Judy Marks Williams doesn’t have much time to find her brother.
The 59-year-old Georgia woman is battling stage 4 lung cancer, which is now ravaging her entire body.
“I have it in my brain, in my liver, a lot of my bones,” she told NBC’s Atlanta affiliate WXIA.
With what little time she has left, Williams hopes to track down a brother she hasn’t seen since she and her siblings were separated and adopted into different families more than 55 years ago.
Williams was the youngest of the seven children born to Nancy Doris Fletcher Marks and James Edward Marks. She was 2 when she and her two youngest brothers were taken from their Aragon, Georgia, home.
"Four of them stayed with a blood relative, and was raised by them, but they couldn't take all of us, so three of us got adopted out," she said.
Marks and her then 5-year-old brother, Nathan, were adopted as a pair, but she doesn’t know what became of her other brother, William “Billy” David Marks. He was 8 and she was 3 the last time they saw each other in 1961.
"He kind of looked around to see where he was, and he told us, 'I'll be back,'" she said.
After battling cancer for more than a year, Marks fears she doesn’t have much time left to find Billy.
She reconnected with her other siblings when she was 17, and the group remains “fairly close.” Billy remains the missing piece.
"My time is getting shorter, and if he's going to be found, now is the time to do it," she said.
Williams’ daughter, Charity, put the only photo the family has of Billy up on her Facebook page and the post has since been shared more than 1,000 times as of Friday morning. The family also plans to have DNA samples drawn in hopes they will help connect them to Billy or any children he may have had.
William David Marks would be 63 years old today. He was born on June 28, 1954.
Williams said she thinks about him constantly.
"As you're growing up, and you know that you're adopted and you know there's others out there, you know a lot of people you look at, you might see a feature and you think, 'I wonder if that's them?’”