Person on the Page

During the final year of his life, my father did everything right. By following a strict diet, he lost weight. He exercised daily and avoided stress. He rekindled the romance in his marriage. He looked and seemed to feel healthy.

Then one summer morning, a neighbor discovered him lying unconscious on the ground in our yard. By the time emergency medical help arrived, it was too late. At age 57, he was gone. 

Following the funeral, family members focused on me, his 12-year-old only child.  As you get older, they said, you’ll have to watch what you eat.  Keep your cholesterol level low.  Exercise and maintain a healthy lifestyle. You’ve probably inherited your father’s heart problem.

For the next several decades, I worried over my own heart, trying to stay healthy, watching for signs of trouble. Heart disease killed my father at an early age, and it could kill me, too.

My father’s heart and mine were always connected in the story I told myself about his life.

. . . . .

Recently, I caught the genealogy bug. I traced my lineage all the way back to Massachusetts Bay Colony and discovered a few colorful characters on my family tree. I purchased a DNA test kit and sent it to Ancestry for analysis. Hoping to expand my knowledge of my family story, I wanted to locate living relatives with whom I could communicate.

What I discovered from the DNA analysis jolted me. I learned that I have a half-sister. Someone I’d never heard of while growing up as an only child in my tidy nuclear family—Dad, Mom, and me.

The DNA evidence allowed me to uncover the fact that five years before I was born, my father conceived a child with a married woman. A daughter who grew up thinking that the man to whom her mother was married was her father.

During the years I was growing up, my father had another child. She was out there somewhere, and I never knew. He may not have known, either. Perhaps the woman never told him. Perhaps he knew about his other daughter but never told anyone. In either case, he kept his relationship with the married woman a secret.

When he died, he took his secret with him.  It remained a secret until I discovered my half-sister.  

. . . . .

Imagine going for an eye exam and having a refraction test. Think of staring through the circular openings in the phoropter as the optometrist flips lenses into place and tells you to look through them.  One lens makes your vision blurry.  Then the optometrist flips a different lens into place.  Suddenly, you see clearly.

That’s what it was like for me, learning about my father’s other child. I had always understood him through the blur of his illness. Then suddenly I saw clearly.  

For many years, I saw my father’s life through the lens I had created, believing that he died due to a genetic predisposition to heart disease. His genes, combined with his diet and lifestyle, led to an irreversible problem. His story was as simple as that.

Now that I see his life through the lens of his secret, the story has changed.

I remember his silence in our home. His unwillingness to talk about himself or his past. The emotional distance he maintained between himself and Mother and me. 

I recall his occasional negative moods. Periodic irritability Mother attributed to his memories of his experiences in the Army during World War II. Sometimes a melancholy so heavy it could be felt throughout the house.

Looking at family photos from my childhood, I notice that he rarely looked into the camera when his picture was taken. He gazed to the right or left, into the distance, as if he were thinking about something, as if his mind was somewhere else. Or he looked down, as if he had something to hide.

. . . . .

Memory is unreliable, I know. Especially those as distant as my recollections of my father. I may be changing or augmenting what I remember of him in light of my discovery.  Maybe I’m misinterpreting what I observed about him as evidence of the secret he kept. 

Still, though, the things I remember seem to make more sense since I learned about his other child.

But although I have uncovered this secret, questions still prod me. Was he unaware of the existence of his other child? Or did he know about her?

If he knew, did he cope as well as he could with the fact that he didn’t take responsibility for her? That he made no effort to be a father to this other daughter? That he stood by in silence as another man raised her?  

Did he love her—the woman with whom he was apparently having an affair? As he lived in our home with Mother and me, was he missing her? Was he lamenting his absence in his other daughter’s life? Did he live the rest of his life wishing things could be different?

My father’s heart and mine are connected still in this new story I tell myself about his life. But now they join in sorrow for the absence of his daughter—my sister—in our lives.

In the new story I tell myself, I recognize that lived experiences may exert as much influence as genetics in matters of life and death.  I imagine the effects on my father of carrying his secret, if that’s what it was, alone throughout his life. 

I wonder if his was truly a heart crippled by physical disease that led to his early death. Or was it one plagued by painful circumstances?

A heart broken.

Cover Photo: Pixabay