In 2003 my bonus sister, my niece, and my nephew came to visit me in Sweden. They came for New Year and it was very snowy and cold – minus 19°C!
Two weeks ago, my niece was in Norway for work and spent a wonderful week with us. She is now the age I was in the above photograph and is a wonderful, amazing woman. A wife and a mother with a demanding career (a robotics engineer for an oil drilling company). Her journey home took an awful 48 hours but she took it all in her stride.
She went to several museums and a nature reserve, ate traditional Swedish dishes, and did her 200th Park Run on the day she left. One day we visited all my favourite spots in town.
Then this last weekend, my biological nephew visited from Estonia.
It was a big thing for both of us. My father married and divorced in the 1950s. For a devout Irish Catholic family, it was a huge shame, and after he married my mother it was never spoken about. I knew I had a half-brother and sister but that was the extent of it. In the 1990s I found my brother by chance when applying for a job. Later my niece and sister (both sadly have since passed away) contacted me via Facebook. My niece contacted her brother to say that she had found me, so he connected too. On Saturday this week, I finally met him. He moved to Estonia recently so now lives fairly close by. I keep thinking that my father (who died when I was a teenager) probably never imagined that his daughter and his grandson would meet all those years later in Northern Europe
