SPANISH FORT, Ala. — Sharon Brammer received a registered letter nearly two years ago that answered 44 years of questions in only five words.

“I have always loved you,” the letter began, and Brammer felt her heart skip.

Penned by a woman named Sandra Snow, the letter recounted the adopted woman’s recently learned information regarding her 1964 birth in Birmingham to an unwed teenager.

“I have always known you loved me,” the letter continued.

Brammer, a nurse practitioner who runs a homeless clinic in Mobile, said the words she read that May morning seemed surreal and lyrical at once. In an instant she said she knew the daughter she’d given up for adoption 44 years earlier had finally found her and harbored no ill will.

Snow, who was born Melissa Denise Whitley, immediately set about putting her birth mother’s guilt to rest.

“I knew in my heart you were a young unwed mother. As a child of the sixties, I understand the societal pressures at the time and the tremendous pressure you must have felt from family and community. In reality, it was probably not a choice; it was a choice made for you.  You were brave and courageous not only because you signed on to this reality, but because you were able to pick yourself up, go on with your life, and make something out of it. That takes courage and grit,” she wrote.

Of course, that realization and understanding took time, Snow wrote, because she has always believed her birth mother never intended for contact to be made.

“I believed (and still do) that you placed me for adoption under a set of conditions that included the fact that I would not have information about you and could not, then, disrupt your life. This kept me from pursuing contact with you for a long, long time,” she wrote.

But one small truth kept gnawing at Snow, who was told all of her life the only instructions left with the social worker who handled her adoption was that her adoptive parents be certain she receive music lessons.

“That single piece of information has defined my life … this is how I knew as a young girl that I was loved. It would never have been communicated if this weren’t the case,” Snow wrote, calling music “my constant, my source of identity and my anchor.”

Today, Snow holds a doctorate and is a choral director at Michigan State University.

“Thank you, Sharon, for giving me a good life. You are brave and courageous, and I consider part of my personal strength and toughness to be rooted in our shared experience, you as the mother, and me as the child,” Snow wrote.

Brammer, who has since reunited with her daughter after more than four decades, said it still amazes her how one, simple letter could change her life so quickly, but it did.

“I wondered. I wondered every day where she was and how she was, and now I don’t have to wonder anymore. All I have to do is pick up the phone and hear her voice on the other end, and that is a miracle I never thought was possible,” Brammer said.

Editor’s Note: November is National Adoption Month. This was the final story in a three-part series on one woman’s experience.