A Georgia mother preparing to fly back to the United States after a once-in-a-lifetime spiritual journey has disappeared after deadly floods swept through the Nepal-Tibet border region on Wednesday, her family said.
Mary Sorenson, 60, who lives just north of Atlanta, had traveled to the area for a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, where she joined a group to practice yoga, pray and meditate, her son, Riley Wildeman, told ABC News.
Sorenson had finished the long-dreamed-about trip, a bucket-list journey she had hoped to make for years, before she vanished amid the catastrophic flooding. The disaster’s death toll has since risen to more than 900 people.
Her family last heard from the adventurous, deeply spiritual mother as she was starting her descent from the mountain and making her way back toward Atlanta, the outlet reported.
“My brother likes to say that she walks to the beat of kind of her own drum,” Wildeman told the outlet. “She’s so able to find good in everything and find good in everyone and to enjoy every moment.”
“The last thing that she sent to us was Tuesday morning, and she was on her way down the mountain,” Wildeman said.
Sorenson last told her family that she was looking forward to her long trip back to the US to reflect on her pilgrimage and, chillingly, ended a text letting them know she was “so grateful” for them.
“She ended that text by saying, ‘I’m so grateful that you guys are my family,’” he recalled.
The catastrophic floods struck the Nepal-Tibet border region on Wednesday morning, after Sorenson last contacted her family.
Rescue teams have been working tirelessly around the clock at the border to search for a total of more than 4,700 missing people in the muddy ground, Nepal’s disaster agency said Monday.
Of the missing, 592 are foreigners, including at least 85 Americans, officials said.
Long Island, New York locals Amita Amin, 67, and Jitendra Manubhai Patel, 63, along with New Jersey resident Tejal Vyomesh Patel, 64, were also taking part in a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash when they vanished in the disaster.
Wildeman, who is a public school teacher, revealed that his father called him at work after the organizer of Sorensen’s trip contacted the family with the harrowing news.
“There was really very little about where they were, about where the flood had hit, about how severe the flood was,” he said. “And then all the news coverage and all the videos and all of the social media popped up, and so that’s how we kind of understood the severity of the situation.”
The terrified family has reached out to the US State Department and government agencies in Nepal and China in hopes of finally reaching Sorenson.
“We’ve called in every favor and every possible thing that we can call in,” Wildeman said.
“We feel so much heartbreak and so much sadness and pain, like a deep, guttural pain,” he said, noting his family feels “the grief of the situation, not the grief of the loss.”
“My whole family and my mom all believe in a God that does miracles, and that the miracle that we’re gonna get out of this is gonna be something that we might not necessarily understand right now, but it’s gonna be something that we look back on and we feel.”