The Story of My Life: The "Other" Mailbox

If you missed the last installment, here is the quick version. Josiah had gone to a friend's house for the afternoon. While he was gone,  I searched for Carol Close on the internet and my find led me to a website called 'Find My Family'.  There I found a post by Jessie Harvey who was looking for a birth sibling whose birth mom was Carol Close. If this Carol was my birth mom, then further search showed that I had four siblings, Brad, Brent, Jessie and Jenna.  If you want to read the whole post to catch up, you can find it here.

On the way to pick up Josiah from his playdate, I called Steve. He had received my text and was looking at Carol's profile. I filled him in quickly on what had happened as far as my searching had gone that afternoon.  He said he would continue working on it while I was getting Josiah.

I arrived at the house where Josiah was playing. I went in and ended up talking with his friend's mom for a while.  It was so hard to stay focused on the conversation with all of the other events of the day swirling around in my head.  I wanted so badly to spill everything that was going on, but somehow managed to keep it all in.  In the middle of our conversation, I got a text from Steve. The first chance I had, I glanced down at my phone.

It was only two words.  "Jenna died."

What??!?!?  How??!?!?

His response, "Suicide. In 2007."

My heart broke.  I had already lost one sibling to suicide and if these people truly were my blood family, now that number was two.  Only this time, it would be a sibling I would have never had the chance to meet.

The weight of what had happened to Jenna weighed me down while the excitement about what could possibly be with Carol and Jessie and the others left me overwhelmed.   I was emotional while at the same time feeling half numb. I kept trying to talk sense to myself to keep my heart from getting too overly involved. "Lorena, you still don't know for sure if this is them. You need to stay calm until you do."

I still came home and mourned as I read post after post from different people on her obituary, many from Carol, a mother broken by the loss of her daughter. So much so, that she was still posting in the memory book, the last entry just a couple of months before that day.  And I became even more certain that these people were my birth family as I saw so much of myself in the pictures of them, especially the ones of Jenna.  Looking at pictures of her in her childhood years was like looking at pictures of myself.

That evening when Steve got home from work, we talked about what I ought to do.  We decided that it would probably be best to try to contact Jessie as she was the one that had posted on the adoption registry that she was looking for me. I looked everywhere I could on the internet to find a way to get in contact Jessie.  There was no way to be found.  So after some more discussion, we decided that I should send a note to Alyssa, Brent's wife, and tell her that I was trying to get in touch with Jessie.  I had seen pictures of them together so I knew that they were friends as well as sisters-in-law.

So that is what I did. I sent her a quick note on Facebook. I asked her to pass my information along to Jessie and let her know I was trying to get in touch with her in regards to a post that she had put on the internet the previous October.  When I went to send the message, Facebook informed me that because she and I did not have any contacts in common, my message would not go directly to her inbox. It asked me if I would like to pay a dollar so that it would.  Otherwise, it said it would go to her "other" mailbox. I had never heard of this "other" mailbox and being unsure of exactly how it worked,  I decided to take my chances and see if she would get my message without paying the dollar.

Steve had a church softball game that evening.  I probably checked my phone hundreds of times during the couple of hours we were at the park.  I was so anxious.  When we got home, I saw that Alyssa had posted something on her wall on Facebook, so I knew she had been on and not seen my message.  I paid the dollar to send the message and within an hour, she had responded saying she would forward my message to Jessie.

As I sat on the bed with Steve processing the day,  Flora came home.  She is our niece that was living with us at the time.  She listened as I excitedly shared what had happened that day, in awe of all that had transpired.  I explained to her everything from the paper I received from my dad that morning, to finding Carol's picture, to having to pay the dollar to keep my message to Alyssa from going to the "other" mailbox on Facebook.  When I got to the part about the "other" mailbox, she asked what I was talking about.  And since I had not even known about the "other" mailbox myself until that day, I was happy to pull up my profile and show her how to find it.  When I clicked on the tab to take me to the other mailbox,  I saw it and then let out a scream.

There was a message in there.....from Jessie Harvey.