How to Mourn a Father I Have Never Met.
By: Jenn Goldstone
Tags: Mental Health, This Happened To Me, Adoption, Relationships, Beyourself

D. [Date Unknown]

Homicide detectives really do make those calls you see on television.

“Ma’am, I am afraid that I have bad news.” His sweet, slow Texan accent made him sound gentle, kind. He wished he could tell me this in person, he said, but him being in Austin and me in New York, this was going to have to do. “Your father is dead.”

I had been expecting this call since D. went missing from an extended-stay motel. He had been living there for months with his beloved border collie Kaela, wracking up a hefty tab (which he asked me to pay), driving for Grubhub, and charming the front desk staff.

It was one of those young ladies, who so adored him, who called me earlier in the week to tell me that D. had been missing since Sunday. He had left behind his cell phone, plugged in and charging, along with his wallet and that faithful, aging dog. Would I please call the police for them, she asked, because I was next of kin and no one at the Austin Police Department would tell them anything. She said that I was his “in case of emergency” contact on the registration form he filled out when he checked in.

This struck me as odd. I have never met this man, despite him being responsible for half of my DNA. The 11.6% of my genetic makeup that shows up as Native American on 23&Me comes from him. He is my birth father. Our relationship is the most bizarre one I have ever had.

Since 1997, we have spoken only once but exchanged countless texts, Facebook messages, and the occasional email. The only times he wrote to me using lucid prose were when he asked for money, which he did multiple times over the past 24 years. The remaining missives were in a language that was part phonetics, part poetry, part pothead.

He would often recount the first time we “met” — the only time we heard each other’s voices, and actually connected, albeit over the phone. Ever since that day, he would message me the same question every few weeks, “Do you remember our first conversation?” and I would respond, “Yes, I do remember.” It was like a bedtime story, repeated again and again. Almost immediately after I picked up the phone that first day, he asked me for my date of birth, and before I could answer, he jumped in: July 26th. That happens to be two days before the date when I have always celebrated my birthday. So I told him quite plainly that he must have the wrong person. I was ready to hang up the phone until he blurted out the name of my birth mother. I sat in complete silence on the other end of the phone. He recalled that those silent “30 seconds almost competed with eternity.”

Those epic thirty seconds, I was at work, holding my breath in my drab cubicle, nestled in a windowless corner of ABC News headquarters. I had been carefully cultivating my relationship with my birth mother, whom I’d actively chosen to seek out a year earlier. Thoughtfully navigating the years between us and the connection from birth, I protected my heart — and the only parents I have ever known, my adoptive parents. I always planned to find my birth father, but in my mind, I needed to discover my birth mother first before I could handle the other half of the equation. Ultimately, she’s the one who — as a teenager — had carried me for nine months and had the courage to let me go.

Alas, I did not get to control the timing. Here was this man barreling in, totally uninvited. He grilled me about my opinion on the metaphysical world and the fundamental nature of reality. He tested me on my understanding of the multiverse, spewed manic ramblings wrought with conspiracy theories. Plus, he had my birthdate wrong.

How could this incoherent, frenetic caller be my father? How did he get my number? The answer to that last question, he would simply explain, “When I asked the Oracle as to your existence on earth, Oracle gave me your number.” Year over year, he would insist that my birthday was two days earlier than I have always known it to be, and every July 26th, he would wish me, “Blessed Birth of Light Day kindred.”

I would soon receive boxes of mementos: love notes from him to my birth mother, a drum, spiritual tokens, old photos, Joni Mitchell concert ticket stubs, and his high school ID. There was little explanation for the jumble of artifacts, but there was another box that I easily understood: it contained the birthday presents that he had purchased for me for many years after I was born. He’d saved them all.

I kept my birth father a secret from the parents who raised me. I am not sure if I feared hurting them, or admitting out loud that this confusing, disordered man was responsible for half of my DNA. I was convinced that I wanted to have children, but were his delusional genes recessive? While I spun in my tortured indecision, he once again went barreling into somebody’s lives. This time it was my parents’.

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, he left a message on my father’s work answering machine. He stated who he was and that “he wanted to know if his daughter was ok.” My dad called him back, and in the calmest way, honed by years as a psychiatrist, let my birth father know I was OK. Full stop.

My birth father had forced my hand and left me, in the face of a national emergency and my wedding four days later, trying to explain to my parents why I had hidden from them my relationships with him and my birth mother. My parents and I muddled through the moment and my confessions, and it all sort of got lost in 9/11’s horror and 9/15’s wedding joy.

Then there were the verses via Facebook Messenger, hundreds of them, in that mysterious tongue,

“Intuition wise, knot sure why u chose to bypass a stitch in time.. saves nine. Warp and woof, eh, maintain continuity yet functional ie tension/compression fields have to reset electromagnetic platforms. Algorithm: Jenn, don’t hold me to my research. Yet only way iye can stretch the canvas of life to 2 fit Monet and Rembrandt within the same simultaneous brush stroke.” “Nature/ Nurture like dark matter balances dark engery. The lock is our attachment to a key. If there be a secret, the secret would be no secret within a fifth dimensional platform.” “Now simultaneously occupying space time. Do you not dream my genetic bread crumbs I left for you?”

There were also hang-ups, calls at all hours of the night, causing me so much anxiety that I would jump at the sound of any ringing phone. The hang-ups became so frequent that my husband finally returned his call. He told D that unless he could normally communicate at a normal hour, to never call me again — until and unless I contacted him first.

He went quiet for a while.

Even while D. was quiet on the calling front, I would still get random text messages from him. He’d started a solar farm; he ran for mayor; he’d moved to Belize, then to Peru, then to Oklahoma to complete his psychology degree — and he needed money for tuition. Being asked to send him money jolted me out of mild amusement at his exploits and into a panic. What was my responsibility for this man, who until now seemed to be tilting at windmills, harmlessly casting about? I knew that once you lend money to someone, it was seldom the last request. I told him that I could not lend him any money. And would say it to him again when his truck needed fixing or his rent was late. Only in these moments would he text with complete clarity, “one day just like all humans you will die. And the next space you land on, you will be judged …”

I blocked him.

I was, of course, of many minds about all of it. I had one voice that was telling me to go forth with gusto. What could go wrong? Don’t you want to know the truth? I turned this voice up as we careened into COVID. What if I never really understood what Native American tribe I was from or missed some bit of inherited information I could glean from D.? He would share nuggets of my past like, “Your grandmother was a high priestess, a medicine woman with great healing skills. She understood quantum physics.”

I would always leave wanting more. The pull to open the channel to him was too strong, and in September, I unblocked him. Not only did I unblock him, but I proactively reached out. How was he? Had he managed to stay safe? I sent him the first day of school pictures of my sons, and he sent me the latest photos of his dog.

During these renewed conversations, he began begging me repeatedly to take his dog in the event of his death. “J, no contract involved if I leave this body before Keala promise me you will take her into your home.” He was getting her a new tag and engraving my name and phone number on it. His requests became pleas: “please adopt her before I go…Am sure I will no longer be on this planet….Ergo Jenn, please use your engery [sic] to adopt Keala ASAP.” I read it as paranoia, maybe even a way to connect with me, to tie down his human daughter with a commitment to harbor his canine daughter. Our digital conversations felt safe, even though he still sounded like the Cheshire Cat … until he didn’t.

D’s last ask was simple: $3,600 for rent. But the consequence for refusing was newly menacing. First came the vitriol, “Shame on you, without my DNA you would not be on this Earth,” and then the guilt, “How can not assist me? I never desired to share my DNA yet you appeared.” He seemed to forget that I never asked him to share his DNA either.

Our last volley of messages (although I didn’t know that’s what they were at the time, of course) ended with a threat: D. and his dog would walk all the way from Austin to New York City, where I live. He continued via Facebook Messenger: “we will ask local people to house us because we are homeless because my own blood relations don’t give a damn about homeless people even if they are related to them.”

And then the bottom line, “You should receive a phone call from KVUE news station to confirm story by Friday.”

I blocked D. again.