Grief gives way to joy: the extraordinary tale of how a daughter finally came to know her mother

This is really something: the story of a woman who never got to see her birth mother, until she went to her wake. 

From the Buffalo News:

  When Jackie Oddo came downstairs on the morning of Dec. 13, she noticed that her husband seemed oddly quiet and still as he read The Buffalo News in the kitchen of their Town of Tonawanda home.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

Bart Oddo walked over to his wife and laid the obituary section in front of her.

“Oh my God,” Jackie Oddo said, thunderstruck by what she saw.

“Marsha L. Straubinger, artist, dedicated volunteer. Aug. 17, 1942 — Dec. 11, 2011,” the obit read.

It was Oddo’s birth mother. The woman who had given her up for adoption on a cold December day at a Buffalo hospital 50 years ago. The woman Jackie Oddo had reached out to but never got a chance to meet in person.

“Oh my God,” Jackie Oddo recalled she kept saying.

“I was like … I just couldn’t function,” she recounted.

Oddo realized that she had to go to the wake. She needed to meet the people who knew this woman whom she herself had never gotten a chance to get to know.

“This was my only opportunity to find out anything now,” she thought. “I had to take that step and do it.”

Read more, including how she discovered her mother’s identity — and what happened when she went to the wake.  It’s just beautiful.