep well and get his color back, working outside, working hard.

Then, he would go back to Reno or California and we wouldn’t hear anything for months or a year or two.  Over a 30-year period he came back five or six times.

In 1998 we hadn’t seen M for more than a year.  My folks asked if I knew where he was, could I contact him, see if he could come out for a couple of months that summer.  I found his number in the Reno phone book but when I called, the number had been disconnected.  I phoned my former brother-in-law to see if he knew anything and was told that M had died of a drug overdose the previous October, at his mother’s house in Sparks where he’d been living, broke and out of work.