What do you see when you look into the mirror—and who do you hear in the silence behind your reflection?

In Beyond the Mirror: Reflections of My Mother and Me, Rev. Patrick A. Sands delivers a raw, deeply moving memoir that peels back the layers of a complex mother-son relationship shaped by survival, silence, resilience, and radical love.

Raised in the Bronx during an era of violence, addiction, and systemic abandonment, Patrick came of age in the shadow of his mother, Carmen Bonita Sands—a woman as fierce as she was fragile, as private as she was powerful. Through scenes of protection, pain, and profound transformation, Sands retraces his journey from a confused child longing for his mother's presence to a man uncovering her hidden truths—and his own.

This is not just a memoir. It's an excavation.

Of memory.
Of grief.
Of identity.
Of what it means to forgive someone who gave you everything... and yet not enough.

Told with poetic clarity, spiritual depth, and fearless vulnerability, Beyond the Mirror is a love letter to the wounded child, the misunderstood parent, and anyone learning to heal through honest reflection.