July 30, 2019- Stories of the Heart-Pat Simmons

The Story Continues  By Pat Simmons

As an author, here’s a story I didn’t write. A friend of mine was adopted when she was a few months old (Because I respect her privacy, I won’t use her real name). Cassie grew up in a loving family and had no desire to seek out her birth parents for most of her life. When my friend finally decided to search for her biological family, I was ready to assist. I kept bugging Cassie to see if she requested access to her adoption file. She decided to stop procrastinating, but by this time the system was backlogged more than six months.

I am big on researching my family roots and a fan of “Finding Lost Family on TLC and Finding Your Roots on PBS. Time is not on our side, and when you’re adopted, time could be running out for a child to meet their birth parents. Cassie is in her fifties, so that would make her parents between seventy and eighty. My best genealogy sleuth skills were no match for the simple Ancestry DNA test. While Cassie’s results were being processed, she received her birth certificate, and I tried to create a paper trail from the clues. One thing was for sure, Cassie had a sibling.

Cassie’s results came back recently, and a few days later, she got a hit from a close relative with news that both her mother and father were still alive. Cassie’s mother was in her eighties—didn’t look a day over seventy—and her father was in his early nineties. Plus, she had more than one sibling. At one time, there were ten of them, but one died.

The story gets better. While my friend didn’t know her parents, people we knew had crossed paths with Cassie’s father.  He and my late father-in-law worked for the same company and would have been about the same age. No doubt, they knew each other. Then it was one of our church members who knew Cassie’s father when she attended another church forty years prior. She was surprised to learn that there was a connection.

When my friend texted, “I’m going to meet my mom and dad this weekend.” I smiled. Cassie’s adopted parents had been deceased for at least fifteen, if not, twenty years. God gave her a new set to continue her life’s journey. Amen. I’m glad this isn’t a fiction story. 

Pat Simmons lives in the heart of the Midwest, writing romantic Christian stories that touch the soul.