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    To:  Lori · Tue, Jun 16 at 9:27 AM
     
     

    To you, this may be looked upon as traumatizing. It well might be. No surprise. Many things in this life are, and will continue to be. But to me, this is how sensible people, good brothers, good fathers, respond to something in this sort. It brings back hope after calamity. It brings clarity, freedom from slavery to confusion and misinformation. It promises a walk with the Lord in His ways within which only good outcomes can be expected. For Rob this will be nothing. He doesn’t even know I’m writing this. For you it’s an opportunity to be free and move forward. This is for you. Dad is long gone. This is nothing between me and him. There were no hard feelings between us until I found Rob. Even the remark in the email, “don’t make me come down there” was a harmless remark meant to, yes, give him a hard time, motivate him to do something, anything. I had no reason to believe it would be received with anything other than affection and good intentions. It was a father-and-son remark by a son who was on the same terms with his father that he had always been. You took the liberty of helping him misinterpret that. 

    At the prospect of simply letting his son meet him, he complains to you, and you two concoct nothing more than a lie saying it was due to the relationship between dad and I that dad would not meet with his son. Except, our relationship was fine until I told him I found Rob, my brother.

    I reconciled my feelings towards dad in my 20s accepting things as they were. I came to peace with things pertaining to dad. Probably had a bit of a hard opinion of him at times, but I didn’t complain excessively about him to you as you and I would talk on the phone often though the years. So any feelings I had towards him, and may still have, have little to do with what I’m doing here. But the after-effects of his and your actions reverberate through present relationships that you would like to resurrect. Your wanting to continue a relationship of any kind with me causes a problem. You told a man, your brother, that he was not welcomed to meet his father. To me, your other brother - his brother, that is unimaginable. 

    The contents of this note is nothing more than an offer to you of a way forward if you wanted to resurrect a healthy relationship with Deanta, and even me. You are free, and I’ve told Deanta that she is free, to have any kind of relationship you and she would like to have in spite of any relationship that you and I don’t have. In fact, I encourage it.  She is entirely her own person. But then you began lines of communication with me, without the desire to do the hard work which that would involve.

    Donna managed to get us blacklisted from the other side of Deanta's family, even after we had gone down, I think two times, to visit. So you would be her only aunt. 

    Under different, perhaps future circumstances, I wouldn’t mind responding to an occasional family reunion. Right now this is not the type of family anyone would be interested in perpetuating. But you’ve made steps towards communicating with Deanta, as well as myself, even though I’ve told you I don’t want to be around you as you presently are. And it was that which prompted me to do some thinking. You were wanting to have more contact with me as if you had forgotten what you had done to your brother, Rob, and how vile that was. If you have a hard time understanding your connection to him as a brother then you could try thinking of him as your father's own son. A son who is at least as entitled to meeting his dad as you were. That is, if his father sees fit, and no one else intervenes with some malicious lie, as you did. That is finally now all just water under the bridge. But, it took out the bridge. But, it doesn't end. AThe Lord avails himself to his people in our situation, if they so chose, to rebuild a better bridge.

    The lie was that dad's and my relationship was anything other than what it had been our whole lives (and then, the notion that that should have anything to do with his relationship to his son Rob). We had not communicated in several years, but we never had a falling out. That is, until I told him I found Rob. It was my relationship with dad that you say is the reason that Rob cannot meet his father? Is there some kind of connection between a father and his relationship to one son and the relationship or responsibility he has with another son? Of course not. That is, unless irresponsibility followed by spite, vindictiveness, and perverse outside influence enter into the picture. Because, Dad and I never had fallen out together, ever. And our relationship at that time was virtually no different than it had ever been, in real terms, since the divorce. And if it was lacking, it was only because of his pattern of not maintaining contact, not mine. It was me who had to initiate and maintain any kind of contact from the time of the divorce onward. He had not called or initiated contact since the divorce. I had, eventually, hundreds of times. And the last time I had seen him, you were there. And things were fine. It was when you and I visited him together. What was wrong then? Our relationship then was the same as it had ever been.

    Throughout our lifespan I was able to visit him many more times than you. It was easier for me. I was in closer proximity to him most of the time when visiting home. Particularly Christmases. Yes, I had not made contact with him for several years, but how, after him not calling me since the divorce, except for one time in my late 30s, under some really weird circumstances, how is it a crime when I don’t contact him for several years? And, isn’t that actually what he wanted?

    You made up the bad relationship thing. He did not say that. What he could rightfully have said is that we had a very bad relationship from that morning that I told him I had found Rob and asked if it would be OK for Rob to come over briefly with some dinner and meet him. The bad relationship started at that moment which I had told him that I had “found a brother”. He did not ever say I had a bad relationship with him (until that morning). You did. If he did, he was lying to you. What makes me able to say that is that the last time I had seen him you and I had visited him together, and my relationship with him at that time was fine, or as normal as it had always been. 

    But, 'what if' I did have a bad relationship with him? “What does who I was to him have to do with his relationship to another son”? It was not just a dishonest attempt to shift responsibility he may have felt and the potential consequences away from him and onto someone else, but an ill-intended attempt to punish that someone else for the inconvenience and responsibility that person had brought back to him. He could indeed have shirked that responsibility in a number of more honorable ways. 

    And it's an understatement to say Rob had also been inconvenienced his entire life with not knowing who his father was, not being fully accepted into a family who would not tell him why he had no father's name on his birth certificate and didn’t look like everyone else in the family. And who, in fact, came into being years after his mother and supposed father had divorced.

    Consequently, Rob would not be able to meet his dad. Perhaps, he no longer wanted to meet his dad after his dad's initial response to me. Weeks before, he had not even known that he would ever know who his father was. Suddenly he was farther along than he had imagined. Rob is gifted enough to understand human nature and the uncertainty of events. He’s a real privilege to know. And he took what he was dealt in stride. And now he's good-to-go; disappointed, but good. He had had a good step-dad (Buzz Swift) whom he always suspected was not his real dad, who had stuck with him weekends for years after their divorce. But, he also experienced another step-dad years later who asked him to leave the house in 11th grade, with his mom consenting -  because he was an inconvenience to them. He lived on the street and with friends for a few months and then moved in with an older sister. That relationship with his mother never did fully recover. Nor the sister and the mom.

    Until I had seen that email of yours last August (that I had not recalled ever seeing), it had never sunk in that you had said that it was because of 'my relationship with dad' that was the reason he would not meet with Rob. It’s verbatim, right there in your email (attached). Rob had simply told me that you called him and told him "you aren't welcome to meet with him". But, there in the email, the evil thing was staring at me up from the screen, stating that he would have met with him, if it were not for his bad relationship with me. 

    So, it was you showing up in “likes“ on my Facebook and etc, as well as other things I’ve mentioned that prompted me to start to think about the lingering reality of the situation and how disgusting it continued to be to me. And, so I went diving back into past emails during which I discovering the email (attached) that I did not recall seeing. It had things in it that I know I would've responded to. One thing led to another, and here I am writing all of this at this time (thorugh this past year, by now).

    There was also something in your email about my adventure with Dan Shossow’s daughter Sheri Shossow that was innaccurate and ill-informed. That's why I know I didn't see this email before, or I would’ve remembered and responded to that. I get to that in a while.

    So here it all goes. 

    Here is the problem. Here’s why we likely won’t been seeing much of each other in the future if you remain as you are. And then the explanation of that problem is followed by an explanation of what you have the ability to do with it, if you so desire, which is to act on the problem and make things right with it in the interest of your mental health and the relationships with any of your family and mine, minus Rob. This does not involve 'patching up things' with Rob or anything of the sort. There is nothing to patch up. You chose not to know him. Rob is fine. But this is about doing the right thing. Making things right with him, in order to get right with yourself.

    So, the lie:

    (Your email to me): "It was because of my bad relationship with dad that dad refused to meet with Rob”

    Where that notion runs into difficulty is that, I was not going to be at the brief encounter between them that I was suggesting. I would not even be in that part of the state. I would not be present. I would not be a part of it. As described in the email to dad. The idea of "coming down there" to assist is still two emails away. How then does my supposed bad relationship with dad have anything to do with him meeting or not meeting with his son? And moreover, "What does a father's relationship with one son have to do with his obligations to another son"? 

    To make that worse...even if one son's relationship (me) should affect his relationship with another son, there was nothing actually better or worse with dad's and my relationship than there had ever been. No, it was not good, but it had never had the opportunity to go bad. It was the same relationship that I had with him when you and I visited him the last time I saw him and probably the last time I talked with him. You were there.

    Dad's and my relationship was no better or worse than it had ever been, arguably, since the day I was born. No, I had not spoken to him in several years, but I simply never fell out with then or any other time throughout our lives, ever. And that took some doing. Sure, I hadn’t called him in several years, but he never called me, ever, but for one exception. One bizarre exception. I think I told you about the call that came one year after deer season a few weeks after I had put a note on someone's car that was illegally parked at Camp 10 Ski Area (where I lived). Not at my place, but at the edge of the woods a quarter mile away. Not knowing whose car it was, I put a note on it saying there was no parking there and no hunting on the Camp 10 property. I never even knew it was his until several weeks later when he called me and asked me why I put a note on his car. Do I have to ask you if that’s strange? He thought it was funny. I told him I didn’t know it was his car and that I never looked in his garage to see what kind of car he had. Very puzzling. Disappointing to say the least. Deer-hunting up north, and the Grosses, and what they all were doing was virtually our only bond through the years. While living at Camp 10 for 5 years I had invited him up numerous times to hunt and he'd always decline and would go East instead, not continuing to go to Gross' since Hubert died. He was who he was, and I accepted that. But he was there and he didn't even stop in? Too strange. The very short phone call ended in a friendly manner, and that was it. That was my one call. Our relationship went on as it always had for years following that episode. In other words, in the usual, ‘unusual’ way. I would usually call him and visit when in town, and invite myself over to his place for Christmas Eve once a year, and probably call him a time or two more over the course of the year. Or presumably, would never had heard from him or seen him. I took Deanta to see him, one time. The last time I invited myself over to his place for our annual get together at their place on Christmas Eve (the only maybe it was to invite myself, and what I had had to do for years), he met me at the door and told me it wasn’t until tomorrow (Christmas Day) that year. So I managed to invite myself in and asked if I couldn’t grab a sandwich before I left. And there was no invitation to come back the next day. Or any of the years following. But that sort thing had been the norm and I had long since become accustomed to it. I had come to terms with it. You can only expect me to have so much respect for a man who didn’t ask for any visitation time with me when he left at the divorce, or with any of us for that matter, or even call, yet I showed him nothing but respect through his entire life - deserved or not. I understood and came to accept that was the best he could do. So the idea that you concocted that his unwillingness to meet with Rob was somehow due to me was nothing more than an attempt at a nasty fabrication. 

    Was I harming dad by asking him to give his son an opportunity to meet him? How does that work? He should have had years to prepare himself for it and be at peace with the likelihood that he would show up finally someday. 

    So, the problem:

    Twofold,

    1) Even if my relationship with dad was ‘bad’, I was not going to be at the meeting between he and his son. How then does my supposed bad relationship with dad have anything to do with him meeting his son? 

    2) (And, furthermore) What does a father‘s relationship with one son have to do with his relationship/responsibility with another son?” How does that work?

    He didn't just welch, he did it in a way that would have lasting consequences for those whom he left behind, such as yourself. 

    You want to smile and be friends on Facebook and so on. And I would like to smile back and be friends, but don’t want have anything to do with you unless you can grow up. Change. Much like I witnessed mom do. Far from impossible. Growth. Christ, through Paul, in the Bible, as you know, describes the process of ‘growing up into a mature man/woman’ as a never-ending, life-long opportunity to attain to and persevere in so long as we are here on earth. Not to work our asses off to sheer exhaustion, but for the sheer joy that it brings us through walking in the Spirit of the Lord and watching things happen under his favor. Let the Lord help you in this. It's been an incomprehensible blessing, in my life and continues to be.

    Mom grew up considerably through the years, in so many ways. She grew considerably through the middle and late middle-age span of her life. And that was a thing of beauty to watch. We don’t know how much the Lord had to do with that, but it happened nonetheless.

    The roadmap:

    You would understand what you did. You told your brother that he wasn’t welcome to see his father whom he’d never met. Instead of encouraging dad and offering to help him do an apparently difficult, important thing, or perhaps simply helping dad to, himself, tell his son he was not interested in seeing him (such as Barbie‘s dad did), you concocted a disgusting, lying response with dad (or instead of dad), helping him to harm himself, completely redefine  himself, and in turn, negatively impact the rest of his surviving family.

    This should not have been an emergency for dad. He’d known about Rob since Rob was born. He needed to act, finally. He chose to act in a dishonorable way. He could’ve handled it honestly, not dreaming up far-fetched, vindictive excuses, nor trying to punish others for the inconvenience of the consequence of actions involving him fathering a child. He could have met Rob at the door, or by phone and suggested he did not feel good about what had happened, but nonetheless, did not wish for any further contact. Perhaps even wishing him well. Or simply any variation of the above, or much which there is to mention. It's a no-brainer. Instead, his story ends with rejecting his son, and piling on a malicious vindictive claim that it is because of someone else. Instead, he profaned himself, and his legacy. And you, yours.

    Amazingly, things are forgivable in the Lord's universe when one takes responsibility to make things right, to the best of their ability. And that’s what you are given the opportunity to do. Yes, even in one’s self-pitying old age, if that’s the case. Or, you are just as free to have what you've done as your own, unattended, to legacy. It boils down to whether or not you care about these things. That's what's going to define you.

    So, you go to Rob, in person. Tell him that you understand now what you did to him, and you would like to do what you can to ‘make it right’. That’s it. You’re done. Just make him that offer. You can even fake it if that’s the best you can do. He will look at you funny, I imagine. Surprised, curious. He may even tell you he forgives you. I’ve not talked to him about this, and won’t. His answer will probably be one of total perplexion, wondering what in the world you could do to make up for what you did to him anyway. But it's your intention. Your desire. Your remorse. Your change of heart and mind (penance). You simply ask him what you could do to make things right. You will then be finished so far as I am concerned. If he asks you to do something in particular to “make things right”, then that will be left up to you. You will offer. You will do the best you can to respond to him. And you’re good to go. You are under no further obligation. You will have made amends, so far as I’m concerned. You will have done what the Lord would have you do, in this instance, in my opinion. You will prove that you are safe to be around. You will have model something precious to your family. You’ve taken responsibility for it and can be at peace now with Rob, the Lord, the world, and most importantly yourself, so far as I in this matter am concerned.

    What a simple, beautiful thing this could be in your life to simply act on this. That is, letting the Lord show you the way through to a better outcome, and then enjoying the journey and beautidul fruit of it, with him. Your pride, the selfish pride, is the only thing that will get in your way here. Everybody else is over it - as long as they don’t have to be around you. But it’s something you could do for yourself that would make amends with others as well. Not me telling you what to do, but the Lord. Yes, I’m telling you what I would like you to do, because I wouldn’t mind Deanta having a better relationship with her aunt, as well as me with my sister, And Deanta being able to meet her neat cousin Jeremiah and see Merlin again. Yes, bygones can be bygones, but then why does the Lord waste all his time telling us about how to make things right? To make things good?Because it's right and good. It's worthwhile and possible. Not leaving those things paralyzed and dysfunctional, as we all at one time became accustomed too.

    If you show yourself willing to grow and make things right, even if there’s little you can do to make things right, it still pleases the Lord. And ultimately, others involved. Someone that makes things right is a person whom others can trust and respect again. I would interpret Jesus' teaching in that area as asking us to strive to become what he would have us become through living according to his will and what he has shown us and taught us is right and good. I can’t conceptualize being like Jesus, God in the flesh. But I can conceptualize living according to how he would have me live. That is, to be seen, at least occasionally, if not always, to have the visible presence of his Spirit accompanying me in everything I do. We catch glimpses of the Lord at work in each other when we do and succeed in doing (even attempting) the seeming impossible – things we wouldn’t otherwise have the blueprint or the power to do. Even a desire to do.That’s what he makes possible. And here as well.

    So that’s it. Do what you want with all that. This is the opportunity that the Lord brings here and to all of his people in these situations and you are no exception

    And, I’m finished. There’s nothing I would like more than to have or make a call once in a while to share with you in this life, if you would. Things will be made right with Rob with your offer to him, never to be spoken of by me again. 

    What happened at mom's pitiful last few weeks? If I didn’t fully understand and come to peace with all of that, you would’ve heard more of that. I have, and have nothing more to say about that. If you want to teach and do something in the best interest of our younger generations, then do something here. If you don’t, I will understand and let it pass. I just can’t trust or respect you until I see otherwise. If you can live with that, then I can as well.

    The rest of this document are just the thoughts and memories it took to enable me to write something as concise and coherent as what you just read. Mentally exhausting, but gratifying. I'm going to buzz through it once more and whack away a lot of what I have already said. Some of it is very emotionally charged. Some of it I am obligated to put in front of you in all fairness because it is family history. Neither good nor bad, but importantly, informs the present and the future.

    If you have read at least this far you have done enough. Your debt to me (if you feel there is one) will have been paid and you will not hear from me again. And I would ask the same of you. The uncomfortable (unfinished) present will have been dealt with at least by me. All will be over between us. Just like I was asked of at mom‘s I will ask of you: You can come and see me after I’ve passed. Don’t bother coming before.

    If you act on this and make good with Rob, as I have described, then this letter is between you and me. You've got a year to act on this. If you don't, that's fine, we are done.  But after that time, this matter will go to the rest of the family, as a matter of record. They deserve an explanation. For any that don't care, then I'm happy to leave them in that place. This is for the one or two that do care. My daughter being one of them. And it will be a rich addition to her family archives, for one. So, after a year, and you don't choose to act on this, at that time, a copy of this will go to Jeremiah, Deanta, and Steve. Because they deserve an explanation. And we will close this thing out in that way and be done with each other. 

    I'm not one to sit around looking at broken things that the Lord can fix, and do nothing. Nor am I one to stick around beating on a dead Horse. This is simply a belated chance for you to do the right thing and thus renew my confidence and respect in you. We will see if Deanta is worth it to you. If your brother Rob is worth it. Even if Jeremiah and Merlion are worth it. And if your brother Todd is worth it. Incidentally, in this whole matter, Deanta is much more forgiving than I appear to be. 

    You need not read any further to satisfy the purpose of my writing all this. If you do, you will surely be in for some rough sailing. What follows below are just a lot of thoughts that I had to organize in my own mind in order to write what's above. It's very time-consuming and I need to move on to other things rather than go back and polish it. All in all, it's a lot of good, honest reflecting that would be valuable for certain others to also become informed. Whether they think so or not, in my opinion. Any any rate, I did the best I can do. The Lord and I. I hope the same for you.

    ____________________________

    Don’t pass up this opportunity to challenge yourself with these thoughts.

    (Jeremiah, your mother is entitled to make mistakes. They are so you don't have to make the same ones. It's all joy, and all toward that upward call.)

    ____________________________


    These are my ruminations leading up to finishing the writing above. They are harping, incriminating, even repetitive to what you've already read, but invaluable. I put far too much effort getting them down to set them aside. I should probably proofread it one more time, but I simply don't have the time or the motivation right now. History can be a beautiful thing, though. And if you don't care, then like I said, this is not entirely for you. Feel free to read no further.  Or, man-up and power through it. It's written with good intentions for you. I care.

    ____________________________


    Your called your brother Rob and told him he was not welcomed to meet his father (according to him). I did not learn about that until after the funeral. You are telling me in this email (attached) that you told him it was because of my “bad” relationship with dad.    

    Rob had been duly notified of his father‘s response and had no intention of going to meet him. You said my third email sounded like a terrorist threat. Then, why did you call Rob? That was not going to keep me, supposedly, from coming down there. Even if I did, which in hindsight we can see I had no intention of doing and never did do, how would that have harmed Hubie? Aside from his ego? And when you have a son, it’s not about you anymore. He desperately did not want to give his son a chance to meet him. That’s despicable. You could’ve consoled him, offered support and helped him avoid the humiliation of not letting his own son meet him. What was the terror in his mind of letting his son meet him? He had my offer of support in my original email. He knew I wasn’t bringing him terror. Instead, you and he decide to attack the messenger. When is that ever relevant? Dredge up totally irrelevant excuses. He humiliated himself, and I don't think he could have done it without you. That's what bothers me. 

    Is anyone foolish enough to believe that, even if I was the best son in the world that that same excuse would've been directed at me? From Hubie’s first response we can be certain that he was desperate to not have his grown son meet him, probably from his son’s birth. You and he were happy to pin that on me. That’s impossible. His responsibility to his son is his alone. He thinks he can just pass it on to another son. That’s pitiful. That sort of disgrace he now owns.

    What did matter was there was a guy out there who all his life wanted to know what is biological roots were. And inescapably, if he found out, he would naturally want to meet his father as well. My intent, as I made clear to everyone in the beginning was to see if he knew who his family was, and that he had a brother who cared about him. That was sufficient for me. All your drama about bitterness and hate on my part? Where is the hate? That’s just more casting around while trying to avoid the reality of the situation. It was nothing but a great thing for Rob and his family to find their biological roots, as well as other biological family who cares about them. I fulfilled my responsibility to Rob and his family. The hate and bitterness is dredged from your own paranoid imagination which is famous, just like Hubies was, for jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst in other people.  Your own process is nothing less than redirecting negative emotions of your own concerning dad‘s neglect for you (I was there) and now having to conceive of what to do with the notion of having to accept another biological family member (and dad’s predictable non-acceptance and subsequent rage ). Now, you were finally getting his attention and his approval by acting as though you’re honoring him by helping him do something dishonorable. And, now you can share in the dishonor.

    Did dad have the right to not let his son meet him? Did Rob have the right to seek out his father? Was Rob in the right to seek out his father? Yes. Was dad in the right not to let his son meet him?   

    So why are we even talking about this? Rob‘s son-relationship (offspring) to his father meant nothing to you or his father. So, why are you and I even talking about this, or anything for that matter? In your world a bloodline relationship has no value, and a father and mother have no inherent responsibility to respond to their offspring. That being the case, all that’s left between you and I are a bunch of mediocre, to poor, to even some violent lifelong experiences.

    One of your favorite replies when the conversation gets tough has always been, “I don’t want to about hear it”. The phrase that has held you back from experiencing so much growth and understanding in your life. And it guaranteed that any relationship you and I had was always going to be superficial. Instead of saying, “tell me more“, or “let’s talk about that“. So, don’t hear this either. But others will hear it and use it to guide their own sense of family, however they see fit, down the road. And, you can just stay away from me, perhaps until you grow up. I don’t have the stomach to handle being around you. And I feel s though it deserves and explanation. So I'm writing this.

    we could probably say it began when Mom opened a Christmas card with the news from Bette Swift that she would appreciate some help with the hospital bills from dad's son Rob's delivery. Our half brother. Or, according to the Lord, our brother.

    I’m going to insert right here what I’ve pointed out to you in the past. And that is that most of the brothers in our God’s "Nation of Israel" were "half" brothers. Just like you and Rob. Yet, that's not what the Lord called them. His new family, the nation of Israel, were for all practical purposes, brothers.

    In the Lord’s ecology, reconciliation is always possible. Complete Forgiveness comes after you make things right with those who you have offended against. I challenge you to ask your pastor about that, as well as the Lord himself.

    I am now going to commence talking about this attached email of yours I don't remember coming across at the time. I do remember the email next to it in which dad was offering me his muzzle loader. But not the one before (or after?). And I did not particularly want the muzzle loader but I appreciated you asking.

    When you refer to "destruction" in your first sentence, we know what destruction you are ‘not’ talking about. You’re not talking about the destruction that followed dad having a child with Bette Swift. That became the destructive secret that would fester and damage the relationship between he and mom; damage Rob, by not having a father‘s name on his birth certificate, not knowing where he fits into a family that wasn’t fully accepting of him; damage to the relationship between you and mom, because of the divorce; and, to our whole family and beyond. That was not the destruction you were talking about. It was some destruction that came upon dad as a result of my actions. Which presumably, was to his ego, which was wholly under his control, and his own ego thus being his own victim as well.

    Graciously, at the birth of the child, the extent of the actual damage would still depend on how dad “handled” it. He sired a boy whom had the natural right to one day ask some predictable questions, questions which he could be sure would be coming way eventually. It could end badly, and it could end well. It’s would be up to Hubie. He didn’t “handle” it. He left it for others to  ‘handle’. Destruction ensued from Rob’s birth, and went into full bloom. But in your mind, the issue is about the way I, “handled it“.

    So, what destruction are you talking about here when you’re pointing your finger at me? Well, It’s the collateral damage that occurred first to Hubie’s secret, and then to his ego. The secret? The destructive secret. Well, who cares if it gets destroyed? Except Hubie and Lori.

    So then, what about Hubie’s ego? He has and has had complete control over how he and his ego responds to the appearance of his son. 

    As for my part, I’m simply looking for a brother. The fact that it’s also his son, whom he doesn’t want to know about him, is a whole other matter. Hubie’s past actions that affected others are now asking to be dealt with. If there are some issues of ego in the way, maybe it has become a problem for ‘Hubie’ now only because it’s recently shifted away from being a problem for his youngest son who had found his biological father’s family? Collateral damage to the ego of a father who doesn’t want his son to meet him? About a minute later, and I’m done feeling sorry for him. Collateral damage to Hubie's ego comes from his original destructive act and both the natural and God-ordained consequences from that act. Any harm is self-inflicted. And, he needs to be thankful that it’s only his ego? Maybe he shouldn’t have left it for others to handle? But the after-effect is personal humiliation. Banishment from being looked upon as a decent human being. Leaving yourself at the mercy of other people‘s forgiveness. What a tragedy? Could it have been prevented? Could it have been handled differently? It wasn’t handled at all. Let’s look at how it was finally handled.

    I knew that finding a brother of mine would affect other people. It would affect dad. It would require sensitivity. But in the end, it wasn’t about him. His son needed to know his biological origins as well as that he had other family members who cared about him. That needed to be handled. The other brother (me), who needed to know about his other brother, was going to be affected as well until he knew he was OK. And, that was indeed how I described it when I described it to family members after recently having learned of his existence.

    So, what were my choices in handling it? What should they have been? What would your suggestions have been? In hindsight, we can have a pretty good idea of what your suggestions would’ve been? Your suggestions were silence. No digging around there without hitting a land mine. What would dad‘s suggestions have been? I think we can have a pretty good idea of what dad’s suggestions would have been. They likely would have been to not do anything. And object to anyone else thinking about doing anything. And then a whole lot more. So, my choices in handling it were limited. Everybody that mattered knew about it and was free to make their opinion known and then chose whether or not to join in with or without a “special invitation”. It did not matter what dad wanted or felt, because it wasn’t about him. He had refused to handle it.

    I felt uncomfortable consulting with dad because I felt he had already shown what his position was. Excuses would’ve been forthcoming and then the war would erupt. I was likely to have been disowned, much like Steve. That wouldn’t have changed anything, but why add that drama to the search? So, naturally I chose to look for the brother, do my best at handling it, and the brother would accept any outcome. We cannot change who dad is. And we cannot change what dad has done. Perhaps when you presumably told him I was looking, that was his opportunity to handle it differently. That was his opportunity to do it his way. Men have done it many times before. I thought that was well within his capabilities. Here was his chance. He’d put it off for 45 years. He would have the chance to do the right thing.  If he wants to get it wrong, then so be it.

    What were some of the possibilities?

    What if, upon receiving my email, he had gone along with, “the way I chose to handle the whole situation”? Unfortunately for him, Rob was still alive and wondering about his biological origins. Now, after Rob potentially meets the rest of his family, Hubie would’ve had to briefly meet with his son, perhaps told him he wished things could have worked out differently, wished him well, and then carried on with his life knowing he had dealt with it as best he could. But he didn’t. All of the pending gloom and doom he imagined to his reputation could’ve been halted by just meeting Rob at the door. Many, presumably lesser men, have done it. In the easiest and most lazy-minded way possible, he could’ve taken a play out of their playbook. I’m not saying he could’ve reversed the decades of destruction caused, but now he could make it right, to the best of the present circumstances, as well as virtually everyone's satisfaction. He could have wiped away many sins by just shaking his son’s hand, told him he wished things had worked out differently, and wished him well. Would that have been a bad reflection on him? Maybe so, but not nearly so bad as refusing to let his son meet him at all. So many different possibilities. And, I was there to help him with that, which can be seen in my third and final email.

    So, I found Rob and soon after sent dad this email.


    Good Morning.
     
    I called a fellow the other night.  I just needed to know if he was o.k.  I'd been looking for him for a year or two now.  Jeannette sort of let him slip about three years ago.  He's o.k.  But he's always wondered why there was no name for a father on his birth certificate.  He's always wanted to know of and to meet his natural father.
     
    He lives in Waukesha.  He's married with children.  He's worked in a plastics shop in Sussex for 15 years.  He's a good fellow.  Smart.  Good natured.  ...Forgiving.
     
    Naturally..., he wants to meet you.  That was not my intention in seeking him out.  I would have been disappointed, though, if he had not.
     
    He wants to stop over either tonight or tomorrow night(thurs./fri.) with some supper to briefly meet you.  Which would you prefer?  
     
    And...let me know if there's anything I can do to help you be o.k. with this.  
     
    He's o.k., so I'm o.k., and your going to be o.k.
     
    I'm going to call you late this morning;  to make sure you're o.k.  
     
    Love, Todd
     

    His reply was:

    Thanks for dropping a bonbshell on my poor old 82 year-old head.  I have no wish for any meeting you have referred to.  Further more, I have nothing but contempt for you for what you have done in this matter.  HWS 

    I sent him a second email:

    Please don't complain to me about your shame and your inability to be responsible.  I don't think there are many who share your self-pity.
     
    Nothing but great joy has come from this for almost all involved.  Most importantly, he's found a brother who has the guts to tell him what he was right to want to know.  So he's alright now.  
     
    The rest of what there is to know about you he will now learn from myself and others.


    I sent him another email which I no longer have a copy of. I’d love to see it again. Not just that email, but missing a number of other emails that I thought I had saved around Mom's death, and that is also what prompted this communication. For the first time since mom and dad‘s passing, and since you’ve been showing more interest in continuing a relationship with Deanta, I recently went looking through past emails that I had intended to save for Deanta’s knowledge of what went on, and found that many of them were gone. They had never been properly saved into a folder, and went away after being deleted by Yahoo. I also found this email that I had not seen before. And, it needs a response. Now, with you wanting to have a relationship with Deanta, which is fine, she’s in the position to hopefully meet Jeremiah and his family one of these days. For that matter, I would love to see Jeremiah and his family one of these days. But, there remains the disgusting issue of a daughter who told her brother that he’s not welcomed to meet his father. And then her impossibly shifting the blame to another brother, with an impossible connection, equally as disgusting as the first offense. This seems like the perfect time and way to hold that up to the light, and in the process, render most of those other lost emails no longer necessary.

    So, getting back to my third email to dad. It’s not hard for me to remember the main points of that email. 

    In that email I had asked dad, “Why not let Rob bring some pizza over, talk briefly, and then he will get out of your hair and leave you alone”, or, something to that effect. It was my last ditch attempt (was indeed my last correspondence with him). Maybe that’s why I added, jokingly “ Don’t make me come down there“. Yeah, I should’ve put a smiley face after it. But those words were surrounded by many other words that were encouraging, and forgiving, and promising. Not to mention a lifetime of mutual understanding. I knew it would be about persuading him that it would be OK and he would be fine, which I was capable of doing. And, that was indeed the tone of that whole email. Those words should’ve been interpreted as communicating a sense of importance to allow his son to finally meet him. And when you say, “He was so effected by your "news" that he hadn't been able to eat or sleep for three days, it was clear that he was horrified at the development of the initial, very tame email, and desperate not to simply allow his son to meet him. Who's fault? Where's the horror? Extreme distress may well have been his response. You simply ramped it up. Nobody had the stomach to take it any further. That was the last communication from me. Rob had given up hope for anything further after his first response. I did not learn about your phone call to Rob until much later.  

    I had no idea that you had entered the picture and called Rob until sometime after the funeral. Rob surely didn’t deserve that phone call. It was perverse. He had to listen to his sister say that. And, why wouldn’t he be ‘welcome to meet his father”. There could be no other reason other than character issues.  With you, dad even refused to accept responsibility for his own denial.  But Rob had already accepted dad‘s original response. But, then it got worse. Instead of accepting responsibility for not letting his son meet him, his son was told that it was because of a bad relationship with the son who found him. But, how can that be true when you were with me, visiting dad the last time I saw him or spoke to him, and our relationship was fine. I subsequently stopped calling him mainly because I just got tired of always being the one to call. He didn’t call or visit me, either. So, what makes me more responsible than him for a so-called “bad “relationship? In fact, we can be pretty sure that those words never came out of his mouth, and that it was you who concocted the idea after the fact. That is, after my email to him. Which is too late. And, what you did was an abomination. In plain terms it would be disgusting.

    Who would’ve thought that dad would have such a depraved response? He was in fear for the life of his “ego“. So many others like him have handled it so differently. How could he not see that he was trading his honor for his ego? To  play the self-pity card and become a drama queen in the face of meeting a son didn’t excuse him from anything. And, in all of the hysteria, why didn’t Lori call me? I was supposed to be the threat ready to come down? How does 'that' stop me from coming down there, in his mind, in Lori’s mind? The whole explanation was just pitiful. And as I said, I didn’t even know about the phone call from you to Rob until after the funeral. There’s no doubt Lori called dad, and dad called Lori, and that there was a whole lot of hysteria going on trying to figure out how to not to let his son meet him. But, what would actually excuse him from not letting his son meet him? Nothing. But in spite of that, he could've excused himself, himself. But a perverse continuation of his life-time of dereliction of parental duty ensued. Instead of anybody calling me, childish destructive drama followed.

    So, it’s kind of hard to imagine, but you say that you made this phone call:

    “I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad.”

    I doubt if those were your words and that was your tone. Because that’s not you. I doubt if it was even the fake you. But regardless, my relationship with dad was fine (or, had been until the moment had told him I had found Rob). And, I will break that down even more, in a minute. 

    But, first let me look at your first complaint in this Email.

    “ I have listened to you call dad, an asshole…“

    So, you’ve also heard me tell you that dad was the first one to use the word “asshole” to describe himself. He referred to himself as an asshole. Where is the grave sin here? I’ve told you this before. He thought it was cute. It got him off the hook. I’m pretty sure it was during a phone call just after he surprised me by saying, even out of the blue, “We can’t be buddy-buddy anymore“. I was hitchhiking around Florida. I was excited. I could always tell it was painful for him to hear about some of my exciting experiences. You may think I was asking him for money. Not only had I never borrowed money from him, I never asked to borrow money from him. Well, except for one time. I asked him to help me go to school in Russia, of all places. But I needed a motivator and I thought that was it. I needed to get away from the drugs and alcohol friend group I had at UW Whitewater. That was an insult that came out of your mouth in an email after dad died as well. A lie that came from either you or him in a flurry of drama excusing him and you for not calling me until hours or maybe it was a day before he passed away  As if I even wanted to see the guy as he lay dying because he didn’t have the sense to quit smoking. You said he was afraid I was going to bring Rob? What a joke that that was what Rob was looking for. Yes, he went to honor him at his funeral to close things out, and turned out to be the only one to go down to where they were laying dad to rest. But what interest would he have had in seeing a guy on his death bed who didn’t want to see him?

    But back to the money thing. He had given me money when I was about 16 or 17 to get a new set of brakes on my Oldsmobile when I ran into a guy on the way home from visiting him one rainy night. There were several times in college when I had to remind him that he had not sent me cigarette money a week here and there, which he had initiated. We never even talked about it. He would just send it along, sometimes with a joke or a saying but most of the time mindlessly, to his cigarette addicted boy. I know later on you mentioned he accused me of always borrowing money. Only money he had offered, and even that I couldn’t count on. 

    But, in the midst of telling him about my hitchhiking on Florida, sort of out of the blue, he had said, “well, you know, we can’t be buddy buddy anymore“. And then he said “I’m an asshole. I know. That’s the way I am”. I couldn’t believe he just said that, and I said, “Well, I wish you hadn’t have just said that?”, and the conversation just lamely continued on.  I concede that I was probably expecting to get too close to that father. By pointing out that conversation, it’s less me trying to justify calling him an asshole (which I rarely if ever did, surprisingly) and more just giving an example of just what an asshole he was willing to think of himself as. And how little weight that word even carried in his life, even so far as he was not afraid to be one.

    And, doesn’t every son at one point or another refer to their dad as an asshole? So, where is the heat and bitterness that you are imagining? Is that all you have? Those are no more than frustrated words that came out of my mouth. Where’s the hate? “Asshole”? He prided himself on being an asshole. He considered it practically a compliment. I understood the man and his shortcomings. And sure, I would criticize him. That’s normal. But, where’s the hate???  Our relationship was no different than it had ever been. We’ve never exchanged cross words or had any type of falling out. Yes, I understand that you have to dredge up or imagine some hate from me to excuse your actions. 

    Yeah, I did have a brother Steve, who dad had disowned a couple of decades earlier. At least “disowned“ was the word in circulation at the time. He never met his grandson, Jason. So, why would I bring another brother to dad who didn’t seem to know what or how to deal with the kids he already had? Well, that’s a no-brainer. The answer is that his son needed to know. Without his dad’s consent. Without his dad’s participation. Even if dad would not let him meet with him. Mom had “grown up” considerably since we were all grown and out of the house. It was possible for dad to have done the same thing. 

    And your relationship with dad? A few years before he died, he moved to assisted living? You offered to come down and help him move. He said, that’s OK, but his girlfriend was able to help him. Or so you said to me. What kind of relationship was that? That’s a rhetorical question. I already know the answer. It’s the one you never had with him. And, that broke my heart. And, that sort of aversion to his kids is maybe the excuse that I have to finally one day just get tired of it, maybe just quit calling him. Especially in light of witnessing the needs of my own daughter.

    So, to get to the how much more interesting question here: what if? What if our relationship was “bad”? What if everything you said about my relationship with dad was, indeed, true? It should be self evident: What does a father’s relationship with one son have to do with fulfilling his responsibility to another?” There is only one possible answer.

    Is there anyone who believes, even if I were the perfect son that dad would have elected to do anything differently”? 

    So again, my relationship with dad was fine. However, no, it was not fine anymore after he received my email telling him his son Rob wanted to meet him. But until then our relationship was hardly any different than it had ever been. The idea that it was “bad”, before that moment, was simply a concoction of you and dad after the fact, because it certainly would not have come from dad’s mouth except and until after I told him I had found Rob. We had not had any cross words together or a falling out of unkind, ever. We had not corresponded or seen each other in several years (I lived 4 hrs away), but that was only slightly unusual, and I am not sure either one of us even cared. Certainly not to start blaming each other. The only reason for our lack of contact was that I quit doing it for him. Quit initiating the contact. Tired of it. So, the whole charge that it was “because of your relationship with dad“ is without anything  to it. But what makes it more perverse is the context it was employed in: an attempt to avoid doing the right thing. It was a manufactured excuse because he needed one, because there was no other reason for him not to let his son meet with him. 

    It should not be hard to understand how I could’ve just gotten tired of always having to initiate everything in that father/son relationship, and with a father who had already told me he didn't particularly want much of one with me. I didn’t, “Break off communication with him“. There was no communication coming from him to break off. He’s the one who decided he couldn’t be “buddy-buddy” anymore. So, many years later when I stopped doing the hard work for him, it’s no surprise that in his own mind he knew it was not quite right and he had to cast around for blame. I had no control over that. And in hindsight, I see that it was towards the end of that period of time that I begun to look for my brother, who happened to be his son, and there was his excuse to shirk responsibility for two family relationships at the same time. And it was during that time mom had mentioned sort of out of thin air that, “if only your dad had not had that child“. Beyond that, dad‘s and my relationship had no signs of being any different than it had ever been. No cross words exchanged, never a falling out of any kind, or even close.

    I was succeeding. doing well at horseshoeing, horse dentistry, my own remodeling business, music, raising a daughter. I had brought her to see him. OK, once. But It was no more my responsibility to keep lines of communication going then it was his. 

    A long time before that perverse excuse, dad had already, desperately not wanted his son to know who or where he was. And, what was his excuse back then? Before me?

    Let’s talk about what it means for him to have “Contempt“ for me now and what that means for him.

    Dad was fine. Well, taken care of by his girlfriend. He presumably was a big boy, doing fine. I had no knowledge of anything unusual going on in his life. He was old, but age happens, and responsibility never goes away. And, there’s no reason he couldn’t deal with the fact that, very predictively, his youngest son was going to seek him out. His age did not give him an exemption. If, because of his age, he needed help, then he had you, me, Irene. I assumed it would be a challenging development for him. But, as we can see in my email to him, I was on-track to make it as easy for him as possible. It was not my obligation to warn him a few years or anytime in advance that I was looking for my brother, who happened to be his son. Dad was fine, but his son Rob was not. That’s all we needed to know. Even though his son Rob was doing marvelously in life, he had the need to know his biological origins. And, in that regard he was not doing well. Rob’s family (children) have had a lot of health issues that he wanted to know more about on his father’s side of the family. I was able to share some of that with him. Now, no surprise, he’d like to meet his father. No reason why that should be a problem. His dad could simply tell him no (again, may men have. Barbie’s father did). He’s not there to ask for anything and was willing to graciously walk away if sadly his request was denied. And, in fact, he did just that when the request was ultimately denied by his father. His father desperately did not want to be inconvenienced by having to let his son meet him. 

    Could that had been prevented in advance by allowing him to participate in the process? Could that have been handled differently? What if the son, before he tried to find his brother (who will probably want to meet his father) had told his father that he would like to find and meet his other brother and see if he knew who we were, and that we cared about him? See if he was ok? One could be justified in assuming that the relationship between the father and I would’ve turned really bad right about then. Therefore, why go through what amounts to an empty formality that would probably make matters worse? Why would that matter if I didn’t involve him? Because, after all, it’s not about the him. The son has every right to wonder about and pursue a brother, and a son every right to persue a father he doesn’t know and is curious about. So, exactly why this “contempt”? Why would he even have to be asked to let his son meet him? That’s a no-brainer. Sure, I was asking him. But his natural instincts, his dignity as a human being, God himself, had already confronted him with it. Nature confronted him.  It was confronting him long before I came along. I simply gave him a new opportunity to do it graciously.

    OK, I have to look at this statement of yours. 

    “You, yourself chose not to have a relationship with Dad, so now you send him the first communication he has heard from you in many years and it is telling him that he needs to meet a son. Do you get the irony of the situation? A son who hates him and doesn't talk to him telling him that he has to do something?” 

    No, I don’t get the irony. There’s no irony there. It’s a grown man acting like a nine-year-old supposedly not wanting to be told what to do, being confronted by responsibility and desperately looking for an excuse. He picks a bad one. One that works only in his mind and those foolish enough to lazy-mindedly go no further.

    If simply not calling him was choosing not to have a relationship with him, then what do we make of him cirtually never calling me? Calling me twice, maybe three times, in 30 some years since the divorce? At least twice. I’m sure once sometime when I was a kid after the divorce, and then once again when I was about 38 years old, when I had called him dozens of times. If not calling and not coming to visit is any indicator of hate, then you could conclude that he hated me much more than I hated him. 

    Something bigger than me was telling him to do something. Among things such as common sense and common decency were God‘s natural laws written on our hearts. Christ’s system of ethics  asking people to take care of their own. In this case, dad should have been wrestling with the serious matter of a father allowing his son to meet him. I wasn’t telling him what to do so much as I was telling him what he should already know he should do. I was giving him an opportunity. He decided to shoot the messenger, but that doesn’t wipe away the message. I get the convoluted thinking in dad‘s head about not wanting to be told what to do. But, when is it ever OK not to do the right thing just because somebody else tells you to do it? That’s just a small, selfish mind of a small man/child trying to escape responsibility. 

    He used to find a way to belittle me when I would beat him at chess as a kid. I knew who I was dealing with.

    So, imagining previously nonexistent “hate“ and “bitterness“ in a son who hasn’t called him “in years“, when he could easily have called that son himself doesn’t add up. And it surely does not exempt him from his responsibility to another son? There is no exemption there. He was asked to do the bare minimum of a man and take responsibility for creating a son by letting him meet him. He refused. And then blamed it on his shortcomings with another son. In general terms, it’s despicable. Where I come from, it’s despicable, pathologically selfish. He had no intention of fulfilling his responsibilities as a father, and was ready to cast blame and then expressly boil in contempt for anybody who might present him with it.

    Given time, he could’ve felt OK about it. He needed encouragement. I was ready to help him succeed at that. It’s right there in my emails. It couldn’t have had a positive effect on his life. Lifted the shroud of gloom and doom. Made people proud. That’s what those things do. He needed us to help. He let everybody whoever had an ounce of faith in him sick to their stomach.

    He had a son who was aspiring for him to be his best and a daughter who was aspiring for him to be his worst. 

    If the Lord was present in either of your lives, then his assistance would’ve been alive and able to get him across the finish line. No doubt he was present in yours, and you went on and listened to your flesh.

    This next quote of yours below almost isn’t even relevant anymore, because you’ve admitted that Rob is your brother. But, this is a good example of your twisted thinking:

    Your said: “Rob is our cousin”. 

    OK. What kind of ill-conceived nonsense is that? Even dad didn't deny that he’s not our cousin. Yeah, we as kids thought he was our cousin. In fact, we barely thought about him at all. That statement indicates that you, when you stated it, were severely out of touch.

    __________________________

    You state:

    “… the fact that you chose to shut down communication with him for all those years backed up the opinion that you obviously had. So when you made Rob "your project", and I say that because you obviously didn't do it to share with the rest of the family because Steve and I never got his phone number, I ended up getting it off of an email you sent Dad, and you must not have shared ours with him because we never heard from him. I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad. You encapsulated this mission of yours and shot it right at the guy that you had so much bitterness and hate for.”

    ____________________________

     

    I didn’t shut down communications. There was no communication coming from him to shut down.

    So, would it have made you happy if Rob was “our project“? No, you would’ve been content just running and hiding from him for the rest of your life, like dad. When I first mentioned to you that I had found out about Rob, and how I wanted to see if he knew that there were people who cared about him, and implicitly, if he knew who his father was, you had gone silent. You didn’t even have the honesty to mention that you’d known about him for decades. It was impossible to do anything other than assume that you had a problem with that. I made it a point to not bother you any further. Why didn’t you mention it to dad? I suppose you did.

     (?). I would’ve loved to hear from him. I could tell that nobody was very enthused that I was looking for Rob. So, I didn’t keep bringing it up. Needless to say, this was not about them, dad or anyone else; it was about Rob and his best interest. If there was ever anything you “didn’t want to hear about“ this was it, and, I was not about to go through the disgusting experience of forcing it on anybody. This was about Rob and his best interest. So it became “my project”, apparently, and in Rob’s best interest. However, it could have and perhaps should have been ours. 

    So, I was looking for any Swift to tell me something about Bette or Rob, and they had all moved away from West Bend. Of course, they had all grown up and scattered by then. I would ask mom if she had any notion where any of the Swifts were. One time she said, oh yeah, I ran into such and such a Swift about a month ago. But she had no idea how to contact them. So when you informed me of Len Swift’s funeral in Wausau, I checked the obituary, called down and asked if anybody had any idea where I could find Bette or Rob Swift? I told him that I was Rob’s brother and I’d like to locate him and see if he has any interest in meeting me. A very sour sounding ladies’s voice on the other end of the phone said that maybe I should call Uncle Bill in Sussex. Uncle Bill said yes I know where Rob is, I’ll give him a call and see if he is interested in talking with you. Rob called me that evening and said that he’s been looking for someone like me all his life and we talked for three hours. 

    I can’t remember how I broke the news to you, but I still have an email that I sent to Steve, with his joyous response. Joy that you’ve since talked him out of. As I recall, I sent a similar email to you which was inviting you into whatever you chose to do next. Not forcing you to do anything. Not asking you to go ‘through me’ for anything. I didn’t force a phone number on people expecting them to feel like now that they have a phone number that they’re obliged to call the person. You might appreciate that I did not put you in that predicament. And I spared Rob that same predicament of giving him phone numbers and potentially making him feel obligated to call people he doesn’t even know or know whether or not they even want to have contact with him. I could tell from your silence that with you, that was the case. So, I left it up to individuals, giving however much space they needed to get comfortable with it. Wanting to claim that I was doing it as some sort of conspiracy to get back at dad for who knows what, or why, is bizarre and unfortunate.

    The fact that you’re perplexed about something as simple as not giving you his phone number, or him yours, is just warped. Assuming-what-you-want-to-assume. Assuming worst motives on the part of other people, with little or no justification is something that showed up many times in our life with dad. If there was any interest at all, I was prepared to see if there was some interest in get-together where we could all casually agree to meet, introduce ourselves, and simply test the waters for future relationships, if desired. Or, just call it good. But, it was your responsibility to actually “do” something then. You even said that you went “silent”and waited. You can’t blame others for not moving forward. Rob had no choice. He had to move forward, and let come what may.

    As it turns out, your response from the start was going to be to share dad‘s response to welcoming Rob into his biological family. You regressed back into your age-old habit of “not wanting to hear about it“, and to explode if you are made to listen. Back into your paranoid generating of all sorts of false, over-imaginative motives on other people‘s part that would justify you not doing anything, or even doing the wrong thing. Knowing that vindictiveness has always come through for you in the past.

    So, yes, I broke the news that I had found Rob and indeed, he didn't know who his father was, and is happy to hear from us. 

    I told dad. He responded. Somewhere in there you called Rob, as you say here, “I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad.” I did not hear that from Rob until a while after the funeral. He said you had called him and told him that he was “not welcome to meet with dad“. So, you had, bizarrely, told a son that he was not welcome to meet a father he had never met. And by then, after dad‘s first reply, he no longer had intended to. If you indeed told him it was because of his dad‘s relationship with me, then that would have left him completely dumbstruck. That would have struck him as some twisted excuse. You came up with that irrelevant excuse probably because you were terrified of dad’s rage, and maybe being disowned yourself, as was his habit. All you really wanted was the facsimile of a father daughter relationship with him whether it was real, healthy, or not. But, that excuse would not make sense to the average person. And of course, right then and there, whatever was said, Rob could tell the kind of people he was dealing with in you and dad. People who are just no good. People to whom it was a contemptible thing to be asked to meet a family member. How mystifying? Are you starting to get the idea of why I find you so abhorrent?

    Here, we will briefly touch on this statement:

    “Then he started talking about how Juanita's daughter Nancy had told him once, because she worked with the law somehow, that you had been dragged into jail for some sexual misconduct, or something, and how would you like it if someone told Deanta about all of her dad's history. I thought had a legitimate point. He sure showed a lot more restraint and forgiveness, as an unbeliever, than you did. He softened up as time went by and even asked about how you were doing at various times.”

    That is an irresponsible rendering of an important matter by Nancy. No doubt, she had a position in the district attorney’s office who had information that was intended to remain confidential. Even though it didn’t matter to me whether it was or not. She left dad completely misled with information that she was trained to know and keep confidential, and it was incomplete and used to go on and assert a false conclusion. 

    It was regarding an incident with Sheri Shossow, Dan Shossow’s daughter, who had come to live with us for a Fall and Winter. She quickly got very cozy with me, on her own initiative. Oh sure, and I helped. She was always all over me. Mom even warned me. She was infatuated with me and loved to make out. Well, she was a sweet, fun, 17 year-old girl, so I went with it. We were at a family Christmas party there at the house in Big Bend. Maybe you were there. We both had several alcoholic drinks (grasshoppers). Admittedly, slightly drunk. She was always talking about having sex during that period of the month during which she was not fertile, and was wondering where we could go that was dry and give it a shot. I suggested the hay in Guthrie‘s barn down the hill. So, down we went, laid down and had sex. Couple weeks later, after quite a bit more making out, Dan comes home and says he was told what we did in the barn, and that now she’s moved in with her mother. To get her cell phone off the hook, she had to explain herself. She said I went into her after she had passed out. The detective from the county called a day or two later and asked me to come in. We talked for 10 or 15 minutes and he told me that he would not be filing any charges. It was because of how she described what had happened, conscious and awake. He said that she said she had gotten up in the middle of the act to go to the bathroom. And, what I had said confirmed that. So, I learned, with her, that girls and women who have never had sex before, don’t always want what they think they want. And I took that to heart. She enjoyed the experience, but later, did not enjoy not being a virgin anymore, and the whole aftermath was not something she was prepared for. She was pissed. She had flirted and teased, and then consented to do what she thought she wanted to do and found that it was different than she expected. Truthfully, I had it coming. Because, I should’ve known better. But, what I had done was done innocently and stupidly.  So I called Pat Brown who you might remember from the saddle club. He lived over by the Cooper’s and the Putz’s. He was the Waukesha County DA. I told him what it happened and ask him about the merits of filing a complaint for her lodging a false accusation? Mainly because I needed to prove to Dan that I didn’t do what she said I did. Even though all he had to do was ask the detective. Brown said I hadn’t been falsely charged, or charged at all. He said there was no record of it, but if I was to file a complaint it would become public. He said the best thing to do would be to forget about it. So, except for Dan, that was the end of that. Dad, according to what you’ve said below, was left by Nancy to let his imagination run wild. Importantly, I had even shared this with Steve, I’ve told Deanta about it in he past, and mom certainly knew. In fact, let’s not forget that Deanta will be reading this email. I took responsibility for it. No harm done. I would’ve liked to have apologized to Sheri, but she was long gone. I saw her many years later at mom‘s funeral. She approached me, which surprised me, and we talked long about many things, minus our sexual encounter. Perhaps she had taken responsibility for her part as well. I’m actually surprised and disappointed that neither Steve nor Jeannette told you about it. Your comparison of that to Dad and his having had a sexual encounter didn’t add up. He had a family and a wife, and after bearing a child tried to excuse himself by saying Bette Swift was just a whore. He acknowledge the child was his, but never took any form of responsibility for it, and then once the child had grown up, and it was no longer a threat to him, refused his child the simple decency of letting him meet him. Said it was his son’s (my) fault, according to you. Then, he capped it off with contempt for even being asked. 

    Hubies request was honored. He made everybody sick to their stomach.

    I took dad's response like one would take that of a selfish, angry child. You don't take offense at something from someone who knows no better. But, hurt did come from deep disappointment in someone whom one might have had greater hopes for. In locatinf Rob, I did what anyone would or should have done out of respect for their family. Same as I'm doing now. Dad's response was to disrespect his family. My family. And then harm himself and those who helped him by doing what he did and involving them.

    But, let’s say that the  worst of your fantasies comes true. What did Hubie actually have to be afraid of?

    Todd, comes down and gets Rob. They knock on Hubie’s door. Hubie’s terrified. He’s going to have to speak through an ajar chain-locked door and tell a guy he’s not interested in meeting him. Or perhaps a different scenario unfolds. He says thank you for coming, but I’m not interested in anything further. Have a good evening. Or a different scenario unfolds. He meets him at the door, shakes his hand and tells him he’s gratified that he turned out OK. Tells him he wished things had been different. He might say he’s honored to meet him, and that he wishes him well in the future. Tells Rob that he hopes he understands. Have a nice evening. Or, he could say, “look, I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in meeting you”. It’s happened many times. The worst Hubie would have to deal with then is to watch a guy bid him good night and walk down the hall with a fresh pizza. Game over. This is what grown-ups in Hubie‘s position do. 

    I can’t tell you how many times dad and I listened to “Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash and laughed our asses off. Not a bad ending to that song. Not the ending dad chose.

    Robert, naturally, curious about who his father was, was not told by people who knew. He had no father‘s name on his birth certificate, he didn’t quite bear the family resemblance, and was told as much. He went through his 20s and 30s and even into his 40s without knowing, while wanting to. It was the source of strife for him and would only get worse the farther along it went. Barb, his sister, had walked in on a compromised Hubie and Bette when she was eight or nine years old. Because of the encounter, she suspected he was Rob’s father and actually had half-heartedly suggested to Rob later in life that maybe he should start thinking about Hubie. He wasn’t sure who or where this Hubie was. He could’ve used some support from somewhere. He had no support. I suppose anyone else who thought of supporting him may have feared becoming complicit in encouraging a boy to meet his natural father, Hubie, whom they knew did not want to meet him. I’m sure it was talked about widely. Rob was quite alone in the issue. At any rate, Robert was stuck on a square one. And it strained relationships. Particularly with his natural mother. 

    Instead of dealing with it, Hubie elected to let it work itself out in the worst possible fashion. When his son had grown up and become curious about who his father was, Hubie could’ve taken a play out of the playbook of so many other men and women in his position. He could have met with him alone and told him he wasn’t interested in having a relationship with him. I can think of several people close to me whom that’s happened to, my adopted first Cousin Barbie being one of them. You should well know about that. They’ve met the parent and learned, contrary to what they had hoped, that there won’t be a forthcoming relationship. And, they’ve left. That option was available to Hubie as well. Instead of making something up, lying about it, and betraying his daughter by having her do the dirty work for him. 

    Rob would understand. Turns out he accepted without any resistance at all. Just a lot of bewilderment and disappointment. Hubie had Lori, who would do anything for the attention and the approval of a father which she needed so badly. Her history with him, as far as him calling, inviting, or visiting her, as she recounted to me during my probably 35 years of being her erstwhile therapist, was even more wanting of a father’s attention than mine was. And, she felt that she was honoring him by helping him do the dishonorable thing.

    How to close.

    Did dad have the right to not let his son meet him? Did Rob have the right to seek out his father? Was Rob in the right to seek out his father? Yes. Was dad in the right not to let his son meet him? No. He couldn’t think of a reason, and neither can I. And his intent was to hurt anything that would suggest to him do otherwise. 

    More importantly, what does a father’s relationship with one son have to do with not fulfilling his responsibility to the other? There is only one possible answer.

    Did my lack of respect for him ever show up in my behavior towards him? No. Never a cross word exchanged between us, and never any kind of falling out. 

    The take home:

    Is there anyone foolish enough to believe that even if I were the perfect son Hubie would not have done everything possible to not let his son meet him. He had no intention of fulfilling his responsibilities as a father and instead was ready to caste blame and contempt on anybody who made him uncomfortable about it. 

    In winding down here I thought it would be interesting to ask AI. I ask AI all kinds of things. The response was interesting. I left out the potential unfortunate effects on the children, and all of the selfish and personal weaknesses of the typical  father who chooses to reject his child. But I found the ethical and societal considerations convicting. And yes, ironically, someone has taught me better.

    These are a few of the thoughts that AI generated:

    When a father never allows his illegitimate son to meet him as an adult, it raises complex emotional, ethical, and psychological issues for everyone involved. The exact thoughts on this situation can vary dramatically depending on the perspective of the father, the son, and society. 
    Ethical and societal considerations
    The consensus view is that a father's choice to reject his son is morally and ethically wrong, as it places his own comfort and secrets above the emotional and psychological well-being of his child. 
    • Responsibility and accountability: Many believe that a man should take responsibility for the children he fathers, regardless of marital status. To avoid a biological child is considered a major moral failure.
    • The child's rights: The child has a right to know their biological parent. The father's choice to deny contact deprives the son of a fundamental aspect of his identity.
    • Outdated stigma: The term "illegitimate" is no longer legally relevant in most places and is socially viewed as an outdated concept. However, the societal bias against non-marital children persists, making the father's rejection even more painful.
    • Breaking cycles: Some argue that a father who was poorly parented himself may repeat this behavior, even if unconsciously. This does not excuse the behavior.
    There's so much more I have to say, but this is it. Take the suggestions here and make things right in your life and the life of others. I'd love to get back on better terms with you, mainly for Deanta's sake. But, my sister's, too. Good luck. Love, your other brother, Todd.





    Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

    On Saturday, May 21, 2011, 8:36 AM, Lori Saunders <homeward13@yahoo.com> wrote:

    I'm glad I gave it a night before I responded because it brought back all the destruction that happened because of the way you chose to handle that whole situation. Rob is our cousin, so, certainly that is the element that can be made known here, and reuniting with a cousin is a good thing.
    I am going to take this opportunity to get this off my chest so I don't have to stuff it and just be done with it.
    On my end of things, I have listened to you call Dad an asshole, among other things, for many years so I know what you thought of him. The fact that you chose to shut down communication with him for all those years backed up the opinion that you obviously had. So when you made Rob "your project", and I say that because you obviously didn't do it to share with the rest of the family because Steve and I never got his phone number, I ended up getting it off of an email you sent Dad, and you must not have shared ours with him because we never heard from him. I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad. You encapsulated this mission of yours and shot it right at the guy that you had so much bitterness and hate for. I was amazed that you couldn't figure out why Dad responded the way he did. You, yourself chose not to have a relationship with Dad, so now you send him the first communication he has heard from you in many years and it is telling him that he needs to meet a son. Do you get the irony of the situation? A son who hates him and doesn't talk to him telling him that he has to do something? Well, you accomplished something that I'm sure would have made you very satisfied, so I will tell you about it. When you informed me that you found our half brother, I figured there would be fallout so I waited. I got what was almost a prank call one day. I answered the phone and the voice said "oops, wrong number". I could have sworn that it was Dad's voice; it came to my mind that he wanted to talk to me but didn't know how to talk about this new news. So I called him back, many times, but he wouldn't answer for a couple of days. So, I sent him an email telling him that I had known this news for over 30 years because Mom had made sure, in her post divorce ranting and raving, that I knew about what my father had done. I also wrote that you obviously had become bitter about it, but to pity you, not to hate you. I wrote that he needed to forgive you, forgive his father, forgive Mom. He was so affected by your "news" that he hadn't been able to eat or sleep for 3 days. The thing that saddened me most was that Mom had gone to visit Dad, not too long before this happened, and forgave him and they had a nice visit. She had showed up a couple of times. After this, he asked me to tell her not to drop by anymore and he didn't want to talk to her; that this incident had dredged up too many bad memories of times past. I passed this on to Mom, because I knew what would happen; and it did. She blew up at me about why he couldn't tell her and that she was going to drop in on him anyway whether he wanted it or not. I told her that the way she was acting was exactly the reason why he didn't want to tell her himself. It was very sad because the fact that there was a reconciliation after all those years was beautiful. Then came your next email, with what seemed to be a terroristic threat. I had him forward it to me because I wanted to make sure that it was what he was making it out to be. You don't tell someone to call this person and meet him or you will come down there, without it being considered a threat. Then he started talking about how Juanita's daughter Nancy had told him once, because she worked with the law somehow, that you had been dragged into jail for some sexual misconduct, or something, and how would you like it if someone told Deanta about all of her dad's history. I thought had a legitimate point. He sure showed a lot more restraint and forgiveness, as an unbeliever, than you did. He softened up as time went by and even asked about how you were doing at various times.
    I hope it was all worth it in the spectrum of your life. It prevented us from letting you know about Dad's status until the very end because we didn't know what you were going to do. He deserved, as our father, peace at the end of his life.
    The glory is all God's; I have seen some beautiful things in the end of Mom's and Dad's life.
    Cleaning out Mom's dressing table I came on to over 20 cards that she had saved from years of Valentine's Day and Anniversaries from Dad; "To my little wiff, from you big hubbie." I found only 2 from Dan. It hit Dad hard when Mom got cancer and he wanted me to keep him up to date on the situation. Irene told me that it hit him hard when Mom died, he was noticeably depressed. I know that they are both in Heaven. Jeannie even said that Mom had a smile on her face in the end. There were some beautiful things going on at Dad's bedside in the last week and a half of his life and especially that last night.
    So, it wasn't easy staying in Dad's life; there were plenty of times I had to brush my feelings off and not return negative thoughts. But I wouldn't have missed it for anything now that I have seen what God's mercy and lovingkindness can do.
    Todd, you are my brother and a fellow believer, which comes before your being my brother actually. I will rely on the Spirit for the rest.
    I look forward to meeting Rob and seeing you guys.
    Love, Lori






    --- On Fri, 5/20/11, Mr todd saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com> wrote:

    From: Mr todd saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com>
    Subject: Re: got response
    To: "Lori Saunders" <homeward13@yahoo.com>
    Date: Friday, May 20, 2011, 10:59 PM


     Rob Swift is planning on coming with me.  What can we do to make that work?  Do I need to introduce him as a friend of the family?  Friend of mine?  Shall I have him wait until everyone is gone?  Thoughts?
    From: Lori Saunders <homeward13@yahoo.com>
    To: Steve Saunders <ssaunders33@yahoo.com>; Todd Saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com>
    Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 10:24 AM
    Subject: got response

    I got a reply back from Juanita; don't have to worry about her coming to the funeral. It wasn't worth forwarding. Since she had made it her business to tell Barbie about Dad's death, I was worried that she was considering herself to be part of the picture and I didn't want Irene to have to deal with that. It's all good.
    Love, Lori


  • Message 2 of 3. For JAWS, turn virtual PC Cursor on if needed.
    To:  me · Tue, Jun 16 at 10:19 AM

    Message Body




    Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

    Begin forwarded message:

    On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 9:27 AM, Todd Saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com> wrote:

  • Message 3 of 3. For JAWS, turn virtual PC Cursor on if needed.
    To:  Lori · Tue, Jun 16 at 10:50 AM

    Message Body






    ----- Forwarded Message -----
    From: Todd Saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com>
    To: saunderstodd@yahoo.com <deanta.saunders@yahoo.com>
    Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2026 at 10:19:35 AM MDT
    Subject: Fw: For my daughter, and my nephew, and my brother, Rob.




    Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

    Begin forwarded message:

    On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 9:27 AM, Todd Saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com> wrote:

    To you, this may be looked upon as traumatizing. It well might be. No surprise. Many things in this life are, and will continue to be. But to me, this is how sensible people, good brothers, good fathers, respond to something in this sort. It brings back hope after calamity. It brings clarity, freedom from slavery to confusion and misinformation. It promises a walk with the Lord in His ways within which only good outcomes can be expected. For Rob this will be nothing. He doesn’t even know I’m writing this. For you it’s an opportunity to be free and move forward. This is for you. Dad is long gone. This is nothing between me and him. There were no hard feelings between us until I found Rob. Even the remark in the email, “don’t make me come down there” was a harmless remark meant to, yes, give him a hard time, motivate him to do something, anything. I had no reason to believe it would be received with anything other than affection and good intentions. It was a father-and-son remark by a son who was on the same terms with his father that he had always been. You took the liberty of helping him misinterpret that. 

    At the prospect of simply letting his son meet him, he complains to you, and you two concoct nothing more than a lie saying it was due to the relationship between dad and I that dad would not meet with his son. Except, our relationship was fine until I told him I found Rob, my brother.

    I reconciled my feelings towards dad in my 20s accepting things as they were. I came to peace with things pertaining to dad. Probably had a bit of a hard opinion of him at times, but I didn’t complain excessively about him to you as you and I would talk on the phone often though the years. So any feelings I had towards him, and may still have, have little to do with what I’m doing here. But the after-effects of his and your actions reverberate through present relationships that you would like to resurrect. Your wanting to continue a relationship of any kind with me causes a problem. You told a man, your brother, that he was not welcomed to meet his father. To me, your other brother - his brother, that is unimaginable. 

    The contents of this note is nothing more than an offer to you of a way forward if you wanted to resurrect a healthy relationship with Deanta, and even me. You are free, and I’ve told Deanta that she is free, to have any kind of relationship you and she would like to have in spite of any relationship that you and I don’t have. In fact, I encourage it.  She is entirely her own person. But then you began lines of communication with me, without the desire to do the hard work which that would involve.

    Donna managed to get us blacklisted from the other side of Deanta's family, even after we had gone down, I think two times, to visit. So you would be her only aunt. 

    Under different, perhaps future circumstances, I wouldn’t mind responding to an occasional family reunion. Right now this is not the type of family anyone would be interested in perpetuating. But you’ve made steps towards communicating with Deanta, as well as myself, even though I’ve told you I don’t want to be around you as you presently are. And it was that which prompted me to do some thinking. You were wanting to have more contact with me as if you had forgotten what you had done to your brother, Rob, and how vile that was. If you have a hard time understanding your connection to him as a brother then you could try thinking of him as your father's own son. A son who is at least as entitled to meeting his dad as you were. That is, if his father sees fit, and no one else intervenes with some malicious lie, as you did. That is finally now all just water under the bridge. But, it took out the bridge. But, it doesn't end. AThe Lord avails himself to his people in our situation, if they so chose, to rebuild a better bridge.

    The lie was that dad's and my relationship was anything other than what it had been our whole lives (and then, the notion that that should have anything to do with his relationship to his son Rob). We had not communicated in several years, but we never had a falling out. That is, until I told him I found Rob. It was my relationship with dad that you say is the reason that Rob cannot meet his father? Is there some kind of connection between a father and his relationship to one son and the relationship or responsibility he has with another son? Of course not. That is, unless irresponsibility followed by spite, vindictiveness, and perverse outside influence enter into the picture. Because, Dad and I never had fallen out together, ever. And our relationship at that time was virtually no different than it had ever been, in real terms, since the divorce. And if it was lacking, it was only because of his pattern of not maintaining contact, not mine. It was me who had to initiate and maintain any kind of contact from the time of the divorce onward. He had not called or initiated contact since the divorce. I had, eventually, hundreds of times. And the last time I had seen him, you were there. And things were fine. It was when you and I visited him together. What was wrong then? Our relationship then was the same as it had ever been.

    Throughout our lifespan I was able to visit him many more times than you. It was easier for me. I was in closer proximity to him most of the time when visiting home. Particularly Christmases. Yes, I had not made contact with him for several years, but how, after him not calling me since the divorce, except for one time in my late 30s, under some really weird circumstances, how is it a crime when I don’t contact him for several years? And, isn’t that actually what he wanted?

    You made up the bad relationship thing. He did not say that. What he could rightfully have said is that we had a very bad relationship from that morning that I told him I had found Rob and asked if it would be OK for Rob to come over briefly with some dinner and meet him. The bad relationship started at that moment which I had told him that I had “found a brother”. He did not ever say I had a bad relationship with him (until that morning). You did. If he did, he was lying to you. What makes me able to say that is that the last time I had seen him you and I had visited him together, and my relationship with him at that time was fine, or as normal as it had always been. 

    But, 'what if' I did have a bad relationship with him? “What does who I was to him have to do with his relationship to another son”? It was not just a dishonest attempt to shift responsibility he may have felt and the potential consequences away from him and onto someone else, but an ill-intended attempt to punish that someone else for the inconvenience and responsibility that person had brought back to him. He could indeed have shirked that responsibility in a number of more honorable ways. 

    And it's an understatement to say Rob had also been inconvenienced his entire life with not knowing who his father was, not being fully accepted into a family who would not tell him why he had no father's name on his birth certificate and didn’t look like everyone else in the family. And who, in fact, came into being years after his mother and supposed father had divorced.

    Consequently, Rob would not be able to meet his dad. Perhaps, he no longer wanted to meet his dad after his dad's initial response to me. Weeks before, he had not even known that he would ever know who his father was. Suddenly he was farther along than he had imagined. Rob is gifted enough to understand human nature and the uncertainty of events. He’s a real privilege to know. And he took what he was dealt in stride. And now he's good-to-go; disappointed, but good. He had had a good step-dad (Buzz Swift) whom he always suspected was not his real dad, who had stuck with him weekends for years after their divorce. But, he also experienced another step-dad years later who asked him to leave the house in 11th grade, with his mom consenting -  because he was an inconvenience to them. He lived on the street and with friends for a few months and then moved in with an older sister. That relationship with his mother never did fully recover. Nor the sister and the mom.

    Until I had seen that email of yours last August (that I had not recalled ever seeing), it had never sunk in that you had said that it was because of 'my relationship with dad' that was the reason he would not meet with Rob. It’s verbatim, right there in your email (attached). Rob had simply told me that you called him and told him "you aren't welcome to meet with him". But, there in the email, the evil thing was staring at me up from the screen, stating that he would have met with him, if it were not for his bad relationship with me. 

    So, it was you showing up in “likes“ on my Facebook and etc, as well as other things I’ve mentioned that prompted me to start to think about the lingering reality of the situation and how disgusting it continued to be to me. And, so I went diving back into past emails during which I discovering the email (attached) that I did not recall seeing. It had things in it that I know I would've responded to. One thing led to another, and here I am writing all of this at this time (thorugh this past year, by now).

    There was also something in your email about my adventure with Dan Shossow’s daughter Sheri Shossow that was innaccurate and ill-informed. That's why I know I didn't see this email before, or I would’ve remembered and responded to that. I get to that in a while.

    So here it all goes. 

    Here is the problem. Here’s why we likely won’t been seeing much of each other in the future if you remain as you are. And then the explanation of that problem is followed by an explanation of what you have the ability to do with it, if you so desire, which is to act on the problem and make things right with it in the interest of your mental health and the relationships with any of your family and mine, minus Rob. This does not involve 'patching up things' with Rob or anything of the sort. There is nothing to patch up. You chose not to know him. Rob is fine. But this is about doing the right thing. Making things right with him, in order to get right with yourself.

    So, the lie:

    (Your email to me): "It was because of my bad relationship with dad that dad refused to meet with Rob”

    Where that notion runs into difficulty is that, I was not going to be at the brief encounter between them that I was suggesting. I would not even be in that part of the state. I would not be present. I would not be a part of it. As described in the email to dad. The idea of "coming down there" to assist is still two emails away. How then does my supposed bad relationship with dad have anything to do with him meeting or not meeting with his son? And moreover, "What does a father's relationship with one son have to do with his obligations to another son"? 

    To make that worse...even if one son's relationship (me) should affect his relationship with another son, there was nothing actually better or worse with dad's and my relationship than there had ever been. No, it was not good, but it had never had the opportunity to go bad. It was the same relationship that I had with him when you and I visited him the last time I saw him and probably the last time I talked with him. You were there.

    Dad's and my relationship was no better or worse than it had ever been, arguably, since the day I was born. No, I had not spoken to him in several years, but I simply never fell out with then or any other time throughout our lives, ever. And that took some doing. Sure, I hadn’t called him in several years, but he never called me, ever, but for one exception. One bizarre exception. I think I told you about the call that came one year after deer season a few weeks after I had put a note on someone's car that was illegally parked at Camp 10 Ski Area (where I lived). Not at my place, but at the edge of the woods a quarter mile away. Not knowing whose car it was, I put a note on it saying there was no parking there and no hunting on the Camp 10 property. I never even knew it was his until several weeks later when he called me and asked me why I put a note on his car. Do I have to ask you if that’s strange? He thought it was funny. I told him I didn’t know it was his car and that I never looked in his garage to see what kind of car he had. Very puzzling. Disappointing to say the least. Deer-hunting up north, and the Grosses, and what they all were doing was virtually our only bond through the years. While living at Camp 10 for 5 years I had invited him up numerous times to hunt and he'd always decline and would go East instead, not continuing to go to Gross' since Hubert died. He was who he was, and I accepted that. But he was there and he didn't even stop in? Too strange. The very short phone call ended in a friendly manner, and that was it. That was my one call. Our relationship went on as it always had for years following that episode. In other words, in the usual, ‘unusual’ way. I would usually call him and visit when in town, and invite myself over to his place for Christmas Eve once a year, and probably call him a time or two more over the course of the year. Or presumably, would never had heard from him or seen him. I took Deanta to see him, one time. The last time I invited myself over to his place for our annual get together at their place on Christmas Eve (the only maybe it was to invite myself, and what I had had to do for years), he met me at the door and told me it wasn’t until tomorrow (Christmas Day) that year. So I managed to invite myself in and asked if I couldn’t grab a sandwich before I left. And there was no invitation to come back the next day. Or any of the years following. But that sort thing had been the norm and I had long since become accustomed to it. I had come to terms with it. You can only expect me to have so much respect for a man who didn’t ask for any visitation time with me when he left at the divorce, or with any of us for that matter, or even call, yet I showed him nothing but respect through his entire life - deserved or not. I understood and came to accept that was the best he could do. So the idea that you concocted that his unwillingness to meet with Rob was somehow due to me was nothing more than an attempt at a nasty fabrication. 

    Was I harming dad by asking him to give his son an opportunity to meet him? How does that work? He should have had years to prepare himself for it and be at peace with the likelihood that he would show up finally someday. 

    So, the problem:

    Twofold,

    1) Even if my relationship with dad was ‘bad’, I was not going to be at the meeting between he and his son. How then does my supposed bad relationship with dad have anything to do with him meeting his son? 

    2) (And, furthermore) What does a father‘s relationship with one son have to do with his relationship/responsibility with another son?” How does that work?

    He didn't just welch, he did it in a way that would have lasting consequences for those whom he left behind, such as yourself. 

    You want to smile and be friends on Facebook and so on. And I would like to smile back and be friends, but don’t want have anything to do with you unless you can grow up. Change. Much like I witnessed mom do. Far from impossible. Growth. Christ, through Paul, in the Bible, as you know, describes the process of ‘growing up into a mature man/woman’ as a never-ending, life-long opportunity to attain to and persevere in so long as we are here on earth. Not to work our asses off to sheer exhaustion, but for the sheer joy that it brings us through walking in the Spirit of the Lord and watching things happen under his favor. Let the Lord help you in this. It's been an incomprehensible blessing, in my life and continues to be.

    Mom grew up considerably through the years, in so many ways. She grew considerably through the middle and late middle-age span of her life. And that was a thing of beauty to watch. We don’t know how much the Lord had to do with that, but it happened nonetheless.

    The roadmap:

    You would understand what you did. You told your brother that he wasn’t welcome to see his father whom he’d never met. Instead of encouraging dad and offering to help him do an apparently difficult, important thing, or perhaps simply helping dad to, himself, tell his son he was not interested in seeing him (such as Barbie‘s dad did), you concocted a disgusting, lying response with dad (or instead of dad), helping him to harm himself, completely redefine  himself, and in turn, negatively impact the rest of his surviving family.

    This should not have been an emergency for dad. He’d known about Rob since Rob was born. He needed to act, finally. He chose to act in a dishonorable way. He could’ve handled it honestly, not dreaming up far-fetched, vindictive excuses, nor trying to punish others for the inconvenience of the consequence of actions involving him fathering a child. He could have met Rob at the door, or by phone and suggested he did not feel good about what had happened, but nonetheless, did not wish for any further contact. Perhaps even wishing him well. Or simply any variation of the above, or much which there is to mention. It's a no-brainer. Instead, his story ends with rejecting his son, and piling on a malicious vindictive claim that it is because of someone else. Instead, he profaned himself, and his legacy. And you, yours.

    Amazingly, things are forgivable in the Lord's universe when one takes responsibility to make things right, to the best of their ability. And that’s what you are given the opportunity to do. Yes, even in one’s self-pitying old age, if that’s the case. Or, you are just as free to have what you've done as your own, unattended, to legacy. It boils down to whether or not you care about these things. That's what's going to define you.

    So, you go to Rob, in person. Tell him that you understand now what you did to him, and you would like to do what you can to ‘make it right’. That’s it. You’re done. Just make him that offer. You can even fake it if that’s the best you can do. He will look at you funny, I imagine. Surprised, curious. He may even tell you he forgives you. I’ve not talked to him about this, and won’t. His answer will probably be one of total perplexion, wondering what in the world you could do to make up for what you did to him anyway. But it's your intention. Your desire. Your remorse. Your change of heart and mind (penance). You simply ask him what you could do to make things right. You will then be finished so far as I am concerned. If he asks you to do something in particular to “make things right”, then that will be left up to you. You will offer. You will do the best you can to respond to him. And you’re good to go. You are under no further obligation. You will have made amends, so far as I’m concerned. You will have done what the Lord would have you do, in this instance, in my opinion. You will prove that you are safe to be around. You will have model something precious to your family. You’ve taken responsibility for it and can be at peace now with Rob, the Lord, the world, and most importantly yourself, so far as I in this matter am concerned.

    What a simple, beautiful thing this could be in your life to simply act on this. That is, letting the Lord show you the way through to a better outcome, and then enjoying the journey and beautidul fruit of it, with him. Your pride, the selfish pride, is the only thing that will get in your way here. Everybody else is over it - as long as they don’t have to be around you. But it’s something you could do for yourself that would make amends with others as well. Not me telling you what to do, but the Lord. Yes, I’m telling you what I would like you to do, because I wouldn’t mind Deanta having a better relationship with her aunt, as well as me with my sister, And Deanta being able to meet her neat cousin Jeremiah and see Merlin again. Yes, bygones can be bygones, but then why does the Lord waste all his time telling us about how to make things right? To make things good?Because it's right and good. It's worthwhile and possible. Not leaving those things paralyzed and dysfunctional, as we all at one time became accustomed too.

    If you show yourself willing to grow and make things right, even if there’s little you can do to make things right, it still pleases the Lord. And ultimately, others involved. Someone that makes things right is a person whom others can trust and respect again. I would interpret Jesus' teaching in that area as asking us to strive to become what he would have us become through living according to his will and what he has shown us and taught us is right and good. I can’t conceptualize being like Jesus, God in the flesh. But I can conceptualize living according to how he would have me live. That is, to be seen, at least occasionally, if not always, to have the visible presence of his Spirit accompanying me in everything I do. We catch glimpses of the Lord at work in each other when we do and succeed in doing (even attempting) the seeming impossible – things we wouldn’t otherwise have the blueprint or the power to do. Even a desire to do.That’s what he makes possible. And here as well.

    So that’s it. Do what you want with all that. This is the opportunity that the Lord brings here and to all of his people in these situations and you are no exception

    And, I’m finished. There’s nothing I would like more than to have or make a call once in a while to share with you in this life, if you would. Things will be made right with Rob with your offer to him, never to be spoken of by me again. 

    What happened at mom's pitiful last few weeks? If I didn’t fully understand and come to peace with all of that, you would’ve heard more of that. I have, and have nothing more to say about that. If you want to teach and do something in the best interest of our younger generations, then do something here. If you don’t, I will understand and let it pass. I just can’t trust or respect you until I see otherwise. If you can live with that, then I can as well.

    The rest of this document are just the thoughts and memories it took to enable me to write something as concise and coherent as what you just read. Mentally exhausting, but gratifying. I'm going to buzz through it once more and whack away a lot of what I have already said. Some of it is very emotionally charged. Some of it I am obligated to put in front of you in all fairness because it is family history. Neither good nor bad, but importantly, informs the present and the future.

    If you have read at least this far you have done enough. Your debt to me (if you feel there is one) will have been paid and you will not hear from me again. And I would ask the same of you. The uncomfortable (unfinished) present will have been dealt with at least by me. All will be over between us. Just like I was asked of at mom‘s I will ask of you: You can come and see me after I’ve passed. Don’t bother coming before.

    If you act on this and make good with Rob, as I have described, then this letter is between you and me. You've got a year to act on this. If you don't, that's fine, we are done.  But after that time, this matter will go to the rest of the family, as a matter of record. They deserve an explanation. For any that don't care, then I'm happy to leave them in that place. This is for the one or two that do care. My daughter being one of them. And it will be a rich addition to her family archives, for one. So, after a year, and you don't choose to act on this, at that time, a copy of this will go to Jeremiah, Deanta, and Steve. Because they deserve an explanation. And we will close this thing out in that way and be done with each other. 

    I'm not one to sit around looking at broken things that the Lord can fix, and do nothing. Nor am I one to stick around beating on a dead Horse. This is simply a belated chance for you to do the right thing and thus renew my confidence and respect in you. We will see if Deanta is worth it to you. If your brother Rob is worth it. Even if Jeremiah and Merlion are worth it. And if your brother Todd is worth it. Incidentally, in this whole matter, Deanta is much more forgiving than I appear to be. 

    You need not read any further to satisfy the purpose of my writing all this. If you do, you will surely be in for some rough sailing. What follows below are just a lot of thoughts that I had to organize in my own mind in order to write what's above. It's very time-consuming and I need to move on to other things rather than go back and polish it. All in all, it's a lot of good, honest reflecting that would be valuable for certain others to also become informed. Whether they think so or not, in my opinion. Any any rate, I did the best I can do. The Lord and I. I hope the same for you.

    ____________________________

    Don’t pass up this opportunity to challenge yourself with these thoughts.

    (Jeremiah, your mother is entitled to make mistakes. They are so you don't have to make the same ones. It's all joy, and all toward that upward call.)

    ____________________________


    These are my ruminations leading up to finishing the writing above. They are harping, incriminating, even repetitive to what you've already read, but invaluable. I put far too much effort getting them down to set them aside. I should probably proofread it one more time, but I simply don't have the time or the motivation right now. History can be a beautiful thing, though. And if you don't care, then like I said, this is not entirely for you. Feel free to read no further.  Or, man-up and power through it. It's written with good intentions for you. I care.

    ____________________________


    Your called your brother Rob and told him he was not welcomed to meet his father (according to him). I did not learn about that until after the funeral. You are telling me in this email (attached) that you told him it was because of my “bad” relationship with dad.    

    Rob had been duly notified of his father‘s response and had no intention of going to meet him. You said my third email sounded like a terrorist threat. Then, why did you call Rob? That was not going to keep me, supposedly, from coming down there. Even if I did, which in hindsight we can see I had no intention of doing and never did do, how would that have harmed Hubie? Aside from his ego? And when you have a son, it’s not about you anymore. He desperately did not want to give his son a chance to meet him. That’s despicable. You could’ve consoled him, offered support and helped him avoid the humiliation of not letting his own son meet him. What was the terror in his mind of letting his son meet him? He had my offer of support in my original email. He knew I wasn’t bringing him terror. Instead, you and he decide to attack the messenger. When is that ever relevant? Dredge up totally irrelevant excuses. He humiliated himself, and I don't think he could have done it without you. That's what bothers me. 

    Is anyone foolish enough to believe that, even if I was the best son in the world that that same excuse would've been directed at me? From Hubie’s first response we can be certain that he was desperate to not have his grown son meet him, probably from his son’s birth. You and he were happy to pin that on me. That’s impossible. His responsibility to his son is his alone. He thinks he can just pass it on to another son. That’s pitiful. That sort of disgrace he now owns.

    What did matter was there was a guy out there who all his life wanted to know what is biological roots were. And inescapably, if he found out, he would naturally want to meet his father as well. My intent, as I made clear to everyone in the beginning was to see if he knew who his family was, and that he had a brother who cared about him. That was sufficient for me. All your drama about bitterness and hate on my part? Where is the hate? That’s just more casting around while trying to avoid the reality of the situation. It was nothing but a great thing for Rob and his family to find their biological roots, as well as other biological family who cares about them. I fulfilled my responsibility to Rob and his family. The hate and bitterness is dredged from your own paranoid imagination which is famous, just like Hubies was, for jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst in other people.  Your own process is nothing less than redirecting negative emotions of your own concerning dad‘s neglect for you (I was there) and now having to conceive of what to do with the notion of having to accept another biological family member (and dad’s predictable non-acceptance and subsequent rage ). Now, you were finally getting his attention and his approval by acting as though you’re honoring him by helping him do something dishonorable. And, now you can share in the dishonor.

    Did dad have the right to not let his son meet him? Did Rob have the right to seek out his father? Was Rob in the right to seek out his father? Yes. Was dad in the right not to let his son meet him?   

    So why are we even talking about this? Rob‘s son-relationship (offspring) to his father meant nothing to you or his father. So, why are you and I even talking about this, or anything for that matter? In your world a bloodline relationship has no value, and a father and mother have no inherent responsibility to respond to their offspring. That being the case, all that’s left between you and I are a bunch of mediocre, to poor, to even some violent lifelong experiences.

    One of your favorite replies when the conversation gets tough has always been, “I don’t want to about hear it”. The phrase that has held you back from experiencing so much growth and understanding in your life. And it guaranteed that any relationship you and I had was always going to be superficial. Instead of saying, “tell me more“, or “let’s talk about that“. So, don’t hear this either. But others will hear it and use it to guide their own sense of family, however they see fit, down the road. And, you can just stay away from me, perhaps until you grow up. I don’t have the stomach to handle being around you. And I feel s though it deserves and explanation. So I'm writing this.

    we could probably say it began when Mom opened a Christmas card with the news from Bette Swift that she would appreciate some help with the hospital bills from dad's son Rob's delivery. Our half brother. Or, according to the Lord, our brother.

    I’m going to insert right here what I’ve pointed out to you in the past. And that is that most of the brothers in our God’s "Nation of Israel" were "half" brothers. Just like you and Rob. Yet, that's not what the Lord called them. His new family, the nation of Israel, were for all practical purposes, brothers.

    In the Lord’s ecology, reconciliation is always possible. Complete Forgiveness comes after you make things right with those who you have offended against. I challenge you to ask your pastor about that, as well as the Lord himself.

    I am now going to commence talking about this attached email of yours I don't remember coming across at the time. I do remember the email next to it in which dad was offering me his muzzle loader. But not the one before (or after?). And I did not particularly want the muzzle loader but I appreciated you asking.

    When you refer to "destruction" in your first sentence, we know what destruction you are ‘not’ talking about. You’re not talking about the destruction that followed dad having a child with Bette Swift. That became the destructive secret that would fester and damage the relationship between he and mom; damage Rob, by not having a father‘s name on his birth certificate, not knowing where he fits into a family that wasn’t fully accepting of him; damage to the relationship between you and mom, because of the divorce; and, to our whole family and beyond. That was not the destruction you were talking about. It was some destruction that came upon dad as a result of my actions. Which presumably, was to his ego, which was wholly under his control, and his own ego thus being his own victim as well.

    Graciously, at the birth of the child, the extent of the actual damage would still depend on how dad “handled” it. He sired a boy whom had the natural right to one day ask some predictable questions, questions which he could be sure would be coming way eventually. It could end badly, and it could end well. It’s would be up to Hubie. He didn’t “handle” it. He left it for others to  ‘handle’. Destruction ensued from Rob’s birth, and went into full bloom. But in your mind, the issue is about the way I, “handled it“.

    So, what destruction are you talking about here when you’re pointing your finger at me? Well, It’s the collateral damage that occurred first to Hubie’s secret, and then to his ego. The secret? The destructive secret. Well, who cares if it gets destroyed? Except Hubie and Lori.

    So then, what about Hubie’s ego? He has and has had complete control over how he and his ego responds to the appearance of his son. 

    As for my part, I’m simply looking for a brother. The fact that it’s also his son, whom he doesn’t want to know about him, is a whole other matter. Hubie’s past actions that affected others are now asking to be dealt with. If there are some issues of ego in the way, maybe it has become a problem for ‘Hubie’ now only because it’s recently shifted away from being a problem for his youngest son who had found his biological father’s family? Collateral damage to the ego of a father who doesn’t want his son to meet him? About a minute later, and I’m done feeling sorry for him. Collateral damage to Hubie's ego comes from his original destructive act and both the natural and God-ordained consequences from that act. Any harm is self-inflicted. And, he needs to be thankful that it’s only his ego? Maybe he shouldn’t have left it for others to handle? But the after-effect is personal humiliation. Banishment from being looked upon as a decent human being. Leaving yourself at the mercy of other people‘s forgiveness. What a tragedy? Could it have been prevented? Could it have been handled differently? It wasn’t handled at all. Let’s look at how it was finally handled.

    I knew that finding a brother of mine would affect other people. It would affect dad. It would require sensitivity. But in the end, it wasn’t about him. His son needed to know his biological origins as well as that he had other family members who cared about him. That needed to be handled. The other brother (me), who needed to know about his other brother, was going to be affected as well until he knew he was OK. And, that was indeed how I described it when I described it to family members after recently having learned of his existence.

    So, what were my choices in handling it? What should they have been? What would your suggestions have been? In hindsight, we can have a pretty good idea of what your suggestions would’ve been? Your suggestions were silence. No digging around there without hitting a land mine. What would dad‘s suggestions have been? I think we can have a pretty good idea of what dad’s suggestions would have been. They likely would have been to not do anything. And object to anyone else thinking about doing anything. And then a whole lot more. So, my choices in handling it were limited. Everybody that mattered knew about it and was free to make their opinion known and then chose whether or not to join in with or without a “special invitation”. It did not matter what dad wanted or felt, because it wasn’t about him. He had refused to handle it.

    I felt uncomfortable consulting with dad because I felt he had already shown what his position was. Excuses would’ve been forthcoming and then the war would erupt. I was likely to have been disowned, much like Steve. That wouldn’t have changed anything, but why add that drama to the search? So, naturally I chose to look for the brother, do my best at handling it, and the brother would accept any outcome. We cannot change who dad is. And we cannot change what dad has done. Perhaps when you presumably told him I was looking, that was his opportunity to handle it differently. That was his opportunity to do it his way. Men have done it many times before. I thought that was well within his capabilities. Here was his chance. He’d put it off for 45 years. He would have the chance to do the right thing.  If he wants to get it wrong, then so be it.

    What were some of the possibilities?

    What if, upon receiving my email, he had gone along with, “the way I chose to handle the whole situation”? Unfortunately for him, Rob was still alive and wondering about his biological origins. Now, after Rob potentially meets the rest of his family, Hubie would’ve had to briefly meet with his son, perhaps told him he wished things could have worked out differently, wished him well, and then carried on with his life knowing he had dealt with it as best he could. But he didn’t. All of the pending gloom and doom he imagined to his reputation could’ve been halted by just meeting Rob at the door. Many, presumably lesser men, have done it. In the easiest and most lazy-minded way possible, he could’ve taken a play out of their playbook. I’m not saying he could’ve reversed the decades of destruction caused, but now he could make it right, to the best of the present circumstances, as well as virtually everyone's satisfaction. He could have wiped away many sins by just shaking his son’s hand, told him he wished things had worked out differently, and wished him well. Would that have been a bad reflection on him? Maybe so, but not nearly so bad as refusing to let his son meet him at all. So many different possibilities. And, I was there to help him with that, which can be seen in my third and final email.

    So, I found Rob and soon after sent dad this email.


    Good Morning.
     
    I called a fellow the other night.  I just needed to know if he was o.k.  I'd been looking for him for a year or two now.  Jeannette sort of let him slip about three years ago.  He's o.k.  But he's always wondered why there was no name for a father on his birth certificate.  He's always wanted to know of and to meet his natural father.
     
    He lives in Waukesha.  He's married with children.  He's worked in a plastics shop in Sussex for 15 years.  He's a good fellow.  Smart.  Good natured.  ...Forgiving.
     
    Naturally..., he wants to meet you.  That was not my intention in seeking him out.  I would have been disappointed, though, if he had not.
     
    He wants to stop over either tonight or tomorrow night(thurs./fri.) with some supper to briefly meet you.  Which would you prefer?  
     
    And...let me know if there's anything I can do to help you be o.k. with this.  
     
    He's o.k., so I'm o.k., and your going to be o.k.
     
    I'm going to call you late this morning;  to make sure you're o.k.  
     
    Love, Todd
     

    His reply was:

    Thanks for dropping a bonbshell on my poor old 82 year-old head.  I have no wish for any meeting you have referred to.  Further more, I have nothing but contempt for you for what you have done in this matter.  HWS 

    I sent him a second email:

    Please don't complain to me about your shame and your inability to be responsible.  I don't think there are many who share your self-pity.
     
    Nothing but great joy has come from this for almost all involved.  Most importantly, he's found a brother who has the guts to tell him what he was right to want to know.  So he's alright now.  
     
    The rest of what there is to know about you he will now learn from myself and others.


    I sent him another email which I no longer have a copy of. I’d love to see it again. Not just that email, but missing a number of other emails that I thought I had saved around Mom's death, and that is also what prompted this communication. For the first time since mom and dad‘s passing, and since you’ve been showing more interest in continuing a relationship with Deanta, I recently went looking through past emails that I had intended to save for Deanta’s knowledge of what went on, and found that many of them were gone. They had never been properly saved into a folder, and went away after being deleted by Yahoo. I also found this email that I had not seen before. And, it needs a response. Now, with you wanting to have a relationship with Deanta, which is fine, she’s in the position to hopefully meet Jeremiah and his family one of these days. For that matter, I would love to see Jeremiah and his family one of these days. But, there remains the disgusting issue of a daughter who told her brother that he’s not welcomed to meet his father. And then her impossibly shifting the blame to another brother, with an impossible connection, equally as disgusting as the first offense. This seems like the perfect time and way to hold that up to the light, and in the process, render most of those other lost emails no longer necessary.

    So, getting back to my third email to dad. It’s not hard for me to remember the main points of that email. 

    In that email I had asked dad, “Why not let Rob bring some pizza over, talk briefly, and then he will get out of your hair and leave you alone”, or, something to that effect. It was my last ditch attempt (was indeed my last correspondence with him). Maybe that’s why I added, jokingly “ Don’t make me come down there“. Yeah, I should’ve put a smiley face after it. But those words were surrounded by many other words that were encouraging, and forgiving, and promising. Not to mention a lifetime of mutual understanding. I knew it would be about persuading him that it would be OK and he would be fine, which I was capable of doing. And, that was indeed the tone of that whole email. Those words should’ve been interpreted as communicating a sense of importance to allow his son to finally meet him. And when you say, “He was so effected by your "news" that he hadn't been able to eat or sleep for three days, it was clear that he was horrified at the development of the initial, very tame email, and desperate not to simply allow his son to meet him. Who's fault? Where's the horror? Extreme distress may well have been his response. You simply ramped it up. Nobody had the stomach to take it any further. That was the last communication from me. Rob had given up hope for anything further after his first response. I did not learn about your phone call to Rob until much later.  

    I had no idea that you had entered the picture and called Rob until sometime after the funeral. Rob surely didn’t deserve that phone call. It was perverse. He had to listen to his sister say that. And, why wouldn’t he be ‘welcome to meet his father”. There could be no other reason other than character issues.  With you, dad even refused to accept responsibility for his own denial.  But Rob had already accepted dad‘s original response. But, then it got worse. Instead of accepting responsibility for not letting his son meet him, his son was told that it was because of a bad relationship with the son who found him. But, how can that be true when you were with me, visiting dad the last time I saw him or spoke to him, and our relationship was fine. I subsequently stopped calling him mainly because I just got tired of always being the one to call. He didn’t call or visit me, either. So, what makes me more responsible than him for a so-called “bad “relationship? In fact, we can be pretty sure that those words never came out of his mouth, and that it was you who concocted the idea after the fact. That is, after my email to him. Which is too late. And, what you did was an abomination. In plain terms it would be disgusting.

    Who would’ve thought that dad would have such a depraved response? He was in fear for the life of his “ego“. So many others like him have handled it so differently. How could he not see that he was trading his honor for his ego? To  play the self-pity card and become a drama queen in the face of meeting a son didn’t excuse him from anything. And, in all of the hysteria, why didn’t Lori call me? I was supposed to be the threat ready to come down? How does 'that' stop me from coming down there, in his mind, in Lori’s mind? The whole explanation was just pitiful. And as I said, I didn’t even know about the phone call from you to Rob until after the funeral. There’s no doubt Lori called dad, and dad called Lori, and that there was a whole lot of hysteria going on trying to figure out how to not to let his son meet him. But, what would actually excuse him from not letting his son meet him? Nothing. But in spite of that, he could've excused himself, himself. But a perverse continuation of his life-time of dereliction of parental duty ensued. Instead of anybody calling me, childish destructive drama followed.

    So, it’s kind of hard to imagine, but you say that you made this phone call:

    “I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad.”

    I doubt if those were your words and that was your tone. Because that’s not you. I doubt if it was even the fake you. But regardless, my relationship with dad was fine (or, had been until the moment had told him I had found Rob). And, I will break that down even more, in a minute. 

    But, first let me look at your first complaint in this Email.

    “ I have listened to you call dad, an asshole…“

    So, you’ve also heard me tell you that dad was the first one to use the word “asshole” to describe himself. He referred to himself as an asshole. Where is the grave sin here? I’ve told you this before. He thought it was cute. It got him off the hook. I’m pretty sure it was during a phone call just after he surprised me by saying, even out of the blue, “We can’t be buddy-buddy anymore“. I was hitchhiking around Florida. I was excited. I could always tell it was painful for him to hear about some of my exciting experiences. You may think I was asking him for money. Not only had I never borrowed money from him, I never asked to borrow money from him. Well, except for one time. I asked him to help me go to school in Russia, of all places. But I needed a motivator and I thought that was it. I needed to get away from the drugs and alcohol friend group I had at UW Whitewater. That was an insult that came out of your mouth in an email after dad died as well. A lie that came from either you or him in a flurry of drama excusing him and you for not calling me until hours or maybe it was a day before he passed away  As if I even wanted to see the guy as he lay dying because he didn’t have the sense to quit smoking. You said he was afraid I was going to bring Rob? What a joke that that was what Rob was looking for. Yes, he went to honor him at his funeral to close things out, and turned out to be the only one to go down to where they were laying dad to rest. But what interest would he have had in seeing a guy on his death bed who didn’t want to see him?

    But back to the money thing. He had given me money when I was about 16 or 17 to get a new set of brakes on my Oldsmobile when I ran into a guy on the way home from visiting him one rainy night. There were several times in college when I had to remind him that he had not sent me cigarette money a week here and there, which he had initiated. We never even talked about it. He would just send it along, sometimes with a joke or a saying but most of the time mindlessly, to his cigarette addicted boy. I know later on you mentioned he accused me of always borrowing money. Only money he had offered, and even that I couldn’t count on. 

    But, in the midst of telling him about my hitchhiking on Florida, sort of out of the blue, he had said, “well, you know, we can’t be buddy buddy anymore“. And then he said “I’m an asshole. I know. That’s the way I am”. I couldn’t believe he just said that, and I said, “Well, I wish you hadn’t have just said that?”, and the conversation just lamely continued on.  I concede that I was probably expecting to get too close to that father. By pointing out that conversation, it’s less me trying to justify calling him an asshole (which I rarely if ever did, surprisingly) and more just giving an example of just what an asshole he was willing to think of himself as. And how little weight that word even carried in his life, even so far as he was not afraid to be one.

    And, doesn’t every son at one point or another refer to their dad as an asshole? So, where is the heat and bitterness that you are imagining? Is that all you have? Those are no more than frustrated words that came out of my mouth. Where’s the hate? “Asshole”? He prided himself on being an asshole. He considered it practically a compliment. I understood the man and his shortcomings. And sure, I would criticize him. That’s normal. But, where’s the hate???  Our relationship was no different than it had ever been. We’ve never exchanged cross words or had any type of falling out. Yes, I understand that you have to dredge up or imagine some hate from me to excuse your actions. 

    Yeah, I did have a brother Steve, who dad had disowned a couple of decades earlier. At least “disowned“ was the word in circulation at the time. He never met his grandson, Jason. So, why would I bring another brother to dad who didn’t seem to know what or how to deal with the kids he already had? Well, that’s a no-brainer. The answer is that his son needed to know. Without his dad’s consent. Without his dad’s participation. Even if dad would not let him meet with him. Mom had “grown up” considerably since we were all grown and out of the house. It was possible for dad to have done the same thing. 

    And your relationship with dad? A few years before he died, he moved to assisted living? You offered to come down and help him move. He said, that’s OK, but his girlfriend was able to help him. Or so you said to me. What kind of relationship was that? That’s a rhetorical question. I already know the answer. It’s the one you never had with him. And, that broke my heart. And, that sort of aversion to his kids is maybe the excuse that I have to finally one day just get tired of it, maybe just quit calling him. Especially in light of witnessing the needs of my own daughter.

    So, to get to the how much more interesting question here: what if? What if our relationship was “bad”? What if everything you said about my relationship with dad was, indeed, true? It should be self evident: What does a father’s relationship with one son have to do with fulfilling his responsibility to another?” There is only one possible answer.

    Is there anyone who believes, even if I were the perfect son that dad would have elected to do anything differently”? 

    So again, my relationship with dad was fine. However, no, it was not fine anymore after he received my email telling him his son Rob wanted to meet him. But until then our relationship was hardly any different than it had ever been. The idea that it was “bad”, before that moment, was simply a concoction of you and dad after the fact, because it certainly would not have come from dad’s mouth except and until after I told him I had found Rob. We had not had any cross words together or a falling out of unkind, ever. We had not corresponded or seen each other in several years (I lived 4 hrs away), but that was only slightly unusual, and I am not sure either one of us even cared. Certainly not to start blaming each other. The only reason for our lack of contact was that I quit doing it for him. Quit initiating the contact. Tired of it. So, the whole charge that it was “because of your relationship with dad“ is without anything  to it. But what makes it more perverse is the context it was employed in: an attempt to avoid doing the right thing. It was a manufactured excuse because he needed one, because there was no other reason for him not to let his son meet with him. 

    It should not be hard to understand how I could’ve just gotten tired of always having to initiate everything in that father/son relationship, and with a father who had already told me he didn't particularly want much of one with me. I didn’t, “Break off communication with him“. There was no communication coming from him to break off. He’s the one who decided he couldn’t be “buddy-buddy” anymore. So, many years later when I stopped doing the hard work for him, it’s no surprise that in his own mind he knew it was not quite right and he had to cast around for blame. I had no control over that. And in hindsight, I see that it was towards the end of that period of time that I begun to look for my brother, who happened to be his son, and there was his excuse to shirk responsibility for two family relationships at the same time. And it was during that time mom had mentioned sort of out of thin air that, “if only your dad had not had that child“. Beyond that, dad‘s and my relationship had no signs of being any different than it had ever been. No cross words exchanged, never a falling out of any kind, or even close.

    I was succeeding. doing well at horseshoeing, horse dentistry, my own remodeling business, music, raising a daughter. I had brought her to see him. OK, once. But It was no more my responsibility to keep lines of communication going then it was his. 

    A long time before that perverse excuse, dad had already, desperately not wanted his son to know who or where he was. And, what was his excuse back then? Before me?

    Let’s talk about what it means for him to have “Contempt“ for me now and what that means for him.

    Dad was fine. Well, taken care of by his girlfriend. He presumably was a big boy, doing fine. I had no knowledge of anything unusual going on in his life. He was old, but age happens, and responsibility never goes away. And, there’s no reason he couldn’t deal with the fact that, very predictively, his youngest son was going to seek him out. His age did not give him an exemption. If, because of his age, he needed help, then he had you, me, Irene. I assumed it would be a challenging development for him. But, as we can see in my email to him, I was on-track to make it as easy for him as possible. It was not my obligation to warn him a few years or anytime in advance that I was looking for my brother, who happened to be his son. Dad was fine, but his son Rob was not. That’s all we needed to know. Even though his son Rob was doing marvelously in life, he had the need to know his biological origins. And, in that regard he was not doing well. Rob’s family (children) have had a lot of health issues that he wanted to know more about on his father’s side of the family. I was able to share some of that with him. Now, no surprise, he’d like to meet his father. No reason why that should be a problem. His dad could simply tell him no (again, may men have. Barbie’s father did). He’s not there to ask for anything and was willing to graciously walk away if sadly his request was denied. And, in fact, he did just that when the request was ultimately denied by his father. His father desperately did not want to be inconvenienced by having to let his son meet him. 

    Could that had been prevented in advance by allowing him to participate in the process? Could that have been handled differently? What if the son, before he tried to find his brother (who will probably want to meet his father) had told his father that he would like to find and meet his other brother and see if he knew who we were, and that we cared about him? See if he was ok? One could be justified in assuming that the relationship between the father and I would’ve turned really bad right about then. Therefore, why go through what amounts to an empty formality that would probably make matters worse? Why would that matter if I didn’t involve him? Because, after all, it’s not about the him. The son has every right to wonder about and pursue a brother, and a son every right to persue a father he doesn’t know and is curious about. So, exactly why this “contempt”? Why would he even have to be asked to let his son meet him? That’s a no-brainer. Sure, I was asking him. But his natural instincts, his dignity as a human being, God himself, had already confronted him with it. Nature confronted him.  It was confronting him long before I came along. I simply gave him a new opportunity to do it graciously.

    OK, I have to look at this statement of yours. 

    “You, yourself chose not to have a relationship with Dad, so now you send him the first communication he has heard from you in many years and it is telling him that he needs to meet a son. Do you get the irony of the situation? A son who hates him and doesn't talk to him telling him that he has to do something?” 

    No, I don’t get the irony. There’s no irony there. It’s a grown man acting like a nine-year-old supposedly not wanting to be told what to do, being confronted by responsibility and desperately looking for an excuse. He picks a bad one. One that works only in his mind and those foolish enough to lazy-mindedly go no further.

    If simply not calling him was choosing not to have a relationship with him, then what do we make of him virtually never calling me? Calling me twice, maybe three times, in 30 some years since the divorce? At least twice. I’m sure once sometime when I was a kid after the divorce, and then once again when I was about 38 years old, when I had called him dozens of times. If not calling and not coming to visit is any indicator of hate, then you could conclude that he hated me much more than I hated him. 

    Something bigger than me was telling him to do something. Among things such as common sense and common decency were God‘s natural laws written on our hearts. Christ’s system of ethics  asking people to take care of their own. In this case, dad should have been wrestling with the serious matter of a father allowing his son to meet him. I wasn’t telling him what to do so much as I was telling him what he should already know he should do. I was giving him an opportunity. He decided to shoot the messenger, but that doesn’t wipe away the message. I get the convoluted thinking in dad‘s head about not wanting to be told what to do. But, when is it ever OK not to do the right thing just because somebody else tells you to do it? That’s just a small, selfish mind of a small man/child trying to escape responsibility. 

    He used to find a way to belittle me when I would beat him at chess as a kid. I knew who I was dealing with.

    So, imagining previously nonexistent “hate“ and “bitterness“ in a son who hasn’t called him “in years“, when he could easily have called that son himself doesn’t add up. And it surely does not exempt him from his responsibility to another son? There is no exemption there. He was asked to do the bare minimum of a man and take responsibility for creating a son by letting him meet him. He refused. And then blamed it on his shortcomings with another son. In general terms, it’s despicable. Where I come from, it’s despicable, pathologically selfish. He had no intention of fulfilling his responsibilities as a father, and was ready to cast blame and then expressly boil in contempt for anybody who might present him with it.

    Given time, he could’ve felt OK about it. He needed encouragement. I was ready to help him succeed at that. It’s right there in my emails. It couldn’t have had a positive effect on his life. Lifted the shroud of gloom and doom. Made people proud. That’s what those things do. He needed us to help. He let everybody whoever had an ounce of faith in him sick to their stomach.

    He had a son who was aspiring for him to be his best and a daughter who was aspiring for him to be his worst. 

    If the Lord was present in either of your lives, then his assistance would’ve been alive and able to get him across the finish line. No doubt he was present in yours, and you went on and listened to your flesh.

    This next quote of yours below almost isn’t even relevant anymore, because you’ve admitted that Rob is your brother. But, this is a good example of your twisted thinking:

    Your said: “Rob is our cousin”. 

    OK. What kind of ill-conceived nonsense is that? Even dad didn't deny that he’s not our cousin. Yeah, we as kids thought he was our cousin. In fact, we barely thought about him at all. That statement indicates that you, when you stated it, were severely out of touch.

    __________________________

    You state:

    “… the fact that you chose to shut down communication with him for all those years backed up the opinion that you obviously had. So when you made Rob "your project", and I say that because you obviously didn't do it to share with the rest of the family because Steve and I never got his phone number, I ended up getting it off of an email you sent Dad, and you must not have shared ours with him because we never heard from him. I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad. You encapsulated this mission of yours and shot it right at the guy that you had so much bitterness and hate for.”

    ____________________________

     

    I didn’t shut down communications. There was no communication coming from him to shut down.

    So, would it have made you happy if Rob was “our project“? No, you would’ve been content just running and hiding from him for the rest of your life, like dad. When I first mentioned to you that I had found out about Rob, and how I wanted to see if he knew that there were people who cared about him, and implicitly, if he knew who his father was, you had gone silent. You didn’t even have the honesty to mention that you’d known about him for decades. It was impossible to do anything other than assume that you had a problem with that. I made it a point to not bother you any further. Why didn’t you mention it to dad? I suppose you did.

     (?). I would’ve loved to hear from him. I could tell that nobody was very enthused that I was looking for Rob. So, I didn’t keep bringing it up. Needless to say, this was not about them, dad or anyone else; it was about Rob and his best interest. If there was ever anything you “didn’t want to hear about“ this was it, and, I was not about to go through the disgusting experience of forcing it on anybody. This was about Rob and his best interest. So it became “my project”, apparently, and in Rob’s best interest. However, it could have and perhaps should have been ours. 

    So, I was looking for any Swift to tell me something about Bette or Rob, and they had all moved away from West Bend. Of course, they had all grown up and scattered by then. I would ask mom if she had any notion where any of the Swifts were. One time she said, oh yeah, I ran into such and such a Swift about a month ago. But she had no idea how to contact them. So when you informed me of Len Swift’s funeral in Wausau, I checked the obituary, called down and asked if anybody had any idea where I could find Bette or Rob Swift? I told him that I was Rob’s brother and I’d like to locate him and see if he has any interest in meeting me. A very sour sounding ladies’s voice on the other end of the phone said that maybe I should call Uncle Bill in Sussex. Uncle Bill said yes I know where Rob is, I’ll give him a call and see if he is interested in talking with you. Rob called me that evening and said that he’s been looking for someone like me all his life and we talked for three hours. 

    I can’t remember how I broke the news to you, but I still have an email that I sent to Steve, with his joyous response. Joy that you’ve since talked him out of. As I recall, I sent a similar email to you which was inviting you into whatever you chose to do next. Not forcing you to do anything. Not asking you to go ‘through me’ for anything. I didn’t force a phone number on people expecting them to feel like now that they have a phone number that they’re obliged to call the person. You might appreciate that I did not put you in that predicament. And I spared Rob that same predicament of giving him phone numbers and potentially making him feel obligated to call people he doesn’t even know or know whether or not they even want to have contact with him. I could tell from your silence that with you, that was the case. So, I left it up to individuals, giving however much space they needed to get comfortable with it. Wanting to claim that I was doing it as some sort of conspiracy to get back at dad for who knows what, or why, is bizarre and unfortunate.

    The fact that you’re perplexed about something as simple as not giving you his phone number, or him yours, is just warped. Assuming-what-you-want-to-assume. Assuming worst motives on the part of other people, with little or no justification is something that showed up many times in our life with dad. If there was any interest at all, I was prepared to see if there was some interest in get-together where we could all casually agree to meet, introduce ourselves, and simply test the waters for future relationships, if desired. Or, just call it good. But, it was your responsibility to actually “do” something then. You even said that you went “silent”and waited. You can’t blame others for not moving forward. Rob had no choice. He had to move forward, and let come what may.

    As it turns out, your response from the start was going to be to share dad‘s response to welcoming Rob into his biological family. You regressed back into your age-old habit of “not wanting to hear about it“, and to explode if you are made to listen. Back into your paranoid generating of all sorts of false, over-imaginative motives on other people‘s part that would justify you not doing anything, or even doing the wrong thing. Knowing that vindictiveness has always come through for you in the past.

    So, yes, I broke the news that I had found Rob and indeed, he didn't know who his father was, and is happy to hear from us. 

    I told dad. He responded. Somewhere in there you called Rob, as you say here, “I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad.” I did not hear that from Rob until a while after the funeral. He said you had called him and told him that he was “not welcome to meet with dad“. So, you had, bizarrely, told a son that he was not welcome to meet a father he had never met. And by then, after dad‘s first reply, he no longer had intended to. If you indeed told him it was because of his dad‘s relationship with me, then that would have left him completely dumbstruck. That would have struck him as some twisted excuse. You came up with that irrelevant excuse probably because you were terrified of dad’s rage, and maybe being disowned yourself, as was his habit. All you really wanted was the facsimile of a father daughter relationship with him whether it was real, healthy, or not. But, that excuse would not make sense to the average person. And of course, right then and there, whatever was said, Rob could tell the kind of people he was dealing with in you and dad. People who are just no good. People to whom it was a contemptible thing to be asked to meet a family member. How mystifying? Are you starting to get the idea of why I find you so abhorrent?

    Here, we will briefly touch on this statement:

    “Then he started talking about how Juanita's daughter Nancy had told him once, because she worked with the law somehow, that you had been dragged into jail for some sexual misconduct, or something, and how would you like it if someone told Deanta about all of her dad's history. I thought had a legitimate point. He sure showed a lot more restraint and forgiveness, as an unbeliever, than you did. He softened up as time went by and even asked about how you were doing at various times.”

    That is an irresponsible rendering of an important matter by Nancy. No doubt, she had a position in the district attorney’s office who had information that was intended to remain confidential. Even though it didn’t matter to me whether it was or not. She left dad completely misled with information that she was trained to know and keep confidential, and it was incomplete and used to go on and assert a false conclusion. 

    It was regarding an incident with Sheri Shossow, Dan Shossow’s daughter, who had come to live with us for a Fall and Winter. She quickly got very cozy with me, on her own initiative. Oh sure, and I helped. She was always all over me. Mom even warned me. She was infatuated with me and loved to make out. Well, she was a sweet, fun, 17 year-old girl, so I went with it. We were at a family Christmas party there at the house in Big Bend. Maybe you were there. We both had several alcoholic drinks (grasshoppers). Admittedly, slightly drunk. She was always talking about having sex during that period of the month during which she was not fertile, and was wondering where we could go that was dry and give it a shot. I suggested the hay in Guthrie‘s barn down the hill. So, down we went, laid down and had sex. Couple weeks later, after quite a bit more making out, Dan comes home and says he was told what we did in the barn, and that now she’s moved in with her mother. To get her cell phone off the hook, she had to explain herself. She said I went into her after she had passed out. The detective from the county called a day or two later and asked me to come in. We talked for 10 or 15 minutes and he told me that he would not be filing any charges. It was because of how she described what had happened, conscious and awake. He said that she said she had gotten up in the middle of the act to go to the bathroom. And, what I had said confirmed that. So, I learned, with her, that girls and women who have never had sex before, don’t always want what they think they want. And I took that to heart. She enjoyed the experience, but later, did not enjoy not being a virgin anymore, and the whole aftermath was not something she was prepared for. She was pissed. She had flirted and teased, and then consented to do what she thought she wanted to do and found that it was different than she expected. Truthfully, I had it coming. Because, I should’ve known better. But, what I had done was done innocently and stupidly.  So I called Pat Brown who you might remember from the saddle club. He lived over by the Cooper’s and the Putz’s. He was the Waukesha County DA. I told him what it happened and ask him about the merits of filing a complaint for her lodging a false accusation? Mainly because I needed to prove to Dan that I didn’t do what she said I did. Even though all he had to do was ask the detective. Brown said I hadn’t been falsely charged, or charged at all. He said there was no record of it, but if I was to file a complaint it would become public. He said the best thing to do would be to forget about it. So, except for Dan, that was the end of that. Dad, according to what you’ve said below, was left by Nancy to let his imagination run wild. Importantly, I had even shared this with Steve, I’ve told Deanta about it in he past, and mom certainly knew. In fact, let’s not forget that Deanta will be reading this email. I took responsibility for it. No harm done. I would’ve liked to have apologized to Sheri, but she was long gone. I saw her many years later at mom‘s funeral. She approached me, which surprised me, and we talked long about many things, minus our sexual encounter. Perhaps she had taken responsibility for her part as well. I’m actually surprised and disappointed that neither Steve nor Jeannette told you about it. Your comparison of that to Dad and his having had a sexual encounter didn’t add up. He had a family and a wife, and after bearing a child tried to excuse himself by saying Bette Swift was just a whore. He acknowledge the child was his, but never took any form of responsibility for it, and then once the child had grown up, and it was no longer a threat to him, refused his child the simple decency of letting him meet him. Said it was his son’s (my) fault, according to you. Then, he capped it off with contempt for even being asked. 

    Hubies request was honored. He made everybody sick to their stomach.

    I took dad's response like one would take that of a selfish, angry child. You don't take offense at something from someone who knows no better. But, hurt did come from deep disappointment in someone whom one might have had greater hopes for. In locatinf Rob, I did what anyone would or should have done out of respect for their family. Same as I'm doing now. Dad's response was to disrespect his family. My family. And then harm himself and those who helped him by doing what he did and involving them.

    But, let’s say that the  worst of your fantasies comes true. What did Hubie actually have to be afraid of?

    Todd, comes down and gets Rob. They knock on Hubie’s door. Hubie’s terrified. He’s going to have to speak through an ajar chain-locked door and tell a guy he’s not interested in meeting him. Or perhaps a different scenario unfolds. He says thank you for coming, but I’m not interested in anything further. Have a good evening. Or a different scenario unfolds. He meets him at the door, shakes his hand and tells him he’s gratified that he turned out OK. Tells him he wished things had been different. He might say he’s honored to meet him, and that he wishes him well in the future. Tells Rob that he hopes he understands. Have a nice evening. Or, he could say, “look, I’m sorry, I’m just not interested in meeting you”. It’s happened many times. The worst Hubie would have to deal with then is to watch a guy bid him good night and walk down the hall with a fresh pizza. Game over. This is what grown-ups in Hubie‘s position do. 

    I can’t tell you how many times dad and I listened to “Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash and laughed our asses off. Not a bad ending to that song. Not the ending dad chose.

    Robert, naturally, curious about who his father was, was not told by people who knew. He had no father‘s name on his birth certificate, he didn’t quite bear the family resemblance, and was told as much. He went through his 20s and 30s and even into his 40s without knowing, while wanting to. It was the source of strife for him and would only get worse the farther along it went. Barb, his sister, had walked in on a compromised Hubie and Bette when she was eight or nine years old. Because of the encounter, she suspected he was Rob’s father and actually had half-heartedly suggested to Rob later in life that maybe he should start thinking about Hubie. He wasn’t sure who or where this Hubie was. He could’ve used some support from somewhere. He had no support. I suppose anyone else who thought of supporting him may have feared becoming complicit in encouraging a boy to meet his natural father, Hubie, whom they knew did not want to meet him. I’m sure it was talked about widely. Rob was quite alone in the issue. At any rate, Robert was stuck on a square one. And it strained relationships. Particularly with his natural mother. 

    Instead of dealing with it, Hubie elected to let it work itself out in the worst possible fashion. When his son had grown up and become curious about who his father was, Hubie could’ve taken a play out of the playbook of so many other men and women in his position. He could have met with him alone and told him he wasn’t interested in having a relationship with him. I can think of several people close to me whom that’s happened to, my adopted first Cousin Barbie being one of them. You should well know about that. They’ve met the parent and learned, contrary to what they had hoped, that there won’t be a forthcoming relationship. And, they’ve left. That option was available to Hubie as well. Instead of making something up, lying about it, and betraying his daughter by having her do the dirty work for him. 

    Rob would understand. Turns out he accepted without any resistance at all. Just a lot of bewilderment and disappointment. Hubie had Lori, who would do anything for the attention and the approval of a father which she needed so badly. Her history with him, as far as him calling, inviting, or visiting her, as she recounted to me during my probably 35 years of being her erstwhile therapist, was even more wanting of a father’s attention than mine was. And, she felt that she was honoring him by helping him do the dishonorable thing.

    How to close.

    Did dad have the right to not let his son meet him? Did Rob have the right to seek out his father? Was Rob in the right to seek out his father? Yes. Was dad in the right not to let his son meet him? No. He couldn’t think of a reason, and neither can I. And his intent was to hurt anything that would suggest to him do otherwise. 

    More importantly, what does a father’s relationship with one son have to do with not fulfilling his responsibility to the other? There is only one possible answer.

    Did my lack of respect for him ever show up in my behavior towards him? No. Never a cross word exchanged between us, and never any kind of falling out. 

    The take home:

    Is there anyone foolish enough to believe that even if I were the perfect son Hubie would not have done everything possible to not let his son meet him. He had no intention of fulfilling his responsibilities as a father and instead was ready to caste blame and contempt on anybody who made him uncomfortable about it. 

    In winding down here I thought it would be interesting to ask AI. I ask AI all kinds of things. The response was interesting. I left out the potential unfortunate effects on the children, and all of the selfish and personal weaknesses of the typical  father who chooses to reject his child. But I found the ethical and societal considerations convicting. And yes, ironically, someone has taught me better.

    These are a few of the thoughts that AI generated:

    When a father never allows his illegitimate son to meet him as an adult, it raises complex emotional, ethical, and psychological issues for everyone involved. The exact thoughts on this situation can vary dramatically depending on the perspective of the father, the son, and society. 
    Ethical and societal considerations
    The consensus view is that a father's choice to reject his son is morally and ethically wrong, as it places his own comfort and secrets above the emotional and psychological well-being of his child. 
    • Responsibility and accountability: Many believe that a man should take responsibility for the children he fathers, regardless of marital status. To avoid a biological child is considered a major moral failure.
    • The child's rights: The child has a right to know their biological parent. The father's choice to deny contact deprives the son of a fundamental aspect of his identity.
    • Outdated stigma: The term "illegitimate" is no longer legally relevant in most places and is socially viewed as an outdated concept. However, the societal bias against non-marital children persists, making the father's rejection even more painful.
    • Breaking cycles: Some argue that a father who was poorly parented himself may repeat this behavior, even if unconsciously. This does not excuse the behavior.
    There's so much more I have to say, but this is it. Take the suggestions here and make things right in your life and the life of others. I'd love to get back on better terms with you, mainly for Deanta's sake. But, my sister's, too. Good luck. Love, your other brother, Todd.





    Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad

    On Saturday, May 21, 2011, 8:36 AM, Lori Saunders <homeward13@yahoo.com> wrote:

    I'm glad I gave it a night before I responded because it brought back all the destruction that happened because of the way you chose to handle that whole situation. Rob is our cousin, so, certainly that is the element that can be made known here, and reuniting with a cousin is a good thing.
    I am going to take this opportunity to get this off my chest so I don't have to stuff it and just be done with it.
    On my end of things, I have listened to you call Dad an asshole, among other things, for many years so I know what you thought of him. The fact that you chose to shut down communication with him for all those years backed up the opinion that you obviously had. So when you made Rob "your project", and I say that because you obviously didn't do it to share with the rest of the family because Steve and I never got his phone number, I ended up getting it off of an email you sent Dad, and you must not have shared ours with him because we never heard from him. I had called him to ask him to please not show up at Dad's door with you because of your relationship with Dad. You encapsulated this mission of yours and shot it right at the guy that you had so much bitterness and hate for. I was amazed that you couldn't figure out why Dad responded the way he did. You, yourself chose not to have a relationship with Dad, so now you send him the first communication he has heard from you in many years and it is telling him that he needs to meet a son. Do you get the irony of the situation? A son who hates him and doesn't talk to him telling him that he has to do something? Well, you accomplished something that I'm sure would have made you very satisfied, so I will tell you about it. When you informed me that you found our half brother, I figured there would be fallout so I waited. I got what was almost a prank call one day. I answered the phone and the voice said "oops, wrong number". I could have sworn that it was Dad's voice; it came to my mind that he wanted to talk to me but didn't know how to talk about this new news. So I called him back, many times, but he wouldn't answer for a couple of days. So, I sent him an email telling him that I had known this news for over 30 years because Mom had made sure, in her post divorce ranting and raving, that I knew about what my father had done. I also wrote that you obviously had become bitter about it, but to pity you, not to hate you. I wrote that he needed to forgive you, forgive his father, forgive Mom. He was so affected by your "news" that he hadn't been able to eat or sleep for 3 days. The thing that saddened me most was that Mom had gone to visit Dad, not too long before this happened, and forgave him and they had a nice visit. She had showed up a couple of times. After this, he asked me to tell her not to drop by anymore and he didn't want to talk to her; that this incident had dredged up too many bad memories of times past. I passed this on to Mom, because I knew what would happen; and it did. She blew up at me about why he couldn't tell her and that she was going to drop in on him anyway whether he wanted it or not. I told her that the way she was acting was exactly the reason why he didn't want to tell her himself. It was very sad because the fact that there was a reconciliation after all those years was beautiful. Then came your next email, with what seemed to be a terroristic threat. I had him forward it to me because I wanted to make sure that it was what he was making it out to be. You don't tell someone to call this person and meet him or you will come down there, without it being considered a threat. Then he started talking about how Juanita's daughter Nancy had told him once, because she worked with the law somehow, that you had been dragged into jail for some sexual misconduct, or something, and how would you like it if someone told Deanta about all of her dad's history. I thought had a legitimate point. He sure showed a lot more restraint and forgiveness, as an unbeliever, than you did. He softened up as time went by and even asked about how you were doing at various times.
    I hope it was all worth it in the spectrum of your life. It prevented us from letting you know about Dad's status until the very end because we didn't know what you were going to do. He deserved, as our father, peace at the end of his life.
    The glory is all God's; I have seen some beautiful things in the end of Mom's and Dad's life.
    Cleaning out Mom's dressing table I came on to over 20 cards that she had saved from years of Valentine's Day and Anniversaries from Dad; "To my little wiff, from you big hubbie." I found only 2 from Dan. It hit Dad hard when Mom got cancer and he wanted me to keep him up to date on the situation. Irene told me that it hit him hard when Mom died, he was noticeably depressed. I know that they are both in Heaven. Jeannie even said that Mom had a smile on her face in the end. There were some beautiful things going on at Dad's bedside in the last week and a half of his life and especially that last night.
    So, it wasn't easy staying in Dad's life; there were plenty of times I had to brush my feelings off and not return negative thoughts. But I wouldn't have missed it for anything now that I have seen what God's mercy and lovingkindness can do.
    Todd, you are my brother and a fellow believer, which comes before your being my brother actually. I will rely on the Spirit for the rest.
    I look forward to meeting Rob and seeing you guys.
    Love, Lori






    --- On Fri, 5/20/11, Mr todd saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com> wrote:

    From: Mr todd saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com>
    Subject: Re: got response
    To: "Lori Saunders" <homeward13@yahoo.com>
    Date: Friday, May 20, 2011, 10:59 PM


     Rob Swift is planning on coming with me.  What can we do to make that work?  Do I need to introduce him as a friend of the family?  Friend of mine?  Shall I have him wait until everyone is gone?  Thoughts?
    From: Lori Saunders <homeward13@yahoo.com>
    To: Steve Saunders <ssaunders33@yahoo.com>; Todd Saunders <saunderstodd@yahoo.com>
    Sent: Friday, May 20, 2011 10:24 AM
    Subject: got response

    I got a reply back from Juanita; don't have to worry about her coming to the funeral. It wasn't worth forwarding. Since she had made it her business to tell Barbie about Dad's death, I was worried that she was considering herself to be part of the picture and I didn't want Irene to have to deal with that. It's all good.
    Love, Lori