Some people are born knowing their family. Others go looking — and it is often the ones who go looking who love the hardest, because they know what it means to have finally found what they were searching for. Tonight’s honoree is one who went looking.

She carried a question in her heart: Who are my people? Where do I come from? For a long time, that question waited for its answer. And when the answer finally came — when the connection to this family was made — she did not linger at the edge, wondering whether she truly belonged. She did not wait to be invited twice. Where most of us would have felt shy, uncertain, reluctant to impose on people we had only just come to know, she did the opposite. She stepped all the way in.

And then she showed up. Not in words — in miles.

She gathered her entire family, loaded them into a vehicle, and drove them from Canada to Georgia, and onward to Florida, simply to be among us. When we gathered to lay our beloved Aunt Pearl to rest, she was there. And when sorrow visited this family again — when Aunt Pat passed — she made that same long journey from Canada to Georgia a second time, her family beside her, to stand with us in our grief.

No one asked her to do these things. She did them because that is what family does. It shows up. It crosses borders and long stretches of highway to be present for the joy and the heartache alike. That is the very spirit this award was created to honor — the one who, having found her family, gave herself to it completely.