By the time you hit your 90s, you probably figure that you've already seen it all and been shocked as many times as you ever will be for the rest of your life. Fortunately for these two men, there was one big surprise left.
95-year-old Florida resident Norman Cooper answered his phone one day and was immediately pelted with a barrage of very personal questions about his past by a complete stranger from Canada.
"'Are you Norman Henry Cooper?' I said, 'Yes.'
'Were you born in Croyden, Surrey?' I said, 'Who the hell are you?.'"
As it turned out, the person asking the questions was his 90-year-old little brother, Gerry Cooper.
So how did their reunion come to be? Five years earlier, Gerry's son Ian decided to find out more about his unknown grandfather by looking through his father's family tree on Ancestry.ca and found out there that he had a long lost uncle that no one knew about.
"[I was] never really thinking he'd still be alive, because from the records that were found he was born in 1921," said Ian, who was very happy to be wrong.
When Ian and family sat then 85-year-old Gerry down to share some news with him, Gerry assumed the worst and thought that someone was getting a divorce.
With 85 years to make up, you wouldn't guess that they were long-lost-anythings after sitting with the men for a few minutes. Gerry, who claims to be the good looking one, was ecstatic that the five-year hunt wasn't for naught. They were able to paint a more complete picture of their father as well, finding out between the two of them that he was married at least three times as far as they knew.
"To go through life for 85 years, and not know you had a brother around, and then all of a sudden he pops out of the blue...it's bloody amazing."
Gerry always had questions about his father, but his family refused to answer them while he was growing up, citing that his mother would only say, "We don't talk about that."
