What I Found While Packing Changed Everything!

The course of treatment was exhausting. Chemo took my hair and subsequently my appetite. Dan didn’t wait for me to lament when the first clumps started to clog the shower drain. After shaving his own head with a set of clippers, he carefully finished mine. In that moment, he seemed like the most beautiful man on the planet, even though he was ridiculously bald and his ears protruded more than I had ever noticed. He muttered, “We go through this together,” which helped me stay upright when I felt like I was about to pass out from nausea.

I strolled into the guest room one particularly sleepless night, fueled by a combination of deep, gnawing anxiety and insomnia brought on by steroids. It had turned into a cemetery for “miscellaneous” boxes, or things we weren’t sure we wanted but couldn’t discard. I drew a dusty bin close to me and started searching through it for something to divert my attention. A bundle of letters knotted with a piece of tattered twine was nestled inside a faded manila folder near the bottom.

The return address was a little town in Minnesota, where I was born, but the handwriting seemed strange. One year before to my birth, in 1987, the first letter was sent. It was addressed to my mother, Anne. Reading what a man named Frank had to say made me feel like a voyeur. He wrote of weekends spent by a lake and the sound of my mother’s laughter with an agonizing, desperate compassion. The words “I wish I could see our daughter just once” struck me like a physical blow in a letter written just months before I was born. Do you think she has your eyes?

My mother had always told me that when I was a baby, my father perished in an automobile accident. Her stories didn’t contain any Frank. No cabin from Minnesota was present. All that remained was a neat, terrible falsehood that had persisted for thirty years. I realized that there was more that had been concealed from view than the cancer in my body as I sat in the dark for hours with the letter quivering in my lap.

Two weeks later, I approached my mother, and she didn’t dispute it. Her hands shook so hard at the sight of the letters that she had to put down her tea. A ragged river of reality emerged. Frank came from a background her family hated, was older, and was divorced. In order to “protect” me from the chaos of a complex family, she had left Minnesota, altered her story, and cut him out of our life under tremendous pressure from her aunt. Unaware that secrets tend to come to light when you least expect them, she had exchanged the truth for security.

The ensuing months were a struggle for both the body and the psyche. I penned a letter to the address on the envelope as the chemotherapy soaked into my veins. I had no idea whether Frank was still living or if he would even be interested in hearing from the daughter he had never met. A response came three weeks later. His sentences were firm, but his penmanship was unsteady as he grew older. He had always wondered and had never remarried. A hazy, light-leaked photo of a younger version of himself with a bundled baby was the one he sent. Me. It was the final component of a jigsaw that I was unaware was lacking.

The miracle occurred by fall. The results of my scans were clear. The relief was more draining than the sickness. When Dan and I eventually moved into the lake cottage, I started planting a garden by digging my fingers into the ground. I was starting over, but this time it was a different life than I had imagined.

In the end, we drove to Minnesota. Meeting Frank was more like staring into a mirror I had been avoiding than it was like meeting a complete stranger. He had the same shade of hazel eyes that looked back at me every morning, and he was quiet and kind. He told me tales about my mother as a young lady as we were sitting by the water; she wasn’t the wary, overly guarded person I knew, but rather a wild, energetic, and profoundly in love girl. I was eventually able to forgive her after hearing those stories. She had lied out of fear, which I now all too well understood, rather than out of malice.

But the cosmos was about to make one last, astounding disclosure. In our chats, Frank revealed that he had a son from his first marriage, Allen, a half-brother I was unaware of. Allen was a physician in the city where I had been treated.

I felt the breath leave my lungs as I searched for his name. Allen was the radiologist who had examined my first CT scan, so he wasn’t just any doctor. I recalled the notes on my chart, where a doctor had circled a small, unclear shadow and demanded a biopsy even though the urgent care physician believed it to be a straightforward rupture in the muscle. My cancer was discovered at stage one rather than stage four because of that “extra mile.”