After several years of estrangement, my adoptive sister, who is now but a whisper of her pre-cancerous-self, decided to contact me. She has been snooping around my social media posts without me knowing, and she has decided to come out of the weeds after seeing that I have now found and met my biological father and two sisters.

After texting back and forth for over a year, she bravely asked if she could visit me. She soon after flew up to stay with me for four days. She, my beloved baby sister, had not been in contact despite my attempts and she had not been to visit me in over 25 years. I remember her being attached to my hip, until I found out that I had been adopted.

I am the one who tore our family apart. I am the one who “just can’t let it go.” I am the one who can’t stay the same as before, when I didn’t know. My sisters would have benefitted from me keeping our lives in tact, me doing their laundry and cooking and answering late night calls. As it turned out, my adoptive family felt that my grief for people who “gave me away” was an indulgence on my part; and no one understood my confusion at finding out that the parents who said they were your parents, and why would we lie, are not your parents and that they have lied to you all of your life, despite feeble attempts at finding the truth. After figuring out that I had been adopted, my quest for answers and truth was poison to them. They were left angry at my collapse and betrayed by our ensuing estrangement. They said nothing had changed and my sulking, their term not mine, was unacceptable to them.

When I got yanked screaming like a lost newborn baby into my new reality and world view, I became lost to them. I had been drowning in their secret and my new-found truth had freed me. They were the last people that I wanted to throw me a line. I was grieving deeply and I needed to adjust and integrate my late discovery. Everything had changed. As I wailed and flailed the days and nights away, working through my new-found secret treasure chest of discovery and loss, they hung onto each other, hating me for abandoning them. I was uncaring, selfish, disturbed—you name it. I had been the eldest daughter, and my sisters also did not know about my adoption; it was the family secret. I was always in search of something. I was the one who brought this disaster onto our family, their family. I was the one responsible. My sister’s biological mother—my adopted mother—had labeled me a bad seed from day one. She, to this day, holds me accountable for the fracture that I caused her family, her daughters in tow.

Searching for and finding my birth mother was a betrayal to the family. How could I do this to them? This time all these years later, apparently disparaging my adopted father’s memory, I have found my birth father and it is more than my little sister can take without surfacing, to confront me. She, now trying to resolve her own childhood trauma, so she can keep her cancer at bay, or at least try.

Sitting in my house during her visit, her huge brown eyes searched for answers, and I could see the betrayal that she felt. All these years later, she was looking for something that could wipe away her tremendous hurt. As I cried once again, this time she looking on, I said that I was so very sorry that I had caused her any pain. She didn’t cry. She rallied with a stiff upper lip. She was angry—no, furious—at me, and not at our mother who had lied to all of us for years and years and more years. She was furious at the time it took me to finally rebound and find my way after learning, at 29 years old, that I had been adopted, which had left everyone who I had known before that fateful day, reeling and unsure about the future.

She wanted to know why it mattered so much to me that I find my biological father and sisters. “They aren’t really your sisters. They weren’t there when we were growing up and they don’t know you.” She was betrayed and angry that I had biological sisters, and worse, that I had found them. We had lost so much time, she and I, and now she herself was clinging to her own life. I understood her pain and suffering. I understood her confusion and fear. I was again broken-hearted, for all of it. I was not sorry for finding my biological parents and siblings, but I was sorry she had been so deeply hurt by my need to search for them.

As we sat together, I told her that she was the brave one. I also told her that the sad truth is finding my biological people did not replace the years we had lost, and it did not replace the years we as an adoptive family had spent together, and it also did not replace our time as “sisters,” our jokes, our walks, our connection, but it did break our family apart. The shock, betrayal, and lies broke something in me that I alone could only work through and heal, and that left me alone responsible for the fallout and damage to that family, her family, what had once been our family. I asked her if they had reconciled my absence in any way and no, they had not even talked about it. Somehow to this day, it really remains all on me. There is no forgiveness in that wounded family. Our sister ties had been severed because of lies, so we vowed to move forward being honest with one another, but in the end, not even that was possible. Our window was closing as quickly as it had opened.

My last words to her were those of the Hawaiian forgiveness teaching Ho’oponopono: I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.