A mother and a daughter, who had never seen each other in the flesh, were reunited after 51 years apart. As word spread around the airport of what was about to unfold, a crowd gathered and watched as Donna Geil, 67, of Brownsville, embraced her long-lost daughter Cricket Koch, 51, of Garland, Texas. “They’re like two peas in a pod,” an onlooker said. “My daughter sat next to her (Cricket) on the plane,” another spectator, her eyes filled with tears, said. “I don’t know why I’m crying, it’s just such an amazing story.”
Geil and Koch, their eyes also wet with tears, held each other for several minutes before Koch met two other virtual strangers: Geil’s husband, Jim, 66, and her other daughter, Kasundra Pierson, 41. Koch greeted each of them with a warm hug. “My heart is pounding,” she said. “The wait on the tarmac seemed like forever.” “I always wanted a sister,” Pierson said. “It would have been nice to have her all along but I’m so happy that I’ve got her now.”
Back in 1959, in Lancaster, Calif., 16-year-old Geil became pregnant by the man she thought she was going to marry. “I thought I was madly in love,” Geil said. “When I told the father, I thought he was going to say, ‘Let’s get married.’ But he took off.” Geil said she knew she couldn’t properly care for a child and neither could her mother, who was raising Geil’s younger siblings at the time. She decided to give the baby up for adoption. “I knew I had to do it and I don’t regret it, I wanted her to have a good life,” Geil said. “But I always prayed for her and asked God to give her a good home.”
Koch grew up as the only child in a Air Force family that lived in Panama, Albuquerque, N.M., and Texas. From a young age, her parents told her she had been adopted. She was in seventh or eighth grade, she said, when she first felt the urge to try to find her mother. “When I told my dad, he teared up,” Koch said. “ ‘But I’m your dad,’ he said. So I decided that, out of respect to him, I wouldn’t search for her.” After her adoptive father died, Koch decided the time had come to try to find her biological mother. “I’ve wanted this for almost 50 years, so I decided I had to do it,” she said. “I would have never been able to forgive myself if she had died before I got a chance to contact her.”
Koch found Geil thanks to a company named Worldwide Tracers. Last October, the mother and daughter spoke on the telephone for the first time. “I heard her voice and I just said, ‘Hello, it’s me,’ ” Koch said. “I teared up and I was trembling on the inside. It was just a feeling of overwhelming joy.” Mother and daughter talked for three hours that night. Both agree it was almost like they’d never been apart. “It felt like we’d known each other forever,” Geil said. “It was never awkward, it was comfortable. … Like a mother and daughter talking should be.” They’ve been in daily contact ever since.
Koch said she never felt resentment toward her biological mother for putting her up for adoption. In fact, she admires Geil for having the strength to do what was best for her, Koch said. “Having had kids myself, I think it would have been torture to give up part of myself like that,” she said. “But because of her, I never wanted for anything and I’ve had a great life.” After giving birth to her second daughter, Kasundra, Geil said, she began to wish that the baby had her sister by her side. “It was then I realized how important children were,” Geil said. “But I couldn’t try and find her because I respected her adoptive parents and because I was so thankful for what they did for her.”
Koch will spend nine days with the new branch of her family. She has never visited Oregon before, and because “she’s a bit of a city girl,” Geil, who lives on a farm, said she’s going to introduce her daughter to rural ways. “I’m going to take her out to shoot some coyotes,” Pierson added with a laugh. “We’re going to go to the coast, visit Crater Lake and everything else,” said Jim Geil, Donna’s husband. “Basically we’re trying to cram 51 years into about a week.”
Asked why she invited members of the media to the airport reunion, such a seemingly intimate moment, Koch said she hoped it would encourage other people to seek long-lost family members. “My message is that even 51 year later, you can still do it. There are people out there who can help you,” she said. “I’m just glad other people are getting to hear about it,” Jim Geil added. “You hear so many negative stories. It’s always nice to share a positive one.”