“I’m so excited,” Tanya Ellis says while walking along Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on an unexpected journey. “And nervous.” “He’s going to love these, I’m sure,” Tanya says, pulling a photo album out of her bag, and flipping through pages featuring pictures of her birth father holding her as a baby.
Tanya recalls happy memories from before he left when she was five years old and she never heard from him again. “We were told it was due to mental health issues,” Tanya says. That was almost four decades ago, long before we knew what we now know about mental health.
Tanya’s feelings couldn’t be more complicated. “It’s always in the back of your mind," Tanya says. “That there’s something not right with yourself that they leave you.
” While you keep moving forward in life — perhaps like Tanya, lucky enough to have a wonderful family that includes an adopted dad — everything seems to stop when, out of the blue, a stranger calls to say your birth father is looking for you. “I was shocked,” Tanya says. “She kept asking, ‘Are you ok? Are you ok?’ And I’m like, I can’t believe this is happening.
” Yet three days later, Tanya had flown from Ontario to B.C., to visit a hospice facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to meet her birth father for the first time in 38 years.
“I gave him a big, giant hug,” Tanya says. “It was just beautiful. It was really nice.
” If you ask her birth father Glenn Ellis how the reunion was fo.
