Sisters reunited after 47 years

Sharon Sachse waited nervously at Colorado Springs Airport on Wednesday for the sister she hadn't seen in 47 years.

"I hope she likes me," she said.

Sachse held up a sign in case they didn't recognize each other. And when Theresa Reynolds finally appeared, the two women hugged and cried together for a long time.

"It's bittersweet," Reynolds said. "It's sweet because we get to be together, but it's bitter because people kept us apart. We hate what they did to us. We didn't have each other to depend on."

"They" are their parents.

Reynolds, 58, and Sachse, 51, are half sisters who share the same mother. Reynolds remembers when Sachse was born. They shared a room for four years.

The girls were 11 and 4 when they were torn apart. Sachse's father left with her, said the women, while Reynolds was left with their mother. Their late mother apparently never tried to find her long-lost younger daughter.

"My mom was not meant to be a mother," said Reynolds, of New Jersey. "She didn't know how to love, or anything."

Reynolds bounced from one relative's house to another as she grew up. Meanwhile, Sachse moved to Colorado with her father, who remarried.

Her stepmother, she said, didn't like his baggage, and they abandoned Sachse at Sacred Heart Home orphanage in Pueblo.

Both women married and have raised families of their own, but Reynolds always wondered about the little sister she had lost. Sachse was so young when the girls were separated that she didn't realize she had a sister.

Searching on the Internet for the pruned branches of her family tree, Reynolds found Sachse in Beulah. That was about six months ago.

It took two weeks to draw up enough courage to call, and then Sachse hung up on her.

"I thought she was crazy," Sachse said of the women claiming to be a sister she didn't remember.

Reynolds tried again, and begged her to listen. She knew the names of Sachse's mother and father. She knew details of her childhood that a stranger shouldn't know. Sachse was intrigued but not convinced.

"I was still kind of skeptical until she started sending pictures," Sachse said.

Reynolds sent photos of the two girls together.

The women began talking on the phone every weekend. They play it down, but Rick Sachse, Sharon's husband of 25 years, said they talk "a lot."

They talk about the family members that Sachse doesn't know. They talk about their memories. They talk about their own children.

They both love seafood, hate to wear shoes and love John Wayne.

"It's kind of strange we had things in common when we never really knew each other," Sachse said. "She told me my mother loved John Wayne, too."

At the bottom of the hand-lettered sign she held at the airport, Sachse wrote the word "sis." And the pair certainly seemed like sisters as they strolled out to Sachse's car. They held hands and the words tumbled out in bunches, as they easily left a half century of estrangement in their wake.

Call the writer at 636-0226.