Person on the Page

In my earliest memories, I live with my parents in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. I’m four years old.

My life began in the 1960s. Dr. Spock tended to my health, Dr. Seuss oversaw my early education, and my entertainment was provided by cartoons and reruns of I Love Lucy.

Born to parents who were in their 40s, I was their only child. By the age of four, I had come to know and rely on the well-established, predictable routines of my parents.

What I didn’t know was that over a hundred miles away in a house much like mine, a nine-year-old girl lived with her parents and three siblings. I didn’t know, and wouldn’t discover until I was 64, that she was my half-sister. My father was also her father.

…..

The popular genealogical database Ancestry reports that approximately 33% of people who purchase its DNA test to determine their ethnic heritage discover that they have close relatives of whom they were unaware. Men learn that they fathered children with their high school sweethearts, and that the sweethearts kept their pregnancies secret and surrendered the children for adoption. People find cousins they knew nothing about, born through the dalliances of their uncles or great-uncles.

Some, like me, find out they have a half-sibling.

Ancestry warns that when such a discovery is made, contact with the newly revealed half-brother or half-sister should be initiated carefully. A messaging system on the site facilitates communication. Siblings may be shocked to learn the identities of their biological fathers, and they may have family members who feel the shock as well. 

Introduce yourself briefly, Ancestry advises. Be patient. Allow the sibling time to absorb the news. Don’t send multiple messages urging them to respond. Be willing to wait. And be willing to accept that the sibling may never reply.

After the initial shock, Ancestry explains, the sibling will probably be thrilled about the discovery.

When I purchased a DNA analysis kit and submitted my saliva sample, the person Ancestry identified as my closest living relative was someone whose name I didn’t recognize. Linda was listed as my half-sister, with whom I was a 25% match of paternal DNA.

I wrote a brief message to Linda, asking if she thought it was possible that we had the same father and if she would be willing to help me find an explanation for how we could be sisters.  I was prepared to give her time to process her shock and decide if she wanted to communicate with me. When she responded almost immediately, I was the one who was shocked.

“Nothing would surprise me,” she replied.

Linda told me she had always suspected that something was amiss in her family. Of her parents’ four children, she was the different one. Her complexion and physiognomy made her stand out from her brothers and sister, who had physical traits in common. As she was growing up, her siblings teased her, telling her that she had been adopted. She’d always felt that something was wrong. She had hoped to find answers on Ancestry.

When she shared with me information about her mother, I was able to research to find an explanation. As young adults, my father and her mother had lived in the same small town. They had married before my father went overseas during World War II and divorced soon after he returned in 1946. Those facts explained how the two of them could have been together in 1954, the year Linda was born, at least long enough to conceive a child.

Not long after we made our first contact, Linda and I met.

Ancestry is right. Meeting someone who is both a stranger and strangely familiar is thrilling. She and I look much more alike than she and the half-siblings with whom she grew up. Our personalities are similar, and we have similar interests.

When I looked at her for the first time, I was overwhelmed. How arresting it was to look into eyes that were so like the ones I see in the mirror. How amazing to encounter someone who looked, talked and behaved so much like my father.

Since that first meeting, we have gotten to know each other. We have stayed in contact, and we have even gone on a trip together.

Now the question arises. Where do we go from here?  Linda is 70, and I am 65.  We have both lived full lives that never intersected until now. So, what do we do?  Do we try to merge our two families into one, hoping that our relatives will be as happy as we are about our discovery? Do we try to cultivate our sisterhood on our own, just the two of us?

Should we just be thankful that fate has brought us together and blessed us with a close relative during a phase of life when most people are facing the slow attrition of their close families? Just be satisfied that life has given us a gain while most people our age are suffering losses?

Since finding Linda, I have read several accounts of half-siblings who found each other as adults.  They describe the shock of discovery, the excitement of the first encounter, the process of learning about each other and identifying genetically-determined similarities.

But these accounts don’t follow the half-siblings very far beyond their discovery. They don’t track the trajectory of the new relationship past its early stages.  After meeting and getting to know each other, what comes next? 

Ancestry was right.  First shock. Then thrill.  But then what?

…..

When I was 12 years old, my father died. All that I’d learned to rely on as a four-year-old unraveled. For a long time, I engaged in magical thinking, waiting for his return. The notion that he was gone had to be some odd mistake.

As a teenager living with my mother in the house where the three of us once lived, I sometimes expected to hear the sound of the garage door at the time he had always come home from work in the evening. Sometimes I almost thought I heard it grinding open.

Meanwhile, many miles away, that other girl was now 17.  She didn’t know that her biological father had lived and died and that she could never know him.

As the years passed, I gave up magical thinking. But I always felt my father’s absence. I felt it through adulthood and into my later years. I carried the ghost of that expectation, a glimmer of hopeless belief in his imminent return.  

…..

For all those years, I longed for my father to reappear. Now that I’m in my 60s, is that what has happened?  Does Linda’s arrival embody my father’s return? Is this what I’ve been waiting for all this time?

If so, sadly, it’s the return of a stranger. Learning that my father had a child before me, someone he either didn’t know about or kept a secret, has made clear to me that I never really knew him. Finding out that there were parts of his life about which I knew nothing has caused me to question whether we can really know anyone, even those closest to us.

I cannot know with any assurance, for instance, how this discovery has affected Linda. I imagine her sadness. I think I hear it in her voice. A sense of loss because she never knew, and now can never know, her biological father. 

I imagine anger. Why was she never told about her real father? I fear she suppresses her anger when she talks to me about the man we now acknowledge as our father. I imagine she thinks about how her life would have been different—better—if she had known him.

Now, as Linda lives out the last phase of her life, the truth has arrived.  Has it arrived too late?

…..

I have searched for a cultural metanarrative that offers a model of siblings who find each other in their old age. Where is the story that shows us how to navigate the changes wrought by our discovery?  I have found none. 

The ancient Greek dramatists, who wrote long before genetic science made such situations almost commonplace, left behind no iconic stories of sisters who meet for the first time late in life. All I can think of is poor Oedipus, blind to the truth, making his tragic decisions because he does not know who his parents are.  

Stories of long-lost siblings who reunite exist, but none that I have found portrays the height of euphoria nor the depth of sorrow endured by those who meet for the first time late in life.

My relationship with Linda alters not only my future, but also my past. I can no longer recall the years before my father died in the way I once did. Now I see my childhood in light of the fact that his other child was out there, growing up in another family, unaware of us. 

Linda calls her childhood a lie. I suppose mine was, too.

We have no guidebook for becoming sisters, no set of rules for managing this disruption to our sense of who we have been and who we are. We are left to invent a strategy for approaching our new circumstances.

Two late-life sisters just getting to know each other, we will now work together to create the rest of our story.   

Cover Photo: AndPam61 at PIxabay