A relative I'd lost touch with found me online and sent me a gift — the only photos I've ever seen of me and my mom

• I connected with my long-lost cousin on Facebook.
• She reminded me of my childhood and sent me some old photos.

When someone named Rosemary began following my posts on Facebook, I was floored by the woman's kindness and constant support. She shared my writing and left encouraging comments.

But it was only when my aunt mentioned that Rosemary was actually a cousin I'd lost contact with that I reached out to her. We messaged on Facebook and exchanged cell numbers. My cousin Rosemary's mother, my great aunt, was one member of the extended family who helped to raise my brother and me when my mother could no longer take care of us due to her struggle with addiction.

We reconnected, and I was reminded of my childhood

When we finally caught up, Rosemary told me she had married, which was why I hadn't recognized her last name. She also had stepchildren. I had four kids of my own. For years, she had followed me to see where I wound up. Hearing the sound of her voice brought me back to my childhood.

Once again, I was five and rummaging through her perfume collection. I remembered spaghetti dinners with my Italian family and bathtubs in the kitchen sink. The sound of "Nadia's Theme" from the soap opera "The Young and the Restless" carried across decades, and I was back in Rosemary's backyard smelling roses from my aunt's rose bush.

Before we hung up, she told me she would send pictures when she could. She had held onto them in a box.

The pictures came a week or so after we had talked. They were filled with moments from my childhood. I flipped through and couldn't believe it when I saw them — pictures of me at my baptism. The mother I never knew, the one who died of a drug overdose when I was 7 and she was 29, was holding me. The father who left me three times, once in a private message on Facebook, was standing next to her, vowing to raise me before family and God.

She sent me the only pictures I have of me and my mom

We were taken from my mother when we were young, so I had no memories of her. She was a ghost who was never able to care for me. The memories and pictures I had of her did not include me. They were stashed in a box in the basement, reminders of someone I had never really known.

The one time my mother tried to see me, my foster mother, Esther, wouldn't let her in. I must have been 4 or 5.

"I'm sorry," Esther said when she told me years later, "but she looked sick, and I didn't want your first memory of her to be that." I wasn't mad; instead, I was grateful. Seeing my mother sick from addiction was something I am thankful I never had to do. My brother, who was three years older and had a remarkable memory, witnessed more than I did.

My mother left for California with her boyfriend, and while I vowed to go and see her when I turned 14, I never got the chance due to her death. No one knew when she showed up on the steps of Esther's home in the projects that my mother would die of an overdose on the other side of the country just a few months after turning 29, and just a short time before she was set to enter rehab.

I reached out to Rosemary to thank her and to let her know that the pictures she sent were the only ones I'd ever seen of me with my mother. Then I cried. She had given me a gift — I now had one of the few things that proved that my mother was actually my mother and that she loved me.

My long-long cousin had allowed me to glimpse a part of my life I'd never experienced. Seeing my mother in such a different way than I always had — not as an addict or a ghost, but as a mother who wanted nothing more than to raise her children — was healing in so many ways.