Anna Satterstrom

And she's the only one of their four children who had an active memory of her father. But my mother was seven when it happened. And she said she spent the next several years sitting on the brick wall out front waiting for her father to come get her because nobody told her that he wasn't going to come. And I think she carried the trauma of his loss throughout her life.

When I was very young, I sort of had him confused with God. You know, he was the sweet old man who had all the power. I never saw him angry. I never heard him say, raise a voice or say anything unkind. But she never saw joy either.

Yeah. She had an elegance and a presence about her. She was a beautiful woman. And when she entered the room, everybody was aware of it. She was a power source in my life, and yet she wasn't. You didn't want to be judged by that power source.

You place it deep down inside you. And if you violate that, you're going to feel bad about yourself.

I'm sure we never talked about it.

I'm going to experience all that pain all over again.

Maybe there's a way it could have offered solace for her, too. And this is her shawl. I've brought it with me for the weekend to have her here in hopes that there's some healing for her in it somewhere. Because... I think it was a trauma she had through her whole life. And I'm sorry. And I wish that she had had a different relationship with this story.

And somebody's giving him stamps.

I mean, maybe that explains why Mama was so hurt by his loss. She loved him. And he loved her enough to make her those glasses because she wanted some. And it must have been a good feeling relationship or she wouldn't have been so traumatized by it. If he had been an ogre or dangerous or hateful or had done harmful things to her mother, she wouldn't have suffered his loss the way she did.

I think she'd be really torn. And she loved Noah so much, she surrounded her room in the assisted living facility with Noah's paintings on every wall. And yet, the very idea that this whole story is public, I don't know if she could have stood it. I'm Anna Satterstrom. I'm the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the person of interest here, Dr. Smith.

Oh, everyone who worked in the asylum was evil and they would have stolen anything valuable that the patients had.

I don't remember at what age I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk about her mother quite a bit. She would tell me about, you know, what she did and how they went to movies together and how she made her clothes and everything, but she never mentioned her father. And when I asked about my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away.

And so I thought, maybe somebody will direct him back home sometime.

That image of a blackboard where you erase everything on the blackboard but the little bits of information left, I feel like that's what I got from my mother growing up.

I would just say, silence, absence. This is just not where we go. And then when I got older and started asking a little deeper questions, she would shut down right away. And if I got a little too insistent, she would get either snappish or she would tear up and say, I'm not going to talk about it. Anna tried to figure things out anyway.

My mother said that any time she and her sister were together and their voices dropped, I'd show up. But if there was going to be a good story, they were going to lower their voices.

I'm Anna Satterstrom. My connection to the story, first I'm the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the person of interest here, Dr. Smith. I don't remember what age I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather because she would talk about her mother quite a bit. And when I asked about my grandfather, she said he lost his memory and went away.

And so I thought, maybe somebody will direct him back home sometime.

I would just say silence, absence. This is just not where we go.