December arrived with a flood of emotions that spurted off and on all month. Grief during the holidays, coupled with a pandemic that’s been raging for 9 months, is like being caught in questionable weather without an umbrella. You are unprepared when the drops hit you, and without warning they can turn into a deluge.

One night last month I was up late, watching a Korean drama (if you’ve never seen one, Netflix has a ton and I highly recommend any of them!). One of the characters was grappling with abandonment issues, and the fact that when her parents divorced, her older sister chose to live with her mom while this character remained with her father. Although this drama did not portray an adoption story line, it nevertheless got me to thinking about the different paths adoptees could have taken if they hadn’t been adopted.

One of the things that makes me so sad about the path that was chosen for me, was that I waited so long to look for my paternal side. Because the paternal side, as it turned out, was the side I had really been searching for my whole life. In particular, I’m talking about my brother N. I grew up with my adopted brother, G, but we were never close until we were adults and even now, with all we have been through with the death of our parents, we just aren’t very close and don’t have much in common. N, though. From the time I met him, it was if I HAD known him my entire life. We share the same sense of humor, and even some of the same mannerisms. After that incredible evening, staying up until 3am sharing stories, I knew we would be in each other’s lives forever.

How different would our lives have been if we had grown up together (unlikely since we had different mothers, not fathers, but not out of the question entirely)? How extraordinary our lives might have been if I had found him when I was 21 or 31, versus 41?

But we are together now, which is really what matters.

Anyhow, thinking about what I was lacking as I was growing up (closeness to my mom, closeness to my only sibling that I knew) got me all up into my feelings. So I grabbed my phone and send a quick text to N, checking the time as I did so and wincing that it was just after 10pm his time. I hoped I wasn’t going to wake him.

What he texted back was just two short paragraphs, a total of 6 brief sentences in all. But it was a love letter, all the same. The over 35 years we had spent separated was worth it for once sentence in particular.