Half Brother I Never Knew About
To keep it as simple possible I’m going to keep it to the basics. I grew up as an only child. My father had some issues springing from his own childhood and early adulthood but overall he was a wonderful dad. I love him and I am eternally grateful that I got to be his daughter.
He’s now 78 and in a full time care facility at the VA. He has late stage Parkinson’s with dementia. He’s truly no longer living in our reality. His disease is due to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam where he was Special Ops. He was only diagnosed in 2021 and he’s gone extremely downhill over the past year. He was at home until this past December when my mom broke her hip.
Within the last few months I was contacted on Ancestry and Facebook by a young lady I didn’t know. It turns out her father is my half brother. He was adopted and didn’t know either birth parent. With what little she could tell me, my mother and I pieced together who we think the mother was and what happened. My dad had just turned 19 when he was born and shipped off within a few months. There is absolutely zero chance he knew about it. We think under the circumstances the mother kept it secret and gave the baby up.
The doctors advised against telling my dad and we don’t think he’d be capable of understanding it anyway. Things would be different if he had his mind.
I’ve chatted with my brother a little on Facebook messenger but I don’t really have any desire to know him just based on what I’ve seen of him that way. If his daughters wanted a relationship I’d probably be more inclined but I’m not pursuing it.
I had a very hard time with this at first, and I’ve had some very strange feelings of jealousy and protectiveness which I rationally know are ridiculous. I’ve mostly gotten past that too. My mother has been having a harder time with the information and it’s changed how she sees my dad. It breaks my heart. If he’d known he would have married the girl. He would have tried to do right by the situation. We both adamantly agree on that, which is why we believe he had no idea. So there are no feelings about him going against the principles I’ve known him to have or being someone I don’t know. It’s just very hard for him to be mentally gone, soon to be physically as well, and not to be able to confront this. He will die without knowing he had a son. I hate that. I feel guilty his son missed any chance to know his dad. But the whole thing has messed with my head and my concept of everything I thought I knew and I hate it. I wish I’d never found out.