Neither Sandy Nowak nor Pati Johnson had a sister growing up. Now they have each other.
Sandy is 60 years old, and Pati is 64. They just met for the very first time.
The hug at the airport was long, and long overdue. Then the two women leaned back and stared at one another.
“My sister,” I heard one of them say.
Sandy and Pati share the same mother, but Pati was born when that mother was 18, single and scared, and she was given up for adoption.
Sandy was born four years later, and her mother never told her she had a sister, or more accurately a half sister. Pati knew from childhood on that she was adopted, but nothing about Sandy.
About 10 years ago, an aunt finally told Sandy about the baby her mother had given up, and she shared some adoption papers with her. Using that information, Sandy searched for a while, but it was a private investigator she hired who finally tracked down Pati and her adoptive family.
“After 60 years I have found my only sister!” said Sandy when she called to invite me to the meeting. “She’s flying in from Phoenix. We’re both very excited, nervous and scared.”
They spoke on the phone but did not exchange photos before the meeting at Mitchell International Airport earlier this month. Pati said she would be wearing blue jeans and a peacock-blue top. Sandy wore all pink. To be on the safe side, she stood at the entrance to Concourse C and held up a sign saying, “Hi Pati.”
And, just like that, all those years of separation were over. The women compared eye color and talked about how Pati, who walked with a cane, needed the same hip surgery that Sandy already had done.
Sandy lives in New Berlin and works as a medical technologist. She is divorced and has two sons. Pati lives in Phoenix and works as a beauty adviser at Walgreens. She also is divorced and has three kids plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
This story starts in 1946 on a family farm near Lodi, a little north of Madison. Doris Benish was 17 and pregnant. Late that year, she went to live with a married sister in Madison and then was sent to a home for unwed expectant mothers in Wauwatosa. She gave birth on Feb. 20, 1947, to a girl who was placed in foster care for 10 months before being adopted by a couple from Eau Claire, Lyle and Gael Johnson.
Doris kept a diary during that difficult time. She talks of loving her boyfriend and wanting to marry him, but her parents wouldn’t give their blessing. A year later, in 1948, Doris married a different guy, Robert Barman. They had a son, and then they had Sandy, and then four more sons. The family also farmed for a living near Black Earth.
The earlier birth remained a secret. Doris, too embarrassed to tell her own children, confided over the years in her sister. That aunt is the one who eventually shared the story with Sandy. She asked her mother about it, but by then Doris had Alzheimer’s disease and could not fill in any details. She died in 2007.
Meanwhile, Pati was growing up happy and well loved, along with an older brother who also was adopted. Pati said her mother shared her birth mother’s name with her, and she always added that her birth mother loved her, though the birth and adoptive mothers had never met.
The family moved to Minneapolis when Pati was in seventh grade. Years later, when Pati was married and in her 30s, she moved to Arizona. Over the years she made several efforts to find her birth mother and know more about her roots, but she never succeeded.
She had no idea she had a sister who was trying to find her. Sandy found a private investigator from Florida on the Internet and with some trepidation paid $1,500 for the no-guarantee search. It took a year, but it worked. The investigator was able to get the name of the adoptive parents, and thanks to the unusual spelling of Gael’s name, he contacted her recently and then Pati. She told him it was OK to give her number to Sandy, who then called her.
“I don’t have names for all the emotions I went through,” Pati said. “When we hung up, I think I cried for an hour.”
Sandy sent photos of their mother to Pati, both from the time she was in high school and more recently.
“I looked at the pictures and I cried and said thank you,” Pati said. “I think what she did was courageous. If you give your child up for adoption, it’s out of love.”
Sandy is at peace with the past. “Mom did the right thing. She gave her daughter a good life, a loving family that raised her and told her from little on that she was special,” she said.
The two sisters spent all last weekend together, and plan to stay in touch across the miles. If it wasn’t overwhelming enough to meet a long-lost sibling, Pati also attended a reunion of Sandy’s – and her own – extended family in Lodi. Not every family member was thrilled that Sandy had tracked down Pati and brought her here, but it was just too important for Sandy to hold back.
At long last she has a sister. And she is telling everybody.
http://liarcatchers.com/missing_persons_investigations.html
