Month: June 2023

The woman hopped out of her SUV and headed toward me. I was standing in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store in a hardscrabble area south of Syracuse, just off the Onondaga Nation Territory. Locals call it “The Res” for the Reservation.

The sky was gray and overcast; the air was humid and mushy. The woman’s stride, though, sliced through the thickness. It was was solid and purposeful, and there was a determined look in her eye. She grabbed me in a bear hug and held on for dear life. I thought she would never let go! It was as though she had found a long-lost relative. Because she had.

This was my very first meeting with my sister, Bobbie Lynn Featherstone.

“Good to see you,” Bobbie rasped in my ear. “About time. Love you.”

I had known all my life I was adopted; so long, in fact, I don’t remember being told. I just always knew.

Being adopted was never an issue for me. It was an excellent match. Some people who didn’t know my background insisted I looked like my dad. Others were just as convinced I favored my mom. That’s probably why I was never curious about my “real” parents. As far as I was concerned, Tony and Connie Casella were my real parents.

As I got older, though, I wished for the opportunity to somehow thank my biological mother, tell her I was okay and assure her she made the right decision. When New York State established an adoption clearinghouse, I got bare-bones family medical notes. But, as I expected, no one was looking for me.

The secrecy suited my mother just fine. I eventually came to understand Mom’s inability to conceive threatened her self-image as a “real” mother. She once mentioned in passing she was glad I never had the urge to look for my birth mother.

But six years ago, my dear friend Kevin Boudreaux, an amateur genealogist, convinced me it might be interesting to submit a DNA sample to Ancestry.com. That sample led to Bobbie – and the story of how I became a Casella.

My birth mother, Lynn Haggett Welch, was separated from her husband in 1955. She had two children, a boy Dana and a girl Bobbie. During that separation, she met and fell in love with Angelo Barone. I was conceived the following year, but Lynn kept the pregnancy a secret. She put me up for adoption with Catholic Charities. After her divorce, she and Angelo married, and had two more boys – my brothers Joseph and Marc Barone.

My original birth certificate, which I saw later, confirmed my parentage. My name was listed as Angelo Anthony Walsh. “Angelo” implied my biological father. I can only surmise the misspelling of my last name – Walsh instead of Welch – was a “deliberate accident” by the well-meaning nuns, an additional roadblock to frustrate any attempt to unlock the secret of my heritage.

These bare-bones details of my immediate biological family tree are light years away from the true significance of this discovery – the black-and-white version of a multi-hued revelation. The real story is one of discovery, loss, and most importantly – love. Despite my initial trepidation, Bobbie, Joe, and Marc have accepted me fully, completely and unconditionally as a brother. Because of them, I have discovered deep, loving family bonds I never knew could exist. I hope for the same with Dana when we finally meet.

Unfortunately, the reunion came too late for me to meet my biological parents. Lynn died in her sleep of a heart attack in 1992. She was just 63 years old. Angelo was 92 when he died on April 17, 2016 – exactly one year to the day before my first phone call introducing myself to Bobbie.

These past seven years have been a wild rollercoaster ride of emotions, questions, stories, laughter and tears. We’ve even uncovered some surprising intersections in the Casella and Barone paths. But I had to keep this wonderful discovery largely private until now for the sake of my mother. I never wanted to say or do anything that would cause Connie Casella to feel she was less than my real mother. With her promotion to heaven last month, she now knows the full story, including the fact that she was and always will be Mom.

I would love to hear what you think about this story; I hope you will leave a comment. To subscribe, please click “Like” and scroll all the way down.

“C’mon, Rose, Tony’s waiting!”

Usually, urging on death would be ghastly. But dear friend George Banks – who always endearingly called Mom “Rose” – was in the fourth day of a long, difficult bedside vigil that could only have one outcome.

Connie had been rushed to the emergency room with pulmonary distress just after midnight on Mother’s Day. Doctors said the only realistic move was to the hospital’s Hospice wing. It was now late Thursday, Mom still unconscious and barely breathing. She’d received the Anointing of the Sick and Apostolic Blessing. Rosaries had been said. After five long days, it was heartbreaking for George and me to keep watching Mom’s battle between body and soul. Dad, and the angels, were waiting for her.

“Don’t worry, Mom, it’s okay to let go.”

Mom had achieved her last important goal – reaching her 100^th birthday – barely two-and-a-half months earlier. She celebrated at a big party with friends from Jacksonville and relatives from Syracuse and Texas. It was a great afternoon and she had a wonderful time. Big smiles all around.

To be honest, there were a few tears at her goodbye services – a vigil in Jacksonville, plus a prayer service and funeral Mass in Syracuse. But there were more smiles than tears as friends and family recalled happy memories of “Aunt Connie.”

Most of those memories involved family gatherings, sports, holidays – events that involved lots of family and friends. Mom, for as private as she could be, always saw herself in relation to others. And the memories almost always involved food, too. That was only proper – cooking is how Italians say “I love you.”

The service in Syracuse did not attract a lot of people. That was no surprise – at 100 years old, Mom had outlived just about everyone else. She was the family’s last survivor of her generation. And so many of those who had gone before her left so long ago. She hadn’t seen her father in 65 years; she had adored her father! Her mother died 43 years ago. Dad was her beloved; she lived the last 22-years of her life without him. She missed sisters Virginia and Antonetta terribly. And she mourned daughter Susan deeply after she died in 2018, often saying, “I can’t believe I’ll never talk to her again.”

Well, she’s back with all of them now.

Can you imagine what all of those heavenly reunions were like? That’s why there were so many smiles and just a few tears at Mom’s services – tears because we’re missing her, smiles because of her destination. The goal now, however, is to make sure heaven is in our future so we can have our own reunions with her and all of our other loved ones.