A Song for Estrella

Sometimes someone else finds the words you didn't know you were looking for

Throughout the decades and the time we spent recording our podcast episodes, we’ve been looking for the right words to articulate what this search (and what we’ve found) really means. For Estrella. For Marie Christine. For the silence that got passed down through generations of a family that didn’t know it was missing pieces of itself.

We’ve done pretty well, we think. But then our brother sent us something and honestly, he found words we didn’t know existed for what this journey has felt like. wrote a song based on this podcast. Based on our grandmother’s story. Based on Estrella’s story as we know it so far.

We’re saving the full song for the end of the season. Trust us on this because, by the time you hear it in context, it’s going to hit differently than it would right now. But we want to share some of the lyrics. They’re too good not to share, especially after sharing more about our grandmother and who she was from our perspective.

Read them slowly. If you’ve been following this story from the beginning, you’ll get where we’re coming from.

She came across the water as a child without a name.

Nobody wrote the story down. Nobody marked the day.

She learned to wear the silence like a coat against the cold.

And somewhere in the leaving, she left pieces of her soul.

She was Estrella, she was Stella, she was someone’s missing girl.

She kept on reinventing, trying to outrun the world.

But you can’t bury every thread, some roots go deeper than the dead.

A name unspoken still remains, even under all those years of rain.

We are the ones who kept on looking. We are the children of the found.

We pulled the thread and felt it pulling back, up through the dark, up through the ground.

We didn’t get the whole story. We didn’t find the grave or the face.

But something in us healed just knowing, she existed, she was real, she had a name.

My grandmother grew up knowing something wasn’t there.

A hollow in the center of her that nobody could repair.

She hired someone to find her, she went searching on her own.

But the name kept leading nowhere, like a door without a home.

So I picked up where she left her search and I carried what she gave,

A question and a quiet grief and the courage not to cave.

And you can’t bury every thread, some roots go deeper than the dead.

A name unspoken still remains, even under all those years of rain.

There’s more which we’ll share later. But we’ll leave you with these words which speak to our experience:

What makes a person disappear? What makes a person run?

Was it fear? Was it survival? Was she fleeing or undone?

We can’t judge what we don’t carry. We don’t know what she endured.

But we honor her by searching, and refusing to close the door.

She was real, she was real.

She had a mother, she had hands, she had a voice,

She had a story, and now we fully understand.

She existed, she was real, she had a name.

Honestly, there were some tears the first time we heard it. We’re not embarrassed to admit that.

“A door without a home.” That’s the name Stella Smith in four words. We couldn’t have said it better in four episodes.

“A hollow in the center of her heart that nobody could repair.” That’s our grandmother. Exactly and completely.

“We can’t judge what we don’t carry.” That’s been the quiet heart of this entire search from the very beginning.

The full song, with music and everything, is coming at the end of the season. And by the time you hear it, you’ll understand exactly why we waited. There’s still more story to tell. And where it’s headed, we promise it is worth staying for.

💬 We want to know: Which line do you think is most meaningful for this story so far? We’re curious which words land differently for different people.

🧵She existed. She was real. She had a name.

-Angie & Cyndi

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