Episode 13 - Secrets from My Twilight Zone
Another Piece of the Puzzle - Love, Loss, & Regret
If this is your first encounter with my story, you may want to start at the beginning here: Secrets from My Twilight Zone.
Carrie, a third-cousin match from the DNA websites, had emailed me out of the blue last week saying that she would be traveling nearby with her 10-year-old son and asked if I’d like to meet. Of course I would. My office north of Pittsburgh is only a few minutes from her aunt’s house so I invited her to meet me there after I was finished with clients that day.
She had arrived with her boy, who we expected to be bored out of his skull with this ancestry chitchat, and he was, so he eventually took a nap on my stereotypical therapist’s couch. We knew that we were related through my mother, but not how. Carrie also matched my brother and sister, who turned out to be half-siblings after our DNA tests in 2019 revealed that we were related through my mother only. My cousin was not related to my then-unknown biological father’s side, though interestingly came from roughly the same region of Southern Poland, Northern Slovakia, and Western Ukraine— the Carpathian Mountain Range. I am told I have Lemko ancestors.
My mother’s birth certificate from 1935 indicated a father’s name. Still, mom never knew her father and never had a relationship with her mother Virginia Connelly who had Irish roots and gave up her daughter, my mother, to be adopted by my great-grandmother by 1941. The father’s name was poignantly abbreviated Jno Rush. My mother never used that surname on her birth certificate. She was always a Connelly. But Carrie said she had a relative who went by the name John Rush, changing it from his birth surname: Rusinko. The new surname fits my ancestral profile, along with my newfound Slovakian paternal side, of over 80% Slovak. The stars were aligning.
My cousin also had a digital photo of an Army discharge paper from Walter Reed General Hospital (where he may have been assigned for the duration of the war) that for some odd reason, her aunt kept with a note in handwriting on its top border that this was her uncle John Rusinko, even though the document said John Rush. I knew that veterans of WWII were offered compensation by 1950, as I had seen the compensation forms from other relatives like my mother’s uncle Tom Connelly. So, it was a no-brainer to look up John Rush for his compensation form.
I found it within minutes and his serial numbers matched his discharge paper. We had the right man. We learned that he served thirty-three months and never went overseas. $330 was the total one-time payment in 1950, according to an online calculator, that would equal $4,289 in 2024. That's a nice chunk of change.
I also knew the document had a reverse side with space for names of loved ones who might receive the cash benefit should the veteran die before securing the money.
Carrie and I were startled when we read the name of the beneficiary: Virginia Rush.
The address was for Cleveland Ohio where John “Rush” had Rusinko relatives, but I had never heard that Virginia had ever traveled to Cleveland. She had been out of my mother’s life since 1939 and I had no idea where she had run off to.
While this is only a piece of a complex puzzle, it was gratifying to confirm that my mother’s biological father, my grandfather, was most likely John Rusinko Rush who had become a security guard for the city of Pittsburgh and was in a long-term relationship with my estranged grandmother. This set my imagination and ghost kingdom ablaze. I had visions of a recklessly irresponsible romance between the two who never were reconciled, though he seemed to want to make it right by making her the sole beneficiary in 1950. But she seemed to have other ideas, and a legal notice in 1955 described “a petition praying for leave to adopt” a second child, a boy born in 1943 to Virginia Connelly. That legal notice in a Pittsburgh newspaper named John Rush as a possible party who needed to be notified that proceedings were underway for the child’s adoption. I don’t know what became of that boy. According to his death certificate, John Rush died at the VA hospital in Pittsburgh in 1973 of a pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction and had been diagnosed with Myasthenia gravis (not considered hereditary, though a genetic component may be involved). He was buried with his Rusinko relatives in Leisenring, PA, about an hour’s drive south of Pittsburgh.
In their apparent reckless romance, perhaps I see something of my own journey—seeking connection, often finding more questions than answers. Maybe that's what we inherit from those who came before us: not just their names and histories, but their unfinished stories, their unresolved struggles, or unfinished business. Wounds.
Reckless romances seem to run in my family history. I suspect I was likely the result of one myself, as were many of my NPE friends I met over the internet, mostly in Facebook groups and Zoom meetings. I also think Dad (my birth certificate father) suspected it as well, which is why he gave me a unique nickname: Jonko. (He had no connection to that Eastern European diminutive, though I liked it because it made me feel special). He called me a mommy’s boy, verbally poking at me, as opposed to my younger brother who Dad would jokingly ask, Whose boy are you? And the little bugger who could barely talk would always reply wholeheartedly and with bravado, Daddy’s boy all the way!
Looking back, I wonder if Dad had always sensed the truth. Not in words or evidence, but in that deep, unconscious way that psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas called the “unthought known”—something understood without ever needing to be spoken. By calling me Jonko, maybe he was quietly acknowledging what none of us could consciously admit. And yet, beneath the nickname was something more—a deeper complexity rooted in my mother’s unresolved past. She was an adoptee who never knew her father, and perhaps that absence, that yearning, shaped the emotional contours of our family in ways I couldn't comprehend as a child. Perhaps it wasn’t just Dad who sensed an unspoken truth, but my mother too—denying her own longing for the father she never knew may have silently shaped the emotional landscape of our family. I was my father's son, but not his true son. My mother had her ghosts—wounds from a history of abandonment—and together, they may have created an unspoken tension that silently seeped into our lives, and into my story.
For me, being called Jonko carried a weight I couldn’t understand at the time. I felt seen but also caught in an unspoken emotional landscape as if I were part of a story that had been written long before I arrived. That subtle, unconscious distance between Dad and me mirrored the complex, often painful legacies my mother carried within her. As much as I loved them both, there was always this lingering sense of not quite belonging, of feeling lost, that seemed to come out of nowhere. It's the same feeling expressed by many adoptees, but I was not adopted.
Or was I?
No, not in the typical meaning of that word. It’s only now that I can reflect on how these unspoken truths, woven through generations, shaped the emotional landscape of my childhood—an intricate patchwork of connection, separation, and yearning to find my place in a story that was never fully mine.
Exploring my family’s history continues to feel like stepping into another dimension, where the lines between reality and imagination blur. With the keys of genetic genealogy and historical records, I’ve unlocked a doorway into shadow and substance, seeking to understand myself through the strange, unexpected revelations of my ancestors. It’s been a journey through a kind of Twilight Zone—where familiar becomes strange, and the boundaries between light and shadow, science and stories, dissolve. All that remains is the power of the human mind to make sense of it all.
The evidence:
Click here to go back to Episode 12
Your quest is fascinating! Keep going!
So fascinating and makes me want to look further into my own ancestral history.