Just before dawn, Felicia Riley floats in the Pacific Ocean on her red surf board, awaiting a wave and some solace.

In the southern California stillness, her thoughts travel 3,000 miles to the east and two years into the past. She's back in Westmoreland County. Her children Kate, 8, Michael, 6, and Julia, 4, are running, laughing, just being kids. She tells them how terribly they are missed.

Their bodies and that of Ms. Riley's estranged husband, Daniel L. Riley were discovered Feb. 4, 2007, in the family's upscale Rostraver home. Mr. Riley, 39, an engineering manager at Bechtel Bettis in West Mifflin, had custody of the children that weekend. He shot each child in the head before turning the weapon on himself.

Since then, Ms. Riley, 39, has struggled to find the emotional equilibrium to make it through each day.

"It takes a lot," she said during a recent visit to the area from Seal Beach, Calif., her hometown, where she returned to reside with her mother and bury the children. "The first thing I think of every day is just breathe and then everything else is just extra.

"The hardest thing for me was I always felt the reason I was on this planet, that my purpose here was to be a parent, to be their mother. When they were gone, I felt, 'Why am I here?' What's my purpose?'

"But then I really quickly came to realize I'm still their mother. I'm living for them, and I need to keep going for them and not let them be forgotten."

A little more than three months before the killings, she had filed for divorce, saying her 10-year marriage was irretrievably broken because her husband had made her "condition intolerable and life burdensome." She and the children moved out of the Rostraver home and in with her sister's family in Greensburg.

The divorce proceedings were contentious, with both parents seeking custody, but no one foresaw the possibility of her husband's horrific act. Still, she said, hating him for what he did would only cause more pain.

"The honest truth is that I choose not to give him anything more, including filling my life with anger. I continue to pray for the ability to forgive ... and spend no energy from what is left of my life on anger that would give him continued control over me."

She has taken to heart the advice a good friend from her church here, Cornerstone Ministries in Export, who implored her at the hospital that unfathomable night to "heal with God."

"I've really just done that," she said, her back straight, her hands folded, her soft voice verging on cracking. "With all of [my friends'] support, the church's support, my family's support, I'm able to get up every day and keep going."

Through therapy, and therapeutic activities such as surfing, she's making progress but, understandably, it's a difficult process.

"Every time you think, 'OK, there's a little less burden, a little more time between the really hard days,' one simple thing that somebody says or something you see, something of my children's, makes it like pulling a scab off of a wound. It just suddenly comes back completely."

Ms. Riley holds a psychology degree and has a background in social services, having worked with mentally challenged adults before her marriage and child-rearing years. She hasn't returned to the working world, however.

"I'm not quite ready to go back to work yet. It's a very stressful, emotionally involved job. I don't feel it would be very responsible of me to go back in when I'm not emotionally ready."

She's getting closer to that day, however, anchored by her faith and buoyed by her support system. And she finds purpose in giving of herself in volunteer and advocacy work.

She returned to this area to visit her sister, brother and their families, and to attend ceremonies at Cornerstone celebrating completion of its $4.5 million building project. She donated her baby grand piano to the church; a plaque reads: "Donated by Felicia Riley in memory of her loving children, Kate, Michael and Julia. May their music live forever."

Cornerstone also provided her with an outlet for volunteer work. Shortly before their deaths, the children were excited about Cornerstone's plan to send a Caring Hearts missionary group to an orphanage in San Luis, Mexico, in May 2007. They wanted to go and Ms. Riley, who speaks Spanish, was thinking about taking her children on the missionary trip.

After their deaths, she decided to still make the trip. Now, she travels to Mexico from her California home about every other month and stays a week, doing volunteer work.

"Sometimes people ask me why I'm there and I say because that's what my kids wanted me to do. That's where they wanted me to go," she said. "It gives me more purpose, to play with the children, paint the school, construct something, give out beans and rice, pray with people. I'm here for a reason."

While in Mexico, she travels to drug rehabilitation centers, prisons and youth centers and speaks of her suffering and how she is attempting to move forward.

"You give your testimony and give them information that they may have done all kinds of things but they're not done with their lives. They can turn it around and change and continue on.

"I can stand in front of them and say 'Worse things can happen but you still can take that step forward and keep going.' "

Ms. Riley also is advocating a change in Pennsylvania law that would require at the very least the notification of a party in a divorce if the spouse seeks to change beneficiaries in mutually maintained insurance policies. She said she found out shortly after the murders that two weeks before killing the kids and himself, her husband had substituted another person for her as beneficiary of the life insurance policies the couple had for each other and the children.

She has since received a small portion of the insurance payouts from the beneficiary, whom she declined to name, but said the situation left her in a financial dilemma for burying the kids, paying on the mortgage and other bills her husband left her.

"I certainly don't want this to happen to anyone else. You're supposed to be trying to grieve and instead bill collectors are calling and you're wondering 'How am I going to pay to bury them?' It's very difficult."

She is a member of Parents of Murdered Children and attended the national organization's 30th anniversary convention last month in Irvine, Calif. There she viewed for the first time the "Murder Wall," a traveling tribute honoring the memory of murdered loved ones. Her children's names and birth and death dates were among those of approximately 3,600 murder victims listed on engraved, solid walnut plaques.

The convention's 400 attendees each had lost a child to murder, but none had suffered multiple losses like Ms. Riley.

"Like most people, they didn't know what to say. They'd say, 'I'm so sorry. I really don't know what to say.' I'm fairly used to hearing that. I don't know what to say either.

"I feel bad about putting that on somebody else. I feel like I need to comfort them. How can they wrap their mind around it? I can't wrap my mind around it. How can anybody else?"

Ms. Riley's healing is nonetheless progressing so well that she's considering taking a job working at an autism center. She knows sign language but hasn't used it in quite a while and wants to brush up before taking the job.

Her mantra has become a slight variation of the Biblical verse from Hebrews 12:1: "Let us run the race that is before us and never give up."

She found the verse in a book of devotionals for each day of the year. It was listed for Nov. 4, her birthday. She saw that as a sign that she must persevere.

She thinks of that while in the Pacific Ocean. She falls off a wave but catches the next one. This time she manages its power and speed and rides it to the beach.

Dawn breaks. Another day beckons her.