Stages of Grief Journey: Denial Part 1

I think of those 18 months I kept this crushing secret entirely to myself as a period of complete denial fueled by panic. Besides being a world champion in compartmentalizing, I am also a master multi-tasker, so my life went on doing my routine tasks. You didn’t find me curled up in my bed, hiding from the world. That would come later, thanks to the huge waves of sadness that would sneak up on me when I least expected it (Thanks #4). I had Mom responsibilities and a job to go to every day. But the reality was that I was struggling deeply.

If someone asks me to sum up what this journey has felt like over these eight years, I tell them it has been an ongoing process of grief, flipping back and forth between stages. You are changed by this on a level that is indescribable. You mourn deeply for people you have never met and never will, which doesn’t make sense intellectually.

I’m a person who likes to be in control. This is my biggest weakness as a human being.  It comes from being an introvert and the anxiety I feel when I don’t know what is coming. Grieving completely throws being in control out the window. Many of us introverts have to be “extroverted introverts” to get along in the real world on a daily basis anyway, but throw grief on top of that, and it is totally exhausting. I couldn’t control this discovery. I couldn’t see it coming. I couldn’t prepare for the constant emotional energy it would take to even face it. It just happened. In those first 18 months, I can’t tell you how much I regretted taking that test. And I couldn’t control the shock and trauma it was producing. That feeling of being out of control was disorienting and scary for me. But there was one thing I could do. I could deny it. To myself, of course, since I hadn’t told anyone. I had control over that. Fueled by that denial, I set out to disprove the whole silly thing and reveal that it was not true. Simple as that.

From my journal, looking back:

I read everything I could online about DNA but it was so above my comfort zone it was difficult and exhausting to weed through. Although I kept attending regular genealogy workshops, I refused to attend any kind of seminar about DNA. I now had violent hate for the subject of DNA all of a sudden. I weirdly blamed “it” for causing my world to crash down.

The very first thing I did after that terrible night I stayed awake panicking was to order four more DNA tests – one for each of my three remaining siblings and one for my mother. I had sent one to my mother years earlier when she lived in Florida, but she said she had “misplaced” it. I wanted to make sure she was really my mother. My mind was racing around to all kinds of crazy scenarios. What if I was adopted?

I emailed my siblings, and I said I was sending them a DNA kit and asked if they would mind taking it to compare our ethnicity results. It wasn’t a complete lie.  But it wasn’t the entire truth, of course. I still feel bad about that. Thankfully, they have forgiven me for it. I told them I would manage all the tests and send out their reports to them when they came in. Which I did. They all agreed. Honestly, it was not a hard sell to them. As the family genealogist, I frequently asked them about things about our family tree. My oldest brother and sister were thirteen and twelve years older than me, so I would always pick their brains about their memories.  I just couldn’t face telling them about this. And I wasn’t even remotely ready to confront my mother about it.

My sisters sent their samples in almost immediately. My brother in Oregon is a procrastinator, so it took him a little longer. We had moved my mother from Florida back to Connecticut because of her health, and she was living with one of my sisters. My sister made sure Mom did the test.

I was obsessed about getting those results back. I had to ignore this gnawing feeling that it could possibly be true and just prove that it wasn’t.  Hello, denial. It was the only thing I could think of from the moment I opened my eyes each morning until I closed them at night. The expected wait time was about 6-8 weeks for results back then.

During that waiting time, I searched for information on the internet about DNA testing mistakes, and I looked through my DNA matches at the strangers looking back at me. Most were 3rd and 4th cousins, and they were all Irish names. I didn’t catch that similarity when I first looked at the results a year earlier. But then again, I wasn’t even looking at the matches back then.  I had not found any Irish people on Mom or Dad’s side in the research I had been doing for over 25 years. Zero, actually. But here were all these Irish people in my results.

I remembered a woman about a year earlier who messaged me on Ancestry. She said I was coming up as a 2nd cousin match to her father.  She looked at my public tree and said she didn’t recognize any names. She rattled off a litany of Irish names from her tree and a link to it. I didn’t recognize anyone. But I remember thinking how peculiar it was that the birthplace of some of these people was the same town as mine. I grew up in a relatively small place in the whole scheme of things. I told her I didn’t know any of these people; they looked all Irish, which I wasn’t at all.

She answered, “A second cousin match is pretty close with this amount of centimorgans shared. Are you sure you aren’t Irish?”

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This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you to start at my first post of the series HERE.