By Trinity Pellkofer

"Voices" is our column for community contributions, where guest authors share their insights, expertise, or unique perspective on life in Petaluma. If you would like to contribute, please email news@petalumavoice.org.

“I can’t even imagine.” Those are the words I most often hear from someone who has just learned my daughter died. “You don’t even want to try,” is my practiced reply. I usually follow the exchange by directing the conversation elsewhere to relieve the other person’s discomfort.

In reality, the heartbreak and sorrow of losing a child is so profound and inconceivable that only the unfortunate few among us ever really know the dark places we have gone. That was the day my life changed forever. In the four years since, I have been doing the hard work of bringing some light back into it.

Georgia was a fierce, unforgettable beauty. She wasn’t shy, or afraid to tell you how she really felt. She laughed the loudest in the group, wore the tallest high-heel boots bedazzled with rainbows and rhinestones, and when she talked to you, you really felt seen and heard.

An inspiring actress, Georgia was mesmerizing on stage; you couldn’t look away. Her love of all things technology and gaming had her fast mind and faster fingers flying across her keyboard as she coded, writing her own video games. Exploring creative pursuits and living her life surrounded by her family were the most important things to her.

She lived with and was greatly affected by epilepsy. She didn’t let the horrible disease be the most important thing about her, yet ultimately it took her life.

When Georgia was 8 years old, she had her first absence seizure. Absence seizures can look a lot like deep daydreaming, yet during the 30-second to 2-minute duration, she wasn’t consciously there. When she came back, it was as if a reel of life’s movie had been cut out of the story. Instantly, from her perspective, people or the conversation had moved forward.

She had 50 to 100 of these mini-seizures a day. Sometimes she would walk fast, her body working normally while her brain was essentially elsewhere. During one of these moments, she almost got hit by a car in a parking lot.

Alternative and holistic treatments didn’t help. The medicine she ultimately took, which helped slightly, made her sick to her stomach. As with about half of all epilepsy cases, there was no known cause or explanation for the seizures.

Our family circled up, protecting, planning for the future, and building a granny unit just for her. We learned about seizures, medical appointments, traveling, navigating school, and trying to help her handle kids who “othered” her for being different. She grew up brave in the face of an enormously challenging and emotionally taxing condition.

When she was a sophomore in high school, the seizures suddenly and unexpectedly stopped. It was amazing! She was free of their grip! Georgia jumped even deeper into all the new possibilities before her. A driver’s license earned at eighteen gave her a freedom none of us thought she would have. She drove up and down the state, going to school, modeling, meeting new people, and exploring different jobs, until she decided at age 22 to move back home and study at Santa Rosa Junior College to become a computer programmer.

Anticipating her arrival, my husband, Frank, and her brother, Evan, who had just graduated from Petaluma High, worked together to get our granny unit ready for her in the fall of 2019. Even her older brother, Tyler, who lives in Saint Louis, Missouri, arrived for a visit with his wife, Jackie, and their two kids, Eli and Aubrey. 

We were all excited to have her home again. It was a sunny Sunday morning when she and I were standing on her deck coming up with ideas about how to remodel her closet. Without warning, she collapsed to the deck boards in front of me, having a grand mal seizure, or what is now called a generalized tonic clonic seizure. I screamed for my husband and son, who called 911, and she was rushed by ambulance to Petaluma Valley Hospital, where they stabilized her.

The seizures were back: less frequent, but far more serious. 

Three years later, on July 21, 2022, she was getting ready for her day in her beloved granny unit when she suffered her third big seizure. It came as unexpectedly as the rest, yet even more forcefully, and she left her physical body. She was 25 years old. I wasn’t home, and neither were her dad or brother. It was my first day of school as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Cherry Valley and I was already on campus.

Nine days before she left us, Georgia and I had talked at length about an article we read in a local newspaper. It featured Miles Levine, a young adult from Santa Rosa who also lived with epilepsy. Levine was (and still is) on the board of the Epilepsy Foundation of Northern California. He wrote “Under the Lights,” a film destigmatizing epilepsy, and had been a camper and counselor for Camp Coelho, a sleepaway camp in Occidental for kids 8 to 17 living with epilepsy.

In that prophetic conversation, Georgia shared that she was already familiar with Miles' work in the community. She said that she, too, had been wanting to help kids who lived with epilepsy. She was planning on volunteering as a camp counselor at Camp Coelho, sharing activities with the kids that were helping her cope with a chronic condition, such as journaling, doing creative arts, and performing on stage.

The suddenness and unexpectedness of Georgia’s passing created a wave of grief that thundered through our family, friends, and wider community. The ripple it made, for many of us, is etched in stone, forever changing us and our lives.

It took some months for me to remember that poignant conversation with Georgia. When it emerged, I felt it was telling me what I could do to help with bearing an unbearable grief.

We started a foundation in 2023 in Georgia’s honor. We carried forward her vision of supporting those affected by epilepsy. We started with scholarships for campers at Camp Coelho, which continue to this day. And in a moment that circled back to that conversation with Georgia in 2022, I was able to do for her what she had hoped to do herself – I became a camp counselor at Coelho, bringing arts and craft projects to the amazing kids there.

Being a counselor and growing the Georgia Riley Pellkofer Foundation has helped provide me with purpose in my new life. Our biggest fundraiser, G Fest, is just days away. The music festival happens on Saturday, Sept. 19, on the lawn along the Petaluma River at the Foundry Wharf (625 2nd St.).

We designed G Fest as an antidote to life’s inevitable suffering. It is a way to spread joy and honor Georgia’s creative passions and her love of music.

The support our family has received from this incredible community, be it generous funding, volunteering, or sending healing thoughts, humbles me. It gives me a sense that while losing a child is such a singular experience, my empathy for the human condition has grown enormously. Each of us lives not knowing what lies ahead or what challenges our children, our loved ones, and ourselves will face. All we can do is to love more: love our people, our animals, our land, and our spirit. Love is the way to carry ourselves forward.

Trinity Pellkofer is the director of the Georgia Riley Pellkofer Foundation and a teacher at the Mary Collins at Cherry Valley Charter School. She can be reached at trinity.pellkofer@blikeg.org.