LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- They were a perfect match.

Anna Kasper, who took care of nursing home patients, delivered pizza and cleaned offices, had a down-to-earth goodness, a love of life, a spirit of giving.

Connie Culp, who waited tables and painted restaurants before she became the recipient of the first near-total face transplant in the United States, rose above life's hardships, and kept her sense of humor no matter how rough things got.

Today, their connection becomes public.

Anna's husband and children revealed this weekend that the Lakewood woman was the donor for the groundbreaking transplant Cleveland Clinic doctors performed in 2008.

The Kaspers made the announcement to give Anna her place in history.

What prompted them to talk about the wife and mother they desperately miss were surprising similarities between the two women, which the family discovered as they learned more about Connie's life after her surgery.

"Connie's like Anna in a lot of ways," says Ron Kasper, Anna's husband, "as far as her personality and how much she enjoys life and how she smiles and is still able to have such a great attitude after everything she's been through and she takes everything in stride.

"She's a very special person. And Anna was, too."

The more they learned about Connie, the more they hoped to meet her.

"I always felt a connection," says Becky Kasper, Anna's 23-year-old daughter.

"We wanted to do it for awhile," Ron, 52, adds. "We just never got up the courage to make the call. We needed time to recover. And Connie needed time to recover."

On Saturday, Connie and Anna's family met for the first time -- privately -- talking, laughing and crying for 90 minutes.

"It was kind of awkward at first, because we didn't know what to say," Connie said Sunday, back at her home in rural southeastern Ohio, in the small town of Unionport.

"But it was great. They're just really nice people. It's awesome, how much we have in common."

Ron and his son remodel homes and paint for a living.

Connie and her husband had a painting business and remodeled their home together.

The Kaspers had a grandchild who was about a year old at the time of the transplant.

Connie did, too.

The two women were born 14 months apart.

Their skin color is incredibly similar.

Their blood type, identical.

It was Ron and the couple's three children who agreed to donate Anna's face back in December 2008, the day after she stepped onto their back porch, lit up a cigarette and collapsed in the cold.

No one knew anything was wrong until Junior, the family's dog, began scratching at the back door.

By the time their son, Ronald, now 21, found Anna slumped over at the bottom of the back steps she was purple. Paramedics revived her on the way to Lakewood Hospital, but tests showed what the family already knew. After about 20 minutes without oxygen, the 44-year-old woman was brain dead.

The family had no doubt about Anna's wishes.

"She'd give her time. She'd give her money. She gave a lot of things she didn't have to other people," says her husband. "When they asked about the [organ] donation, we knew it was what she would want to do."

So of course, they agreed to give away her heart, her kidneys, her liver, her eyes.

Previous Plain Dealer coverage

Woman who underwent first near-total face transplant in U.S. meets life with joy and humor

When a donation specialist from the Cleveland Clinic, called the house later that day to ask for Anna's face, the family sat down around the dining room table and decided in minutes there was only one thing to do.

"Everything fit together so well," says Ron.

"We knew that Anna wished to be cremated, so there wasn't going to be an open casket. And that Anna was already an organ donor. And that Anna was a match. And for there to be a match was a miracle in itself.

"But the overriding factor was we knew it was what Anna would've wanted," says Ron, his voice breaking as he fights back tears.

"My mom would say, 'Hell if I can't use it and somebody else can, they can have it,' " Becky says.

And Connie needed a face.

After her common-law husband shot her in 2004, Connie was so disfigured, children ran from her and called her a monster.

Her nose was missing. So was her right eye, her lower eyelids, her upper lip, her top teeth. She had to breathe through a hole in her throat and eat through a tube. Most of her vision was gone.

On Dec. 10, 2008, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic spent 23 hours removing skin and muscle, veins and arteries, teeth and bone from Anna and sewing them onto what remained of Connie Culp's face, surgery that changed her life.

Connie, 47, has been thanking her donor from the moment she stepped out on the public stage in 2009, never able to name her because she didn't know who she was.

Today she can.

"She's the perfect recipient," Ron says, quoting his 24-year-old daughter, Sarah, after Saturday's meeting with Connie, "because they had so much in common. She's just so full of life and has such a great personality."

Connie doesn't look like Anna because their bone structure is different.

"But I can definitely see the resemblance in the nose," Becky says. "I know she's smiling down on this, that she's very happy."

"In the season of giving," says Ron, "it's the best possible gift."

In Anna's case, more than 50 people benefited from her donated organs and tissue.

Ron stifles his tears, smiles and quotes Anna again.

"Hell," he says, "if you can't use it, somebody else can."