Angelique Marie Del'eaux

Isabella Marie Lacheri, hereafter referred to as Mamie Bella, came from a wealthy Italian family with close ties to the Catholic Church, but she never relied on her family’s wealth to support her future. She was doing research at Harvard when she met and married my grandpa, Bernard Alexandre Lacheri. Together they revolutionized energy research with the creation of plants and techniques that could produce enough energy to maintain the plant’s function and power an entire household when covering a minimum square footage requirement. Upon completing their research they left the university and returned to France to care for Mamie’s ailing parents. It wasn’t long before they departed. Mamie always said she should have been more upset at the time, but instead of wallowing in grief the church inspired her to immediately start seeking new ventures. So with her inheritance and the Nobel Prize money they received for their research they started a company called Green Age Energy. Unfortunately, the space requirements for their technology to create household energy independence restricted their initial customers to wealthy estate owners and tropical blocs of the world. Mami Bella had always hoped that Green Age would eventually be able to make green energy available to anyone. So, even though the company was successful Mami Bella wasn’t satisfied. Papi Bernie spent the rest of his adult life doing Top Secret research that Mamie Bella thought would take the energy output of their company to a level that could sustain her dream, and Mamie joined him in the research for years before she lost hope that they would ever achieve their dream of a greener future. Papi never lost hope, but he still had to convince Mamie that it was worth continuing on. It was a hopeless cause and as he became more absorbed in the research she became more and more fixated on her inability to have children because of the years she had wasted on the research.

Mamie Bella always said that giving birth to my mother at the age of 60 was a sign from God that the research would eventually lead them to something. According to Papi my mom was an intellectual prodigy, surpassing even her parents’ advanced scientific knowledge by the time she was 15. Mamie knew this wasn’t simply because of lucky genetics or good parenting, but was in fact a display of a powerful psychic ability that rivaled even her own parents. Unfortunately Mami had been in the generation of her family that these talents skipped over, so she didn’t know how to deal with such a rapidly expanding skill set. So, when Mamie and Papi could no longer challenge my mom’s intellect she went to the heights of rebellion. At first she merely destroyed parts of their many homes with blasts of kinetic energy as they traveled the world looking for an expert to train her.

Eventually my mom couldn’t wait anymore, she was thoroughly bored by the intellectual pursuits her parents set out in front of her and was sick of waiting for the right teacher. So to solve this problem my mom ran away with millions of dollars in jewelry that Mamie Bella had been given over the years, the majority of which were one of a kind pieces and therefore irreplaceable. Nevertheless she sold them to pay her way around the world, as she found joy in challenging her body with everything she could think of. She did free dives at the largest waterfalls, parasailing in the roughest winds, surfing of the biggest waves, skydiving in the most remote locations, heli drops on the highest ski slopes, climbing of the tallest mountains, diving in the deepest of depths, and scaling of the biggest buildings only to jump off in a thrilling activity known as urban parachuting. As far as she was concerned there wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle, but she hadn’t been faced with her toughest challenge yet.

Throughout all of this Mamie Bella never worried about her because as long as the wind could reach it, Mamie could see it, and be there in a moment’s notice if my mom were to err somehow. Mamie actually found comfort in her daughter’s self ignited fervor for life, but her Uncle, Cardinal Antonio Portenza, convinced her that she needed to help give my mom direction so her talents could benefit humanity. In order to instill such a suggestion Mamie used a rare technique that consisted of whispering winds which played a recurring message during her sleep, slowly delivering a subtle hypnotic suggestion.

It took nearly two years of whispering winds around the world before my mom’s mind relented to such ideas being her own. She started feeling like there was something missing from her life, some pursuit that could add mental challenges to the extreme physical peril she enjoyed nearly every day. Eventually the idea struck her like a bolt of lightning. What if she tried to answer the unanswered questions of history? That would surely blend the best of both worlds. She could use her heightened intellect to extrapolate the most likely locations of lost cities or relics and then access them using the physical training and equipment that she had accumulated over the years. It didn’t take long before she discovered that the combination of mental and physical challenge provided by her new pursuit was the perfect thing for her, it was the life she was meant to be living.

Mamie Bella couldn’t have been happier with the results. By the time she was 18 my mom was known in archaeology circles as the Liaison to the Lost, having made some of the largest discoveries in the study of the ancient world. With the sale of her earliest finds my mom did what Mamie had wanted to do in her youth, establish her own wealth and reputation without assistance from the wealthy family people expected her to rely on. Now it seemed like she had everything she could ever desire: a job that challenged her mentally and physically, in addition to a level of wealth that could get her almost anything she wanted. Unfortunately all the money in the world couldn’t fill her lonely heart. It was at this point that my mother finally felt guilt. Not just about the jewelry she took, but the potential memories she stole from her mother when she abandoned the family all too long ago.

She wracked her brain endlessly for days trying to think of the right way to enter her family’s life after being gone so many years. It frustrated her so much that her intellect could so easily plan an expedition in the most treacherous regions of the world within a night, but planning for human relations with her parents made her lose so much sleep. The guilt ate at her insides as she wondered the hallways of her large mansion on those long, dark nights.

Writing In Progress....

MIA following an expedition to an undisclosed dig site in the Middle East during Summer 2013. No updates since then.