A FAMILY’S STORY

After More Than Fifty Years, I Finally Met My Brother

I didn’t even know he existed

It was that rare moment when you meet someone but feel like you have known them your whole life. That’s what it was like when I met my brother face-to-face for the first time.

It was a journey to confront my past.

My natural father abandoned our family when I was just two years old. He simply vanished and no one had any idea what happened to him or where he was.

It wasn’t easy growing up without a dad in the sixties. All of my friends had two-parent families. I would walk up to strangers at the supermarket and ask, “Are you my daddy?”

I would ask family friends, “Will you be my daddy?” It broke my mom’s heart.

My mom was now a single mother of three children, with no job and no money. But she did what she had to do and took on the roles of both parents for my older sisters and me. She did all she could to give us a good life.

My two sisters were in their early teens when our dad vanished so they felt his absence even more than I did. He was extremely strict with them but they loved him and had to carry that with them their whole lives.

They pitched in to help my mom raise their two-year-old little brother. My mom decided she couldn’t really work until I started school because of the cost of daycare, even in the sixties, so we lived on welfare.

When I was six, my mom joined the workforce and we got off welfare. Things were finally looking up. Over the next few years, both of my sisters got married and started families of their own, so it was just my mom and me.

When I was eleven my mom remarried and I finally had a dad. I also got three new brothers and two new sisters. That wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. I often felt resentment from some of them. We were preventing their dad from getting back together with their mom. Keith was two years older than me and lived with us most of the time, so we developed a real sibling relationship that remains strong today.

Still, I always wondered, What happened to my father? Years turned into decades and the question faded into my past. We all assumed he had probably died, whether it was years earlier or even more recently. Especially after we buried my stepdad and then my mom.

It was then that my oldest niece signed onto an ancestry website and added our family tree in a quest to trace our family history. Little did she know what she would discover.

You’ve got mail.

It was an email from a woman who said she recognized the basic information we had about my natural father and wondered if it could be the same man who was her stepfather. The name and birthdate were the same. And then there was the photo. It was definitely him.

She said he had recently passed away but they didn’t have any information about his family history. She went online to find out if there were any relatives, cousins, aunts, or uncles, to connect with her younger half-brother, Michael Darren. Darren. My first name. My father had given my first name to his new son. Maybe my dad hadn’t forgotten about me after all.

When we heard the news it was one of those, Are you sitting down? moments. Not only were we shocked to learn that our father had created another family but I had a brother and we shared a name. It was a shock for us but it was almost unbelievable for them.

It was difficult for everyone to wrap their head around. For us, it was trying to understand where he had been and the life he led after he left us. For them, it was trying to figure out who this man really was. They had just learned what I grew up knowing.

Mike and I exchanged emails and messenger chats as we slowly got to know each other. It was easier than I thought. Soon we had our first Facetime call. It wasn’t at all awkward. He was a lot like me and we connected immediately.

It was a couple of years later before I could arrange a face-to-face meeting with Mike. We planned to meet when he and his girlfriend visited her hometown of Montreal. That was in 2020 and the pandemic scuttled those plans.

We simply delayed our meeting. But months turned into years. Finally, just before my 63rd birthday, I decided to take a trip out west to visit family and friends, and that included a meeting with Michael, seven years after we found out about each other.

My flight was going to arrive ten minutes early. But I was the last person off the plane, stuck in the back row, which meant I had more time for my excitement and my nerves to build.

As I walked into the terminal building I searched the faces of the people gathered around the gate. I was sure I would recognize him but it didn’t look like he was there. Suddenly I got a message on my phone from Mike saying he was just three minutes away. It gave me a moment to catch my breath. I felt the significance of this moment.

And then I heard someone calling my name. He was coming up behind me. I turned and we embraced like two long-lost brothers would. We held each other for a few moments before we looked into each other’s eyes. Both of us were feeling the same emotions.

Mike’s partner Chantal and his half-sister (my step-sister) Lori didn’t come with him. I met Lori a few years earlier when she came to Toronto. They wanted to give us a bit of alone time together.

I felt an instant connection and was completely at ease. We talked nonstop on the drive to the ranch. No uncomfortable silences. I found myself looking at him often. I don’t know if he noticed. But I just kept thinking, This is my brother. My blood brother. A sibling I never knew existed.

When we got to his home I was greeted by Chantal and Lori who smothered me with hugs and kisses. I felt like the long-lost brother now. We were all family.

Over the next few days, Mike and I got to know each other better. He’s kind and gentle and we seemed to have a similar philosophy about life – Enjoy all you can. Everything is an experience. And above all, always be kind.

One afternoon Mike offered to go through his box of old family photos with me. It was a chance to see pictures of my father after he disappeared. As we went through albums of photos they would spark stories about our lives. We shared those stories and a lot of laughs. It wasn’t as painful as you might expect. While I wanted to know more about my dad, I loved discovering who my brother is. Sometimes I was able to see my reflection in his face.

We found out that we have a lot in common. We share a love of nature, wilderness, and adventure. We both have wavy-curly hair, hate eating anything with bones, hate liver, and like to pee outdoors, and we both can fall asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillow.

We also discovered some of the things that make us unique, like his mechanical aptitude. And while I can barely skate he played goalie on various hockey teams. He is passionate about riding trail bikes in the hills and mountains of southern British Columbia. He is a daredevil. That’s one characteristic we don’t share.

Mike said he was looking forward to reading my stories to get to know me better. Lori said, “Don’t read the one about Dad.” I realized that would probably not be easy. So I asked her what she found most painful. As her eyes teared up Lori said it was because I wrote about the pain he caused my sisters and me. Survivor guilt. It seems we were each feeling our own guilt about the pain our father had caused us. And yet, we were all victims.

They thought they knew their father. The duality was tough to comprehend. Who was this man that raised them and they called “Dad”?

Our father had a criminal past. He was in jail when I was born on an embezzlement charge. Like all his crimes, they were all about money or love, and never about violence. When he left, we discovered he was a bigamist, married to a woman in Seattle while he was married to my mom. He disappeared while he was engaged to a third woman in Toronto. His other family knew none of this.

Chantal summed it up with one simple line. “That’s fucked up!” The more we shared and the more she learned, the crazier the situation became.

It is what it is. I can’t wonder why or what if. We will never get those answers. That died with our father. But despite his best efforts to keep our worlds from colliding, our father’s legacy is the new relationship I have forged with my long-lost brother and sisters.

We connected. We bared our souls to each other and I am proud of my brother from another mother.

I hated to say goodbye. Our visit was far too short but I know this is only the beginning. We have found each other and are never going to let go.

Thank you for reading. If you want to know more about my struggles growing up without my dad, and the search for answers, you can read about it here.