When my wife for sixty years died, I discovered that she had been living a lie with a woman she didn’t even know.
I always thought I was happily married to a wonderful woman who loved me, but at 82 I knew that my whole life had been a lie, a farce, and that I had not met my wife at all.
Elaine and I had been married for sixty years when she died after a sudden heart attack. I was devastated. I had married Elaine when I was 22 and she was 20, and she was my whole world.
Image for illustrative purposes. | Photo: Pexels
Image for illustrative purposes. | Photo: Pexels
I had always wanted to have children, but when Elaine and I decided that the time had come to be parents in our late twenties, we discovered that it was not going to be like that. The doctors told us that Elaine had a problem that at that time was unsolvable: then there was no IVF.
I suggested that we could adopt a baby, but Elaine told me that she could not love another woman’s child. I tried to persuade her, and we were about to have the only real confrontation of our entire married life.
In the end, I gave in. I loved Elaine and there was nothing I didn’t do for her, so I dedicated myself to my wife and pampered my little brother’s children. The funny thing is that Elaine didn’t really like spending time with my brother’s family.
He said he reminded her of what he couldn’t have, so I used to visit her alone. It was my now elderly “little” brother and his children who helped me when Elaine passed away.
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Six months after Elaine’s death, I finally started packing her belongings with the help of my older nephew. We were going to sort his clothes and give them to the Salvation Army. I thought Elaine would have wanted to help the others.
At the bottom of his closet I found a box in which he had put small memories of our marriage: a flower from his bridal bouquet, now fragile and yellowish, a few snapshots of our honeymoon, small things that marked anniversaries and an old letter.
We can spend a lifetime with someone and not know who they really are.
My nephew gave it to me. “It must be an old love letter, Uncle Tony,” he said. I frowned. I had never written Elaine a love letter because we had never separated. I looked at the envelope and saw that it was addressed to me.
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
The envelope was open and, by the appearance of the letter inside, it had been very manipulated. I unfolded the letter and saw the signature. It was Laura’s! Laura Burton had been my childhood love, my first love.
I had been crazy about Laura until I discovered her kissing my best friend. I guess that’s when I started dating Elaine, on a rebound, but it ended up being the best thing that had ever happened to me… or so I thought.
I started reading the letter, but my eyes were tired, so my nephew read it to me aloud. “Dear Tony,” Laura had written almost 55 years ago, “I guess this letter will be a little shocking to you, and I admit that I should have contacted you before, but I didn’t have the courage.
“Circumstances have now forced me to tell you a secret that I had sworn to take to the grave: I had a baby, Tony, our baby. Then we were very young and, when I found out that I was pregnant, I didn’t know how you would react.
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
“So I told Steve and asked him for advice on how to tell you, and that’s when he told me he loved me and kissed me. You went in and got very angry. You didn’t want to listen to me, no matter how hard I tried.”
“I thought that if I gave you some time, I could make you understand what had happened, but after three months you had married someone else. I then decided that I was going to respect your marriage, your new life.”
“I was going to raise our baby alone, and I did. What I didn’t count on, Tony, is that now I’ve discovered that I have cancer. Anthony is almost six years old, and he is the sweetest boy. You would be very proud of him Tony.”
“What I wanted to ask you is: could you and your wife find in your hearts the possibility of welcoming Anthony and raising him as if he were yours? As you know, I have no family, and my mother died last year, so Anthony will be sent to an orphanage when I die.”
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
“I’m terminal now, Tony, and the doctors say I have six months left at most. I include my phone number, so please call me and tell me what you have decided.”
I burst into tears when my nephew read: “With all my love, Laura.” I was shaking. I couldn’t believe Elaine had hidden it from me. He had a son, a helpless child who had lost his mother to cancer and had been left alone in the world.
How could Elaine not have told me? I realized that Laura’s letter had arrived more or less at the time we had talked about adoption, and I remembered how bitter she had sounded when she had talked about other women’s children.
I had lost the possibility of being a father, of raising my son, who had probably gone from foster family to foster family, thinking that I had abandoned him. Laura had died thinking that she and her son had rejected her…
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Elaine’s jealousy, her insecurity, had stolen my son. Or maybe she never wanted to have a child. I remembered how I had avoided my brother’s children, all the children, actually. He had always said that it was because they reminded him of his failure, but was that it?
I think the Elaine I loved didn’t exist at all. She was a fantasy, and allowed me my illusion. My son would now be sixty years old, he would be a father, maybe even a grandfather, and I had lost everything.
My nephew was determined to help me find Anthony, and he began to contact Laura’s old friends, but most of them had died. Finally, he managed to find a certain Anthony Burton on the Internet, who seemed to be more or less the right age, and contacted him.
It turned out that Anthony believed that I had abandoned him to his fate, but when we explained everything to him and sent him the letter, he agreed to meet with me. He taught his eldest son, a handsome young man named Frank.
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Image for illustrative purposes. | Source: Unsplash
Anthony looked a lot like Laura, but he had my eyes and my smile. There was something, that connection, and I realized that we had both been hungry for that parent-son bond.
Anthony and his family took me into their heart, and now I have three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren with a sixth on the way. My youngest granddaughter, Rachel, has told me that she is a boy and that her name will be Tony, like me. I finally had a family.
What can we learn from this story?
We can spend a lifetime with someone and not know who they really are.
It’s never too late. Sometimes life leaves the best for the end.
