I'm hitting the road shortly for a most interesting weekend. Last year I told the story of my oldest and dearest friend, Rick, finding out that he had a sister. He was raised essentially without a family. His mother died when he was a toddler, then he was raised by his grandparents until both died while he was still young. He lived with my family for a time during high school. Last year he got a call from a private investigator who had been hired by a woman to find her mother, and he found out that she was dead, but that Rick had the same mother. He wondered if Rick would want to be contacted by his long lost sister.
When Rick called me to tell me about this, I knew instantly what it meant to him. I was raised in this huge, crazy family. I can't possibly imagine what it's like not to be surrounded by family, but he was raised with no immediate family at all. It created a huge void for him emotionally, a rootlessness that had always caused him distress (I'm sure that's why he is so passionately devoted to his own children and family now). So the discovery that he had a sister was monumentally important to him.
Well, this weekend I and my family get to meet her, and she gets to meet a bunch of aunts and uncles and cousins she's never met. Rick and his wife are throwing a big Christmas party for everyone to meet Heidi and her family. My dad will be going with me as well; to him, Rick is like another son. So in some ways, it almost feels like I'm meeting my own long lost sibling. I'm thrilled to get to meet her and I'm very happy that she and Rick found each other. It has brought peace and a sense of belonging to someone I love like a brother. Not a bad Christmas present, is it?
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Not bad at all. It has an almost Dickens-type Christmas quality to it.