"Once the children left and the house was silent, she found solace in altering clothes," said her daughter Helen Tran.

"She was my perfect mom," she added.

Pham had overcome much. Her husband spent a decade as a prisoner in Vietnam following the war. During that time, Pham supported herself and her eight children by selling fish and produce, a daily chore that kept her busy from 2 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Finally, in 1993, the Pham family came to the U.S. as part of a government program for war prisoners. She'd attended the church camp in Missouri every year since arriving.

On Friday, Tran recalled her last memory of her mother, getting a bar of soap and a towel as part of her final preparations for the trip. The woman seemed sad, and Tran knew why: She'd just returned from a visit to Vietnam and had the melancholy that always followed.

* Retreived from chron.com