Today it will be nine years since my Grandma Jeanne passed away. That it has been nine years is hard to believe...sometimes it feels so close and my heart aches with every beat. Sometimes when I swim in the ocean and float on my back I can feel her in the sun's warm embrace and it is like I am in her arms again. I have been so blessed in my own life and her love will always be one of my greatest blessings.

 Another blessing I have cherished is the memory of being able to help a 90 year old woman find her own history. Her niece came to me over two years ago asking for my help in finding information for her father and aunt. They and their three other siblings had been surrendered by their mother in the 1920s. They had all been sent to different places and with the exception of two of them had never seen one another again. The aunt and father had found one another as adults when someone said to the auntie that they had seen a man working in the fields that looked so similar to her. She rushed there with her husband and her brother was found. They had been separated since childhood. Both had been institutionalized. Both had suffered neglect. Both were so grateful to have found each other. From that moment forward they were a part of one another's lives and kept their hopes alive that one day they could find their other siblings. While they waited and hoped they raised their children together and tried to provide the love and care that they had not received.

They came to my agency multiple times over the next few decades looking for information and each time were denied or told the info was lost. By the time they came to me the father had died and his daughter had taken on the search in his honor and for her elderly auntie. This woman is one of the most persistent and courageous women I have ever met. I knew I would do everything I could to help her.  Her auntie just wanted to know where she came from. It was a simple request and something many take for granted. I myself know what is like to not know your own history. Over the next two years I spent any spare moment I had piecing information together and taking trips to our archives. My hands would gingerly touch each ageing file and I would hope against hope that the next one would be it. Each time I walked out with blackened by dust fingers and a heavy heart. And then one day with our intern in tow we found it. It was pure luck. We were looking for another file and I looked at one of the boxes. There was a sequence of numbers on it that looked familiar. I grabbed auntie’s paperwork. I carried it with me to the archive always just in case. There had been one piece of paper that randomly had numbers on it. Breathlessly I realized they were similar to the ones of the box. One quick conversation with the archivist and I had the box and auntie’s history was found.

She and her niece (and some more family) came the next day to the office and we went over the file together. The history was ugly….she had forgotten so much and here it was. Being institutionalized, abuse, neglect, a diagnosis of being feeble minded. And auntie took it all with aplomb. She knew who she was. She knew what she had achieved. And knowing her history didn’t change who she was. She handled everything with humor and grace. Her family looked at her with such love that was so easy to understand. She hugged me tightly and I was so grateful to be a social worker, so grateful I am nosy and persistent (two traits from both my mother and grandmother) and so grateful to have met this woman. She changed my life in the course of one afternoon. Her dignity, her ability to accept the past and to create love, these things all moved me immensely.

Today the niece called me with an update as to how they are doing. They have found more and more family members including one of the auntie’s sister’s grandsons. Auntie had cried. She saw her brother in his eyes. The niece wanted me to know that auntie has been collecting photos of all of her new to her family and in the middle of all of them is a snapshot of myself, our intern, and auntie. They all consider me family. I can think of no better than today for me to receive that call. As she told me about the picture I looked at the same picture- it is on my own desk next to the one of my Grandma (that also looks over Ben Affleck. We both had crushes on him so I gave her some eye candy. She was always a flirt.) Auntie and Grandma both looked at me and my heart felt so full. Tears came to the corners of my eyes. Where earlier I had struggled to keep in tears of longing and sadness, I now let tears of joy flow.