62-year-old with a rare illness asked the priest to help find her long-lost family — then she received one text that broke her heart

“If I don't make it, please try to find my parents," Marie Claire Seoane, a resident of Ottawa, El Paso, told Edilberto Lopez, a priest in Texas. Seoane spent 62 years of her life grappling with lots of questions. She didn’t know where her story actually began. Despite receiving all the love she ever needed from her parents, she was aware that they were not her birth parents. And where exactly were her biological parents? She had no idea. 

All she knew was that inside her home hung a painting of the woman who raised her, and that was enough. She never went out looking for answers. But one illness changed everything. The sudden diagnosis of this illness reminded her that time was precious, and she was initiated into a quest to track down her biological family, according to a March 9 report by ABC 7 KVIA and an April 16 report by PEOPLE.

For a long, long time, Seoane believed that her biological parents died in a car accident because that’s what her adoptive parents, Manuel and Elva Seoane, had told her, after adopting her from a Catholic orphanage in Quebec. In April 1983, when she was about 20, her father lay on a hospital bed, dying from cancer. Shortly before he died, he revealed a secret. All these years, they had lied to her. Seoane’s biological parents could be alive. They didn’t tell her, fearing that she would replace them, and partly because she was too young to go on looking for them.

The dream of meeting her original parents never left her mind, as Seoane told PEOPLE. She was listless until August, when life itself propelled her to chase this dream. Doctors diagnosed her with “achalasia.” According to Mayo Clinic, it is a “swallowing condition that affects the tube connecting the mouth and the stomach, called the esophagus. Damaged nerves make it hard for the muscles of the esophagus to squeeze food and liquid into the stomach. Food then collects in the esophagus, sometimes fermenting and washing back up into the mouth.” 

The quest was made even more intense given what she had endured in the past few months, before this diagnosis. A short while ago, she underwent shoulder surgery and a separate neck surgery following a spinal cord injury. All the suffering flung her to do what she had been avoiding for so many years, something she had never done before: find her biological family. As an added support, Priest Lopez encouraged her to go ahead, also paying for her Ancestry DNA kit, which she couldn’t afford. She handed him a notarized letter and copies of adoption papers. Within three months, the results came.

The other day, after that, she received a text from Natalie Billings, a woman from Canada. Seoane dropped to the floor as she read, "You're my grandfather's daughter. You're my mom's sister." She couldn’t stop crying. When she saw a picture Billings had shared, she gasped. It was her dad, Herber Moore. To her disappointment, Billings revealed that Moore passed away in 2002, but Billings' mother and her sister, Valerie, were alive.

Billings disclosed that Seoane was an illegitimate child. The news was saddening. Even the priest warned her that she might not be welcome in her biological family, but she didn’t want to quit trying. Fast forward to today, and the two families are a big part of each other’s lives and are coming closer each day. As for her illness, she has been accepted by doctors at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale and is now running a fundraising campaign via GoFundMe. The episode echoes what Shakespeare said: “All’s well that ends well.”

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