One morning in late September 2023, I discovered by chance that my birth mother had been killed almost a year earlier. The revelation came while I was searching my work email for a stray message. In the bin folder, amid a slurry of irrelevant press releases, lay an unopened email, flagging a long-forgotten Google alert I had set up for her name, Susan Barras. We had been estranged for almost 15 years, so this in itself provoked trepidation. I had cut contact with her when our relationship had finally become too fraught and emotionally exhausting for me to continue. Opening the email, I realised with shock that the alert had been triggered by a probate notice about her estate.

Susan was only 69 when she died, and my first thought was that the breast cancer she was being treated for when we were in touch had returned. My second was the realisation that both my birth parents were now dead – my birth father had died of liver failure in late 2018, aged 70. But then the unfamiliar name listed on the probate notice, Suzann Doyle, captured my attention. Underneath this was confirmation that my birth mother had changed her name. Her address at the time of her death posed further questions. It was not that of the large detached house in Guildford I had visited just once, a few months after we were reunited, where she had lived with her husband. This address was for a tiny one-bed retirement flat overlooking Guildford train station.

I rang the law firm listed on the probate notice. Initially, they seemed reluctant to talk, perhaps because as an adoptee I had no legal claim on my birth mother’s estate. But, eventually, a solicitor disclosed that in late November 2022, Susan had been hit by a car and died hours later in hospital. The solicitor added that her two adult stepchildren had been informed, but not her younger sister, who, like me, got in touch only after seeing the notice. This, along with the disclosure that Susan had left her entire estate (including her personal possessions) to charity, suggested that she might also have been estranged from the rest of her family.

In the following days, I tried to piece together what had happened in Susan’s life since we last met and the circumstances of her death. Through the solicitor, I managed to speak, for the first time, to Susan’s sister and her best friend. From them, I discovered that Susan had undergone bowel cancer surgery a few months before she was killed. She had changed her name and moved home after an acrimonious split from her husband, who had later died of cancer. Susan had cut contact with her mother, her sister and her brother, seemingly around the time I had broken ties with her. She had also recently fallen out with her best friend, who told me that this had happened repeatedly since they were at school together. Unsurprisingly, given her apparent isolation, there had been no funeral. Her ashes were scattered on the Isle of Wight, but where exactly and by whom no one I spoke to knew.