Tom Junod

Did she know?

I think she knew.

I certainly did.

There is something about seeing somebody who is related to you that is hard to describe.

When I first saw Lizzie's picture on her Facebook page,

It's not that I identified her.

It's not that I was able to say, oh, yeah, we have the same nose or we have the same smile lines or our smiles are similar.

It was beyond that.

I recognized her.

And I think that she recognized me as well.

I mean, it took a while, but it just turned out to be one of the most remarkable experiences of my life, not just because we found each other, but we had lost, we each had lost something enormous.

In May of 2022, I lost my sister, Kathy.

She died.

In July of 2023, Lizzie lost her brother, Michael.

And on Christmas Eve 2022, she called me to tell me that she had gotten the results of the ancestry test back.

You had gained siblings.

Yeah.

And so in that moment, we each had lost family and we each had found each other.

But there was something else about it.

I felt like I had settled finally what I'd never been able to settle in my life, which is, you know, my feelings about my dad and my knowledge about my dad.