[ad_1]
This month, 25 years ago, I received the worst phone call of my life. My Aunt Margaret, who was like a grandmother to me, was sobbing when she called to tell me that Chris, my only immediate brother, had died suddenly and unexpectedly in the hospital after what we thought was a routine exploratory operation to find out why. what was sick. losing your breath to the point of blacking out.
despite being a non-smoker and an otherwise fit and healthy guy, his skin looked gray and he had aged considerably when I saw him a few months earlier. I even joked that his clean life wasn’t doing him any favors, not realizing it would be the last time I’d see him.
He was only 36 years old and had only been married for a few months when he succumbed to what subsequent post-mortem examination revealed was an extremely rare congenital condition that attacked his lungs and would eventually destroy his other organs. There was no cure.
And although he died a cruel and premature death in the prime of his life, I considered it a blessing at the time that he did not leave any children orphaned. We had both endured the anguish of losing a father after our mother Jean died of cancer, at age 54, when we were still teenagers.
Chris’s death, less than 20 years later, was tragic and it took me a long time to come to terms with it. And while I, like Aunt Margaret, never regretted not having children of my own, I was saddened to realize that I would never have a niece or nephew and would ultimately be the end of the line for my immediate family.
Or so I thought.
Fast forward to last November, when I was scrolling through my work emails and an unknown name appeared under the heading “unusual question”.
I didn’t pay much attention at first, as it’s not unusual for journalists to get random emails out of nowhere. But this one sent a chill down my spine.
The writer, from my native Canada, asked me if I was related to Christopher Ian Bray. I was immediately suspicious, thinking it was either a bad joke or some kind of online phishing scam. After I responded with a cautious email asking why, she replied, “I’m looking for my father’s family history. His obituary said he had a sister named Allison Bray and at the time of her death she was in Winnipeg. “
To close
Chris Bray tragically died 25 years ago, but none of his immediate family members knew that he had had a daughter, Kateri, seven years before his death.
I almost fainted. I had lived in Winnipeg, Canada before moving to Ireland at the beginning of the new millennium to start a new life.
My head was spinning. Like me, Chris was ambivalent about having children and didn’t even mention wanting to start a family, so the idea that he had fathered a child, let alone out of wedlock, didn’t even occur to me.
But when he emailed me an old photo of him from the late 1980s, when he was dating his mother while on a military training course at a Canadian Forces base in Ontario, I knew he had the tone of the truth.
This was long before people used email routinely, let alone social media, and as far as I know, there are no photos of him anywhere in cyberspace.
She then sent photos of herself as an adult and a child and the family resemblance was eerie. I compared pictures of her as a baby with those of my brother of the same age and they looked almost identical. I also noticed that he has the same eyebrows that both my brother and I inherited from my mother.
I hardly slept that night. The thought that my late brother had left a daughter as his legacy left me equally astonished and delighted, knowing that a part of him is still alive and that he might have a niece after all.
Still, he was not proud of the fact that he had walked away from his pregnant girlfriend and left her to raise Kateri, now a 32-year-old woman, on her own, even though she was young and perhaps simply chose to bury her. head in the sand. And to my knowledge, maybe he went to his grave without knowing that he had a son.
Still, he was skeptical. While I am not rich, it is not uncommon for scammers to target people over the internet. So I was cautious, even though she was adamant about not looking for money. But once the shock passed, we arranged a phone chat a couple of days later and talked for hours like we were old friends.
While I have no problem chatting with strangers, it is my job, after all my first impression was that she was an incredibly convincing con artist or someone who was genuinely interested in learning about her father’s story and the side of the family. At least, I reasoned, she wanted to learn about the family’s medical history, in case she had children or for her own health reasons.
I decided to believe the latter and after subsequent phone conversations and email exchanges, I was convinced that she was genuine.
But was she really my niece?
To close
Allison Bray when she was a similar age to her niece Kateri.
I arranged for us to do a DNA test, insisting that he send the swabs to prevent them from being tampered with. She had no problem with this, another good sign.
I sent the sample in November, but due to Covid mail delays, it didn’t arrive in Canada until the day before what would have been Chris’s birthday in late January.
We decided to celebrate his birthday by making our swabs. In the meantime, we exchanged more photos, including a recent one of her taken in Canada and one of me at the Winnipeg Folk Festival when I was about the same age.
I sent them to my friends and they were surprised to see how much alike we were. A friend said he even thought she was me.
We are both tall, we both have the same hair, long legs and arms, and piano fingers, as well as other similar physical traits and interests. Like my Aunt Margaret and I, we had a strange intuitive connection between us that I jokingly call my ‘Braydar’.
We were on edge for months. Then the results yielded a 97.7% probability of a match.
We are now looking forward to meeting in Canada once we can travel freely again. If all goes well, I hope to have the same close relationship with Kateri that I had with my Aunt Margaret, who lived almost 100 years.
But unbeknownst to me or anyone else in my family at the time, Kateri had been searching for her father for a long time.
She was able to locate me thanks to a photo of me in the Irish independent, accompanying a story he had written about increases in auto insurance.
“I had always known that I had a father somewhere,” he said.
“I had a photo, stories of my mom, a name and a birthday. It wasn’t much but it was something. A big part of me hoped it was just a matter of clicking a button or asking and suddenly I’d have the missing pieces in my life. The answers to the questions that no one else could answer. “
He started looking for clues online in 2018, but went blank.
“I started to think back to the list of possibilities that had occurred to me the year before,” he said. “After having made sure that even if the ‘worst’ happened it would be fine, it was worth a try. Even if I had a whole life that I didn’t want to share with me, I will know my answers.
Finally, he found an online reference to his obituary.
“My heart sank when I read the words because even though it is only a glimpse into the life he lived, I had learned enough from my mom’s stories to know that this was him. My dad passed away when I was seven years old and I never got to know him or know if he wanted to meet me, ”she said.
“Part of me was a little relieved to know now that there was nothing I could have done at a younger age to try to build a relationship with Chris, to find Dad. Part of me was disappointed for the same reasons and more.
“I still felt incomplete. I thought that knowing that I would never be able to talk to him would have given me a sense of peace, acceptance, or understanding.
“It couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was grieved. Although that may sound silly since I never met him, I did. I had to mourn the loss of decades of hope, the loss of a dream. Worst of all, I had to relive the learning that not only had I never had a father, but that I never would. “
Then the pandemic hit and changed everything.
“Chris came up a lot in conversations during the summer of 2020, filled with reminders of what is important to you and what you have to lose and miss if you don’t follow your heart.. “
Kateri finally found the photo of me in the Irish independent and “I couldn’t help but feel that you were my connection.”
To close
Allison Bray looks forward to meeting her niece Kateri in Canada, when it is safe to travel. Photo: Steve Humphreys
She was encouraged to investigate further.
“I plucked up the courage the next morning at work after becoming more confident in myself, telling myself that the worst that could happen is that I ran into another dead end.
“My pieces are falling into place and my questions and hopes are no longer lost. I have found something more than a part of me. Thanks to a photo, a name and a birthday ”.
But the story does not end there.
When Kateri began her fearless search, little did she know that she would not only locate an aunt in Ireland, but an uncle in the UK.
That uncle is my half brother, Stewart, from my father’s previous marriage before immigrating to Canada from England after WWII.
Although I will never know why my father kept his son a secret from us children for so long, I was determined to meet him after Chris passed away and arranged a visit while backpacking Europe.
He called me in Canada to say he would be delighted to meet me. Then the next day, a year after Chris died, my father Ian died, so my first phone call to Stewart was to break the bad news.
But we still met. It was like seeing a ghost when he met me at the Kent train station, looking like my father 20 years earlier.
But I’m happy to say that we’ve now made up for lost time and Stewart, his wife, Alison (whose name he recently found out was spelled the same as mine on her birth certificate – another strange twist), his son and daughter have given him the welcome. me in the fold. They are as excited as I am to have a new addition to the family.
As the saying goes, God does not close a door without opening a window.
Irish independent
[ad_2]