Greetings. I am the dead mom character from the Mary-Kate and Ashley direct-to-video movies, gazing down upon you from heaven. Sure, the twins played ostensibly different characters in each film, but all of the dead, absent mothers are me.

I’m kidding! About the dead part — I really am the mom character. Many of you are wondering how I died — and why I was always dead — but I’m actually alive drinking a cocktail beside a man in a linen suit at a bar in Nassau, Bahamas. Here is my story.

To understand my life, you’ll have to suspend belief — just as you did watching the film Passport to Paris, when you believed that two tween girls would grumble about a lavish trip to Paris to stay with their grandfather, who just happens to be the goddamn Ambassador to France.

I don’t even remember exactly when I first “died,” but it was the mid-‘90s when my ungrateful twin daughters first decided to kill me off as a plot device. Apparently, they needed a catalyst for the dad character to get together with a new lady. "We’re sorry," they said, “but the screenwriters are creatively zapped and we expect to make zillions of dollars anyway. Can you please ‘die’ for us? We’ll wire you money indefinitely. We’ve got a guy who can arrange everything.” I lived in the Valley and all I had going on was a step-aerobics class three days a week, so I agreed to do it. Soon thereafter I bought a plane ticket and flushed the ripped pieces of my passport down a toilet in Havana. Thus began my double life.

I assumed an alias and laid low in the Dominican Republic for a while, but it became clear through the next message — delivered in the night by a handsome ex-Kremlin assassin with whom I had a brief affair — that the twins were killing me off for the next film, too. I believe it was the exact same plot as the first film, but with up-to-date outfits and haircuts. I don’t recall the exact year, and I have no paper trail, but I believe it was after Princess Diana had died. (So sad. We partied together for one stellar weekend in St. Bart’s, but she would’ve known me as Arabella de la Cruz, seventh in line for the Spanish throne.)

One day I woke up in the bed of a snorkeling instructor in Aruba and my ex-lover, Dmitri, was outside tapping Morse code onto the windowpane. There would be another film. Now the girls were getting older, and the absence of the parents was a plot device to give them the freedom to run around European cities with curiously acne-free young men. (After that, Dmitri tapped out: “Also, a snorkeling instructor now? Really?” to which I furiously tapped “Go fuck a bowl of borscht” in response.)

Based on the VHS tapes smuggled onto the various yachts and private islands I inhabited throughout the years, I saw that the twins clearly didn’t fancy resuscitating their mother as a character. Eventually, they outgrew the films altogether, and there I was, a permanently “dead” plot device in the dust of their empire. It was fine; I had good cigars and piles of laundered cash while my friends back in lousy California had gotten divorced, taken up crochet, and Botoxed themselves within an inch of their lives.

I think that about catches us up? Oh, please, please, stop asking if I knew Jeffrey Epstein. I simply did not. (Ghislaine, however, grills a mean cheeseburger.)

Dmitri now lives somewhere in Brazil. He’s mostly retired from a life of crime, but he does sell firearms here and there. If you must know, we occasionally sext from our respective burner flip phones. The man in the linen suit, by the way, is named Armand, but that’s all I know about him. (Note to self: maybe his name’s not really Armand?) Again, if you really must know — and it seems you do — I may be sexting him, too.

So next time you’re watching one of those silly movies for the sake of nostalgia, please, don’t feel bad for the dead mother. She’s doing just fine.