This story just about made me cry.

[kayakjohnny]

Well, the truth is that it did make me cry. For several reasons....

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39026113/ns/today-relationships/?gt1=43001


After 41 years, Nurse Meets Dying Father She Never Knew


Wanda Rodriguez never knew her father growing up. Victor Peraza split from her mother just months after she was born and was never a part of their lives. By chance, the New York nurse was reunited with her dad some 41 years after she last laid eyes on him as an infant.

But sadly, just as Rodriguez is getting to know her father and catch up on lost years, cancer threatens to take Peraza away from her again.

Rodriguez, assistant head nurse at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, N.Y., was discussing new admissions with a doctor Aug. 25 when she heard her long-lost father's name. And even though she had not seen so much as a photo of her dad growing up, she knew the name.

She made a bee-line for the patient’s bed.

“I walked into the room and he looked at me and I saw his light eyes and I kind of knew at that moment,” Rodriguez told TODAY's Lester Holt on Monday. “I just wanted to make sure, so I asked him if he had any children, and he said, ‘I have a daughter named Gina and a daughter named Wanda.’

“The minute I heard I just burst into tears and ran out of the room,” Rodriguez said, choked up with emotion as she related the story.




Please read the whole thing if you can. And check out the photos.

It is such a bittersweet story.

But a lot of sweet.

[Chan790]

1. Very touching. n/t

[Brickbat]

2. I know a man, Bill, whose father walked out on the family when Bill was 10. Bill got a call 45 years

later; it was his dad calling up out of the blue. Oddly enough, Bill's mom, the abandoned wife, had died a few months before the phone call, and Bill's dad didn't know. It was disruptive and painful and bitter and sweet, and through all the visits and phone calls, Bill just grinned like a 10-year-old who got his daddy back.

[kayakjohnny]

3. Wow!

Damn, I'm amazed at what people go through in cases like this.

Good for Bill and all the others like him in this world.

[Brickbat]

4. It was pretty amazing.

Bill's dad then died a couple years later. I know Bill had a lot of good closure from the whole thing. His older sister was 15 when the dad left; his younger brother was 5, and his younger sister was an infant. Their reactions reflected, I think, how old they were when the dad left. Older sister was very bitter and had trouble forgiving when Dad came back. Younger brother was pleased to have a father he knew but didn't have a lot of pain from the whole thing. Younger sister had lived all her life without a father, and was interested in getting to know him but felt little loss when he died, I think.

When Bill was 10, he was sitting on the front porch the evening his dad left. His dad turned to him and said, "Take care of your mother." And walked away. He was a salesman, so Bill didn't think anything was odd about it. But then the dad was gone for 45 years.

[blue neen]

5. They showed that story on ABC News tonight.

Mr. Peraza is very ill and trying to make it to his 61st birthday this week. It will be the first birthday that the father and daughter spend together.

Very touching.