A Blast from Our Past Has Me Spinning

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About this time last week I received an email forwarded through HubPages that took me back to 1991, the year my fourteen year old son died in an accident. In 2009 my daughter voluntarily followed him while in a deep depression. She was 34. I wrote detailed accounts of both events as BarbRad on Squidoo, shortly after Sarah's death. All those accounts are still on HubPages in my BarbRad account. We have pretty well let our grief run its course. We never forget, of course, and we still carry both children in our hearts. We always love remembering the good times. So last week someone who found the account of Sarah's death emailed me through HubPages. It turns out he knew our children before we did. They and their mom actually lived with his mom and two brothers after our children's father went to a state mental hospital. I will call this man C. Sarah had told C more about the bad things in her life than she ever told us. In the third email exchange he gave us those details about the things Sarah suffered that no little girl of seven should have to. We knew the basic charge against Sarah's father, but not the details. That created an emotional shake-up for me, to realize exactly how she suffered. C also corrected some misinformation that was in my account. I repeated what I'd been told, but it wasn't all accurate. C felt cheated that Sarah had been ripped away from him when the county took the children. He thought the mother was going to take them with her to San Diego. She never did. Instead they stayed with the county and went into foster care. Jason was placed in a home next door to us. Sarah was in another city in the county. Just before school started in 1982, they both came to live with us. The plan was to foster them until we could adopt them. The adoption took place in 1984. This correspondence C and I have shared this week has reopened wounds in both of us. He had been separated from Sarah, who was his best friend during the time he knew her. He suffered greatly from that separation. He was crushed when he discovered that she had been still living in the county a bike ride away, and he had no way of knowing. He went to a great deal of effort to find her on Google before finding my hubs. Her birth name was difficult to spell and he had it wrong. He finally found it, and that's when he found the children had been adopted and now had a new name. You may wonder why I believed this man when I first heard from him. I believed him because he knew things that were not in my written accounts or anywhere else on line. Sarah had also mentioned someone with his name, and from her fuzzy understanding I thought he'd been a cousin or something. When he describes my children, I know from his stories that he knew the same children I did, just before I did. He gave the address where they used to live. It fits with memories Sarah and Jason have told me about. Both C and I have missing pieces to our pictures of both Sarah and Jason. We are trying to put them in place as best we can. My husband and I are asking ourselves why C has entered our lives now. I believe it's because he's a lonely man with few if any friends. His family was as dysfunctional as Sarah and Jason's. He is a functional alcoholic, but he had a business and has hired 15 people. I can't help but believe God has a purpose in all this. C's grief in learning that the children died is still very fresh. He felt as close as family to them when they lived under the same roof. He had protected Sarah against bullies. Our grief reached the acceptance stage a long time ago. That makes it a bit easier to help C through his grief. I am grateful for the stories he relates of the things my children did when he knew them. He confirmed what I believed about the relationship between my children. I'm able to help him see the people Sarah and Jason turned out to be. This whole correspondence has been a mind-blowing experience. I have been obsessed with it to the point I can't really concentrate on writing. I'm hoping I will go back to normal soon. Have any of you had anyone contact you because of something you wrote online? If so, how did it affect you? Have you ever searched for an old friend online? What happened if you found them? Have any of you who may also be adoptive parents had something like this happen -- a person from your children's past life contacting you? The photo below shows Sarah and Jason in 1988 -- the only time it snowed when we lived in Ventura County. Jason was thrilled. He loved life and everything about the outdoors. Sarah, as you can see, isn't happy. By this time in her life she rarely was.