Riley Wildeman remembers sitting on the back patio with his family in Canton, Ga., a year ago when his mother announced she was going to join a tour group by herself to Nepal’s Mount Kailash, which is revered among some religious traditions.

“This was a crazy journey for her to go on,” Wildeman says. “We were like, ‘There’s no way that she’s gonna do it.’ ”

But Mary Sorensen did.

“She is a strong, determined lady,” Wildeman tells PEOPLE. “She is an inspiration. She crushed it, and she had an incredible time.”

An environmental consultant, Sorensen, 60, was deeply spiritual — conscious of and connected to the Earth, and her loved ones, in many ways.

“Mary was a believer in kindness and love and care and good energy,” says stepdaughter Jordan Wildeman. “She loved, and she gave you the opportunity to be unlovable and then she still loved you.”

The last time Sorensen’s family heard from her, she was on her way home.

Our new app is here! Free, fun and full of exclusives. Scan to download now!

Mary Sorensen.Courtesy of Brian Wildeman
“She was absolutely swimming in the energy, or dancing in the energy,” says husband Brian Sorensen. “She said the trip was everything she thought — and more.”

Having made the trek to Kailash, Mary was scheduled to return to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, on Thursday, Aug. 27, and then fly to Atlanta. From there, she’d spend one night at home and then fly to Maine to meet her husband for a couple of weeks with their granddaughters.

But the day after her last conversations with her family, catastrophic floods struck Nepal’s valleys along the Chinese border killing more than 1,000 people and leaving another roughly 3,900 unaccounted for, according to the Associated Press.

Mary is one of some 85 Americans who are reportedly missing, too.

“We hope and believe that she’s okay and she just lost her phone and that she will come home,” says son Riley, a 29-year-old old environmental science and biology teacher in Canton.

“I believe that there will be a miracle,” he says. “I have no idea what that miracle will be. There are people being saved every day, and until there’s something confirmed negative, I have no reason but not to hope.”

Related Stories
Last Person to Hear from Missing Software Engineer Was His Brother, Who Got a Message Hours Before Deadly Flood

Principal Evacuated Nearly 1,000 Children from School in Nepal within Minutes of Flash Floods

Riley says he takes solace in her final message to her family.

“Part of the journey was that they were unplugging,” he says of his mom, “but she did take pictures, and then she was able to text us on her way home and say that she had such a great trip.”

“She was looking forward to having such a long travel journey because she wanted to have that time so that she could figure out how to explain to us how amazing it was and how enlightening it was,” Riley says.

“Then,” he says, “she ended that text by saying that she was so grateful that we’re her family.”

“If that is the last text that she sends us — how incredible is that of a goodbye, if that is what it is?” Riley says.

“She had nothing left on her bucket list,” he says. “She was adding things to her bucket list because she kept checking them off. I think about how grateful I am that she has lived such an incredible life and that she got to watch all of her kids fall in love and graduate and find careers and become people that she would want them to be and be proud of.”

The day after Mary’s final call with her husband, on Wednesday, Aug. 26, she arrived at an immigration building on the Nepal-Tibet border, her family says.

Brian says he’s seen records showing the water hit the building not even 10 minutes after Mary arrived. Video of flooding in the area shows a gargantuan wave rolling across vehicles, structures and fleeing people.

The aftermath of severe flooding in Nepal in August.Prabin Ranabhat/AFP via Getty
While Brian, a 71-year-old retired fire chief, says he’s holding onto hope, “I’m a firefighter. I saw what happened to that building.”

His daughter Jordan, 43, says Mary hated being inside and a part of her thinks that, just maybe, Mary went for a walk to higher ground before the floods struck.

“I can’t identify what that hope is for. I would love to hear, you know, some higher being call me and say, ‘Hey, she’s on her way home,’ or have Mary call me and say, ‘Hey, it was, it was all a mess, phones were down,’ ” Brian says.

“I told the girls that we couldn’t find Oma [German for grandmother], and we couldn’t hear from her because the phones didn’t work,” he says. “They cried. And the 8-year-old said to her mom about an hour later, “Mom, I know what Oma’s doing. She’s helping somebody. That’s what Oma does.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Brian first met Mary in the 1980s, when she was conducting an environmental risk assessment at Loring Air Force Base near Limestone, Maine. “She was in an unauthorized area,” he recalls. “I stopped her because she was a security violation.”

There weren’t many places around the base to have a cup of coffee and warm up, so Mary often stopped into the fire station where Brian served as assistant chief.

“One day … she asked me if I knew where there were any good restaurants and I started to tell her — and the chief looked at me and he said, ‘Brian, do you not know when a pretty woman’s asking you to take her to dinner?’ ”

On their first date, after dinner, they were standing on a dock when Mary said: “I so so wanna push you in the water right now.”

“And it was bitter, bitter cold in Maine,” Brian notes with a laugh.

Mary Sorensen.Courtesy of Brian Wildeman
They’ve been married for 30 years. Today they live outside Atlanta, in Canton. In addition to raising son Riley, Mary embraced Brian’s son and two daughters from a previous relationship. They have four granddaughters.

“Not two months ago, she said to me, ‘I’m sure glad I didn’t push you in the water,’ ” Brian says.

His wife’s approach to life, he says, “was she was a spiritual being having a physical experience. And when her physical experience was completed, her spirit would live on,” her husband says. “I believe that spirit lives on in hummingbirds and in the breeze and in the sun and in the flowers and in my heart.”

“Mary loved him with reckless abandon. She loved my dad so much,” says Jordan. “She knew him inside and out and she was the calm to his storm every day, all day.”

Mary taught her kids and grandkids to recycle, even picking up trash on the beach during family vacations at Myrtle Beach.

Though her family feels her absence keenly, they are not despairing.

“I think about … how she would handle this situation if the roles were reversed,” Riley says. “She would be heartbroken, of course, she would be torn up, for sure. But nobody manages loss better than my mom because she believes that she is a spiritual being just having a physical experience and that nothing is guaranteed, and that every day is a gift.”

“We’re in a state of optimism and hope and joy and peace because that is what my mom would want us to be in,” Riley says. “She’s in a place of hope and belief and optimism and joy, wherever that place is.”

Riley says his mom didn’t “want to be buried in a casket or to be cremated. She would want to be turned into something that was biodegradable, because she cared so much about the environment.”

“I think about how incredible it would be that she got her wish,” he says, “if they don’t find her.”