...A few days after News Years my brother (Jim) called me with some news. He began to tell me that a week or two before Christmas he was putting our last name through Google and found information about our long estranged father. It was a two month old obituary and included a picture. He said he told our mom as soon as he found it and they went back and forth as to whether to tell me now or wait until the holidays were over. Since it had been several months already they didn't feel the urgency and didn't want to ruin my holidays so they decided to wait. Once Jim found out he decided to go on Facebook to see if he could find any of the relatives mentioned in the obituary. He 'friended' them and got responses in return. The story was my father had been ill and died in the home he lived in with his wife. I told my brother I wasn't angry with the decision they made to delay telling me. Jim and I have had each other's backs our whole lives and we will always protect each other as best we could from being hurt. I called my mom after hanging up with my brother and we talked for a little while but I had some processing to do.
This unexpected news opened up a can of worms for me. My father had abandoned us more than 30 years earlier. My parents divorced while we were barely in Kindergarten (Jim and I are 15 months apart). At the time we lived on Staten Island (where I'm originally from) and he returned to Connecticut where he grew up and his extended family still resided. We had sporadic visits and phone calls throughout my elementary and tween years but my dad was gone by the time I reached high school. He was the original deadbeat dad. He did not pay the agreed upon child support and back in the '70's there was little my mom could do to obtain it. My mother raised us on her own with the help of my grandparents where we would spend each Summer day for many years while my mom went off to work. I have the most amazing memories of those days with my grandparents.
Throughout my years growing up going to high school, college, etc. I lived my life, celebrated my accomplishments, suffered my defeats all without a father. To put it simply I hated him for giving up on me and my brother and making life difficult for my mom. Certain things were always just a little bit harder because I had no father in my life. I can admit to suffering classic abandonment issues as a result. I never had any plans to find him and make contact although my mom had urged me to do so from time to time. I always told her I don't want him to know how and what I'm doing good or bad. So when I received this news I was shocked at the feelings I was having. Even though I had no plans of ever speaking to him the option to was now off the table, done, period, final! The decision was now made for me. I did, thankfully, have one person I could talk to about this and it was my friend Renee. Without violating the details of her personal life, our situation was similar and I called to give her the news, talk about my feelings and bounce my thoughts off her and get some validation as to whether they were normal or not. She was a great sounding board, told me everything I needed to hear and by the time we hung up I was well on the way to working some stuff out in my head.
A few days later, when I felt ready I emailed my "new" cousin to introduce myself and learn about her life. We exchanged numbers and spoke on the phone. It was a bit odd but so nice to talk with a relative from my dad's side of the family. You see when he severed contact with us we also lost contact with that entire side of my family. Not that I was lacking in the relative department. I come from a very large, very close Italian family where your 2nd and 3rd cousins are like your first and you spend time not only with aunts and uncles but great aunts and great uncles. I was very lucky. Even though my new cousin and I didn't keep in touch much after that (she and her mom lived in Florida) the line of communication was now open. I have only recently joined Facebook and we are connected through that.
The most important thing that came out of this news is that I was able to handle it without a major meltdown. I am quite certain that all the counseling I received through the two trials gave me the tools to deal with the "loss" of my father and the wide ranging emotions that surrounded the news. I was able to manage my feelings without taking them to a dark place. Another one of Life's hurdles, check!
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