National Post (National Edition)
Sisters find each other after 50 years apart
As movie night got underway at Susan Rice’s home in Chicago on Thursday, she and her holiday house guest discovered yet another thing they had in common.
The visitor’s eyes were greenish blue and Rice’s bluish green, they had realized when they first met. They both liked to sing and enjoyed musical theatre. “Oh my God,” Susan’s wife Deb had remarked, observing them on the couch as they scrolled simultaneously through their cellphones. “There’s two of you.”
Now Tina White also felt like watching Love Actually, a story set against the backdrop of Christmas and airports — and, as a result, a fitting celebration of the connection she and Rice never knew they shared.
White, 53, and Rice, 55, are long-lost biological sisters, a relationship to which they were alerted last month when White, sitting in a meeting at her bank job in Fredericton, N.B., read an email outlining the outcome of a genealogical DNA test she’d run through Ancestry.com.
You have a sibling, White read, and her heart skipped a beat.
The automated message marked the start of a new stage in their lives, the first chapter that will be theirs to live together. Their link became tangible on Christmas morning, when White boarded a plane before sunrise in Fredericton and stepped into the arrivals terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport around 9 a.m. Clad in Santa hats, Susan and Deb were waiting to greet her.
“We were so eager to be able to touch each other, to hold each other,” White said. “What better Christmas gift could two sisters have?”
Born to the same parents in a Quebec farming community in the 1960s, White and Rice were each put up for adoption in Quebec City before their first birthday. Rice’s adoptive parents raised her in Aurora, Ill., an hour west of Chicago, while the beachy Maritime town of Bathurst, N.B., became White’s childhood home.
White and Rice both grew up with adopted siblings, but aside from a sneaking suspicion White says she always nurtured, neither knew they had a sister by blood until they separately created Ancestry.com profiles in recent years. White signed up for the service in August. Months later, she messaged Rice within moments of learning of their bond.
At first the sisters exchanged emails and chatted on Facebook Messenger, trading photos, sharing details of their days and developing, from a remove, a sense of where their personalities criss-crossed. One day, White brokered their first face-to-face interaction by accidentally starting a video call and hanging up only after Rice’s phone buzzed with a notification.
Rice called back. The following day, White booked her trip to Chicago, where they hung out this week for every waking moment, from Tuesday morning through to her flight home on Friday afternoon. They went out for dinner with Deb on Christmas Day, and realized their conversations flowed naturally. Rice bought tickets to a Boxing Day rendition of the musical Fiddler on the Roof.
“It’s remarkable to look into the eyes of someone and see your own looking back at you,” Rice said. “I’m trying to learn 53 years of her in four days.”
Rice is sometimes apprehensive of how people she meets will react when they find out she’s married to a woman. It was “a huge relief and blessing,” she said, to hear White question why that would ever be a problem.
The sisters aren’t sure who their biological father is or if he’s still alive. Their birth mother died in 1981, and they know she had eight siblings, aunts and uncles of theirs whose families might still live in Quebec. They would love, by stroke of serendipity, to learn more about those people.
Rice hopes to visit her new sister in New Brunswick this coming spring.
“We did have missed opportunities,” White said, referring to the 53 years they spent apart. “But we can’t dwell on those. We’ve got an enormous one today that we’re so very thankful for.”