I can't imagine what Scott Speicher's family has gone through the last 18 years.

But Mary Helen Hoff and her five children can. They can imagine all too vividly.

Hoff - an Orange Park woman whose idea led to the creation of the POW/MIA flag - knows what it's like to learn that your husband's plane has been shot down on the other side of the world.

She knows what it's like to find out he ejected from the plane and is missing.

She knows what it's like to wake up in the night, hear a noise and swear it's him coming through the door.

She knows what it's like to spend decades keeping pressure on military leaders, fighting for information, hoping that one day, one way, he'll actually come home.

She does not know what it's like to hear his remains have been identified.

Nearly 23 years after Lt. Cmdr. Michael Hoff's plane crashed, the Navy sent the family a letter. Based on interviews with Laotian villagers, the Navy said he had not survived. Beyond that, it said his body likely never would be recovered.

"I once asked in Washington, 'What do I bury?'" Hoff said last week. "And they said, 'Well, we'll give you all the artifacts from the aircraft.'"

So when she heard the news about Scott Speicher's remains being identified, it sparked waves of emotions.

"I'm so happy for them, although I started to cry again," she said. "I thought, 'How many more tears do I have left for any young man who doesn't come home?'"

Hoff, 78, still has a black-and-white banner hanging in front of her house. It's one of the originals, a precursor to an iconic American flag which today flies everywhere from the White House to a Wyoming fair - where organizers recently unveiled what they say is the world's largest POW/MIA flag.

"We never imagined all of this," Hoff said.

In 1971, she read a story in the Times-Union about Annin and Co., a New York flag manufacturer, making a flag for a new United Nations member. She contacted the company and persuaded an executive to help with a POW/MIA flag. It contracted graphic designer Newt Heisley to come up with a design.

"I said, 'I don't want a lot of colors,' " Hoff said. "I had seen a picture of one of those POWs wearing black-and-white pajamas. And because of that I said, 'We need a stark, black-and-white flag.' "

Heisley sketched in pencil the design - the silhouette of a gaunt man (his son), barbed wire, a watchtower and the words, "You are not forgotten."

Heisley died in May in Colorado. He was 88. The flag's design never was copyrighted. So even though it has become ubiquitous - going beyond flags to bumper stickers, shirts and on and on - Heisley never got rich off it. Neither did Hoff. Not that she seems to mind. The flag has served its purpose. It has made people remember.

These days, Hoff says, her own memory is an issue. She has Parkinson's disease. It affects her ability to recall details from long ago. But she says some things will be with her until the day she dies. The flag. The events that led to it. The memories that came with the news about Scott Speicher.

She has not forgotten.