Lightning Strikes Twice

It’s taken me a while to write this entry, as it’s about something quite different to the usual trivia that I either extol or grizzle about.

Can lightning strike in the same place twice? It appears so.

The story begins with my uncle Paul. My uncle Paul died of cancer a couple of months ago. Nothing unusual about that, you might say; thousands around the world die of cancer every day. We weren’t close, but it was quite a blow for my mother. My uncle lived in Winnipeg, Canada and I hadn’t seen him since my wedding. Before that, I hadn’t seen him in some 25 years. That’s how the Macdonalds are.

Fast-forward to 30th March just gone. Lucas is born. In the evening of the day of his birth, I call my mother in Florida to inform her that she now has a grandson. After hearing my news and congratulating me, she tells me that she also has some news for me.

It turns out that the funeral parlour that handled my uncle Paul’s death recently received a letter from afar. The letter was accompanied by a request, that an enclosed letter be forwarded to my uncle Paul’s widow, my aunt Charleen. This request was duly honoured and the letter sent on.

When Charleen received the forwarded letter, she was surprised by its content. Amongst other things, it politely requested that a further letter be forwarded to my mother, wherever she may happen to be.

Upon reading the letter, Charleen called my mother to inform her of its existence and let her know that she would be sending it on.

The letter had not yet arrived in Florida when I called my mother to tell her about Lucas’ arrival. Nevertheless, because she had had it read to her over the phone by Charleen, she was familiar with its content and could at least give me the gist of it. I was rather surprised to learn of the author’s identity and the nature of the letter.

I asked my mother to scan the letter and send it to me via e-mail as soon as she received the physical copy. A few days later, it arrived in my in-box.

The letter was handwritten and metrically arranged, i.e. written in rhyming couplets. This made an already unusual missive even more improbable.

The words told a melancholic tale of one man’s quest to locate two people who had inadvertently disappeared from his life almost 41 years ago. They painted a tragic picture. I was left with a strong impression of a man tormented by his past, such that his past had become an inseparable part of his present and the subject of an ongoing quest into the future.

At the foot of the letter, the man had signed his name and given his contact details. His address, his e-mail address, telephone number and even his mobile number were there.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am one of the two people he had spent 41 years searching for.

I was suddenly struck by the power I now wielded over this man’s life and emotional well-being. By the simple act of picking up the phone and dialling the number at the foot of the page, I could end this man’s fruitless, four decade search with a single, swift mercy-blow. Alternatively, I could shrug off the opportunity, do nothing and leave the man to suffer. If I chose the latter course, the man would likely spend the rest of his life not knowing what had become of the two people whose destiny had somehow slipped through his fingers.

The man in question is my biological father.

All I’ve ever known about my natural father is that he was very young when I was born. I also knew his name, but I’ve been apt to forget it for months on end over the years.

From that last statement, you might correctly surmise that the identity of my natural father has never been a topic of great interest to me. I’ve certainly never felt the need to go in search of him. I was adopted at a very young age by my grandparents, so as far as I was concerned, I had a mother and a father.

Unlike most people in a similar situation, it just never mattered to me that I did not know anything about the man who had helped to bring me into the world. The fact that I shared some DNA with him did nothing to distinguish him in my eyes from the billions of other strangers roaming our planet. In my case, blood most definitely did have the same viscosity as water.

Possibly, that (lack of) reaction stems from the fact that I’ve never been close to anyone in my family. It’s my observation that the Macdonalds are a pretty distant bunch of people (and not just geographically). Without our blood ties, it’s unlikely any of us would ever have chosen to have anything to do with any of the others. We’re not the only such family, but most people don’t care to admit their kin are this dysfunctional.

My grandmother, who raised me, would complain at regular intervals that her children, having left the parental home, would barely even bother to pick up the phone once a year at Christmas. Visits from them were, by and large, an even more infrequent occurrence. By the time I reached puberty, I felt a strong desire to fly the nest, too, so I had some understanding of this behaviour.

My grandmother loved me and, at some level, I must have loved her. Her love, however, was somewhat pathological in nature. She needed me to fill an otherwise unbearable vacuum in her life, a chasm of festering, unfulfilled desire that frequently bubbled to the surface to be vented in the form of rancorous bile towards what seemed like the rest of mankind. Me, my grandfather, the neighbours, British people, protestants… anyone would do if she needed to vent some anger.

My grandmother was one of those people who talked incessantly to her television set, as if the people on it could hear her. She rarely had a good word to say about anyone and I think slagging off other people might actually have been her greatest pleasure in life, albeit a not terribly fulfilling one. She had few other pleasures to speak of, save for a gin and tonic, so it’s not that far-fetched a claim.

My grandmother’s embitterment probably contributed to her children staying away from her. It certainly can’t have done much to endear her to them. And so I turned out to be no different. Once I managed to get out from under her roof, I rarely called or visited. I had some warm feelings for her, but our relationship was so antagonistic that if we had only spent five minutes per year in the same room for the rest of our lives, neither of us would have been able to use the time for anything more constructive than berating the other.

My grandfather was a decent bloke, but by the time I was adopted, he wanted little more out of life than to retreat behind his newspaper, coming out only once my grandmother had gone to bed, to watch the snooker. He was a mild-mannered fellow, but I was never really able to respect him, because of the shameless way he allowed himself to be derided and emasculated by his wife. Consequently, we didn’t have much of a relationship, either.

I therefore left home with little concept of family. The only family I had known had appeared not to particularly like one another. Birthdays were not celebrated and, to this day, I still don’t know my grandparents’ dates of birth. We were a group of highly disparate and incompatible people, who — for no good reason I could fathom — had chosen to live together in the same house.

So, it’s fair to say that I had little interest in family when I left home. I certainly wasn’t about to go in search of more of it. Whoever my father was, he had his life and I had mine.

Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve kept that attitude most of my life. I long ago realised that if I were going to have any close family relationships, I was going to have to engineer them from scratch and create some new human-beings with whom to surround myself.

Sarah has spent the last eight years attempting to grind me down and mollify my stance on this matter, She was, from the very beginning, wildly curious about my natural father. She forced me to ask my biological mother questions about him that made me feel uncomfortable, because I didn’t care about the answers and didn’t want to create the impression I did.

When Eloïse was born, however, the issue of who my father was ceased to be a matter for just me. My father was, after all, Eloïse’s grandfather. At the very least, perhaps there was important medical information to be had. Perhaps my father’s side of the family had some hereditary illness, knowledge about which might prove vital to the health of my children in the future.

So, I very slowly started to soften towards Sarah’s insistence that I should make an effort to trace my biological father. By the time Lucas was born, I had only very recently reached the stage that I was prepared to write a letter to the popular Dutch TV programme, Spoorloos, to see whether they could and would assist in trying to locate my father.

How could I have known that, within a matter of a few weeks, my father would surface under his own steam?

I decided almost immediately after reading his letter that I would contact him. On humanitarian grounds alone, it deserved a call. The man had already served a life sentence.

The weekend following the receipt of his letter, I made contact with my father via the telephone. You can imagine what a shock it was for him when I told him who I was. I was waiting for the dull thud of him passing out and failing to the floor at the other end, but it never came.

Just like that, one evening in early April, 41 years of searching came to an end.

He still lives in Ireland, near Dublin, which is where he met and got to know my mother. He told me that he has often stopped in front of the house where the Macdonald family lived in the mid-sixties, imagining my mother, a teenage girl at the time, at the window. I wonder how many times he’s stopped in front of that window in the course of the last 41 years.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like, to be haunted for 41 years by the few precious memories of your newborn son, to be regularly confronted by the sight of the places you used to walk, hand-in-hand, with your long-lost first love. Imagine not knowing what happened to either… One day, they’re just gone; without a trace.

I find it poetic and poignant that my mother had to lose a brother in order for her son to be found by his father. It’s the stuff of a naff soap-opera, but however far-fetched this plot line happens to sound, it’s perfectly true.

My father’s name is Tony and it turns out that I also have three half-brothers. None of those has any children yet, however, so Tony not only made the acquaintance of his first-born son during that first conversation, but also discovered the existence of his first two grandchildren (and little Lucas was still only a week old at the time): rather a lot to take on board in one evening.

Apparently, my uncle Paul’s death was announced in an obituary in a local Winnipeg paper. Jason, Tony’s youngest son, found the obituary using Google and showed it to his dad, who must have muttered something along the lines of, ‘My God, it’s them!’

Tony only recently told his other children about me. They were enthusiastic and wanted to help him with his search. If Tony had told them a few weeks earlier, my uncle Paul would have still been alive and they wouldn’t have found his obituary. If they had been told a few weeks later, the obituary would have already been removed. Thus, there was a relatively short window of time in which their search would have yielded the desired results.

I don’t believe in fate, but fate is making a pretty good case for itself in these circumstances.

And so it comes to pass that the company known as Google exerts its mighty, life-altering influence on me for the second time. Lightning strikes twice, indeed.

I’m still reeling from the realisation of just how profoundly Google and, by extension, the Internet, are able to influence and affect our lives. There must be thousands of people out there with stories like mine. Even back in 2001/2002, we were already receiving e-mails from people who had found lost family members or diagnosed their own illness and managed to save their own life. Amazing.

Since our initial telephone conversation, Tony and I have exchanged a few e-mails. Whilst he has my blog and our photo gallery to tell him what kind of person I turned out to be, Tony is still something of a mystery to me. The first photos from his side arrived in my in-box only a couple of days ago, so I’ve only just discovered what he and my half-brothers look like.

There’s definitely a strong resemblance between Tony and me. There’s an expression on his face in those photos that I’ve seen spread across my face in photos of me.

The initial telephone conversation was quite relaxed, all things considered. Any initial nerves soon subsided. However, I think if we were to continue the communication by telephone, things might soon become rather stilted. After all, we don’t know each other at all, so it would be a bit forced to call each other up and attempt to chat as if we had the slightest clue about the daily grind of the other’s life.

It’s therefore important that we meet up soon and consolidate the contact we’ve already had. The plan is for Tony and his wife, Bernie, to come here on 12th June and stay with us for a week.

Assuming that contact goes well — and I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t — we will then head off to Ireland during the summer holiday to meet the extended family.

The idea of an initial meeting in a smaller circle is appealing. There’s a lot of catching up to do, and many questions to be asked and answered; on both sides. Much of that will be better suited to a small group, as it would be difficult to focus on a lot of this personal history with a wider audience, most of whom weren’t born when the events being discussed were unfolding. I suspect it may also be easier to speak frankly in a smaller circle.

30th March was a memorable day. Not only did I gain a beautiful son, but I also learnt that my biological father was looking for me. I had expected to gain a child that day, but it came as a rather large surprise to also gain a parent.

Life is bizarre; it really is. I thought the turbulence of my youth had finally been left behind when I turned my back on Silicon Valley and headed home to sleepy Amsterdam to raise a family. Little did I know that precisely that very concept — family — was soon to send such huge ripples radiating across the placid waters of my life.

Even when your life is as peaceful and seemingly uneventful as mine, the next surprise is always lurking just around the corner, right when you least expect it.

Amazing.