On a day filled with “Thanks, Mom!” social media posts, engineered more for the brand than the mother, comes a story equal parts heartbreaking and life-affirming.

Randy Foye has not seen his mother since 1989, presumed dead since disappearing after his kindergarten graduation. Foye’s father had been killed when he was 2 in a motorcycle accident, and the Newark native was raised by his grandmother.

He would ask where his mom, Regina Diane Foye, went, and no one could answer him, with some family members offering excuses like, “She’s on vacation.”

“I am thinking to myself now, like how could she?” Foye told ESPN in a tragic, uplifting feature. “Why would she go on vacation and not take your kids?”

Foye had held out a faint sort of hope until this fall, when the married father of three, who played last season with the Nets, got a phone call. Dr. Jason Graham, of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the City of New York, wanted to speak with him about his mother, who Foye had later learned was a drug dealer. Graham had read about Regina’s disappearance and wanted to investigate, suspecting a connection to a 1990 Jane Doe case in Brooklyn that was unsolved.

After DNA testing of Foye and his family, and through fingerprints that were on file from when Regina had been incarcerated, Graham called Foye on Sept. 19.

Buried in Kings County in Brooklyn was Regina Foye.

“He couldn’t go into details,” Randy Foye said. “[But it was an] overdose. She was found in an apartment building where they pick up and buy drugs. It was known for distribution of drugs. January of 1990.”

Now she resides in an urn in Foye’s New Jersey home. She did not abandon her son, and Randy has finally found closure.

“This is definitely a happy ending,” Foye, an 11-year NBA veteran and current free agent, told ESPN. “Yeah, you didn’t get the Disney and the ‘I just won a Super Bowl’ ending. But all that time of just debating and questioning yourself and questioning your mom’s morals, thinking that she left and didn’t come back … now you know that she was there all along but she ran into a little problem that cost her her life.

“But at the end of the day, she was there. The whole time.”

It’s not the ending Randy Foye would want, but it’s an ending. Before his senior year at Villanova, he got a tattoo on his chest of a portrait of his mother — “This is my mom’s tombstone,” he said. Now, he has a proper one.

“It’s like a movie that has finally come full circle,” his wife, Christine Foye, said. “To grow up and never having your mother … the circumstances are just unbelievable.”