Welcome to the table, Tam. As Linus would say, AAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!
I surely hope you can retrieve them. A couple of years ago I started to draw together family stories and songs I've written over the years to share with my mother and two older sisters. That in turn inspired many new family stories, as well as the chance to flesh out what I'd already written while my Mother was alive. She died a couple of months after her 99th birthday, and I was so thankful for the wonderful times we shared, her last year. My wife and I were a thousand miles away and she reached the point during that last year where she couldn't see well enough to read what I'd sent her but her dear friend (a young woman in her 80's) would read them to her every night. Two or three of the remembrances I wrote that last year ended up in the book I just published, along with the lyrics to some of the songs that were about her life as a child. Memories fade all too soon. I hope that you can recover what you've written, and now is the time to pull together everything that you have on paper.

Jerry