Stages of Grief Journey: Denial Part 2

I was checking the 23andMe website three or four times a day. The first results that came in were for my oldest sister. She is twelve years older than me. I decided to wait for my other sister’s results to come in so that I could look at them together. Hers came just a few days later.

As obsessed and impatient as I was to start getting these results in, the reality was hitting me, and I was doing everything to avoid looking at them. Hello again, denial.

Finally, one evening not long after I received notice that my second sister’s results were in, I decided I was ready. I compared my sisters to each other.

With over 52% shared DNA between them, I didn’t even have to look at the centimorgans to understand they were full sisters. When I looked at the centimorgans, I didn’t exactly understand what that meant, but I did understand that number was over double the amount my brother and I shared. My heart just sank.

I pulled up my brother’s profile and shared him with each of my sisters individually. Predicted relationships for them with him: Brother. 49.1% and 48.6%. The centimorgans shared were over 3,700 for each of them.

That sinking, free-falling feeling crept slowly back into my stomach just as it did that first night when I compared my brother and me. But it wasn’t like the jolt I felt back then. It was like it was washing over me instead. I’m not sure what I thought would change by comparing my own results with my sisters at this point, but I pulled up each one and read them over and over again. The results said I wasn’t their full sister anymore.

But, as unbelievable as it sounds now, denial was still there. Crazy, right? There were still my youngest brother’s results to get. Maybe being the youngest, I thought it was possible not to share DNA when there was such a big age gap between me and my three oldest siblings. That sounds absolutely ridiculous now, of course, after all we’ve learned about DNA. I had this idea that my being the youngest gave some wiggle room to how DNA results were interpreted. That’s the stronghold denial can have on you. Or, I thought again to myself, I needed to test someone else instead of my siblings, and it would show something different. I immediately thought of Dad’s first cousin, who was in her 80s. We shared a lot of genealogy info back and forth since well before my Dad died, and we still corresponded regularly. I contacted her and asked if she would do the test if I sent her a kit. Later, I learned she was already planning on doing one, but she wasn’t good on the computer and planning to ask me for help. I still feel guilty that I never told her the real reason, though. That was wrong. I sent off her kit and waited for her and my brother’s results to come back.

It wasn’t obvious to me back then, but I know now that I was grasping at whatever scenario I could so that I wouldn’t have to accept what science was telling me over and over again.

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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.