“REUNITED AND IT THRILLS SO GOOD.”

“REUNITED AND IT THRILLS SO GOOD.” Getting the family together for the holidays will have special significance this season for Millie Watts. On September 12, the Eskaton Roseville Manor resident was surprised by a secretly orchestrated reunion with her younger sister, Patty Geayson, from whom she has been separated for more than 30 years.

 

Nearly two years in the making, the staff of Eskaton’s affordable apartment community used Google searches, genealogy websites and old-fashioned letter writing to eventually track down Patty in Merced, California. With little coaxing required, the surprise reunion was scheduled and tickets purchased for Patty’s train and bus rides to Roseville. For both sisters it would become, literally, a Thrill of a Lifetime -- the theme of Eskaton’s initiative to help make dreams come true for its residents.

 

“We lost touch after our mom died,” Patty explained, adding. “But I thought about her all the time.” The emotional reunion was celebrated with dozens of Millie’s neighbors, her surrogate family of “brothers and sisters” at Eskaton.

 

Beyond the remarkable Thanksgiving treat for Millie, 74, and Patty, 65, the impending family gathering also will reunite the sisters’ with two older brothers, Alfonso, 88, and Robert 87. Thus extending the Thrill to epic proportions, since the two brothers, living in Merced and Redding, respectively, had lost touch as well. For the first time in three decades, the reunited siblings (the four of 11 children still living) will be together as family. “I could not be any happier,” Millie declares. “Mom would be so thrilled.”