If this is your first encounter with my story, you may want to start at the beginning here: Secrets from My Twilight Zone.
Family secrets, like shadows, have a way of lingering—no matter how deeply buried, they find their way into the present, shaping lives in unexpected ways. After dropping the vintage quarter down the hole at John O’Toole's grave, a gesture that felt like casting a spiritual thread to the past, I thought my journey of discovery was nearing its end. But the O'Toole name had more surprises in store.
In late summer 2021, just before the buzzing cicadas in Pittsburgh signaled the approach of autumn, we were deep into the second year of the COVID19 pandemic, and my life took another unexpected turn. On one of the major DNA websites, I received a notification about a new distant relative—a match from Denver, Colorado.
Denver? I had no relatives from there.
I'll call her “Cathleen.” She was close to my age, an adoptee desperately searching for her birth mother. I responded to her heartfelt plea through the website, and within a day, she emailed me. Cathleen shared that she had recently ordered her original birth certificate from Pennsylvania. She knew she had been born in Allegheny County—where Pittsburgh, my birthplace, is the county seat. After exchanging a few texts, Cathleen sent a photo of her newly acquired document. My heart stopped. The surname was O’Toole—my mother’s grandmother’s maiden name—and the first name was Eileen, my mother’s dearest cousin. It was also the name of the man who tragically died in the elevator shaft in 1931, the very person I had been researching as a possible family connection. Could this be another coincidence?
Her mother must be Eileen. It had to be her!
Excited by the possibility of an authentic family connection, I hastily applied the forensic sleuthing skills I had developed while searching for my biological father to locate my mother's cousin, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years.
After a frantic internet search, I found her living in another state under a completely different name. She had even authored a New Age book about her heart-wrenching experience of gradually losing her husband to Alzheimer’s in 2013, weaving in spiritual perspectives. I didn’t disclose the genetic reason for my reaching out. The last time we had spoken was at my sister’s wedding in 1994, before my mom passed.
I am calling her Eileen, though that’s not her real name. Ironically, I am protecting her identity. I was thrilled to reconnect, and she was delighted to hear from me. She shared many wonderful memories of my mother and quickly updated me on her life—marriages, both husbands deceased, explaining the name changes. She never had any children. Then, she revealed something startling: after being brutally assaulted fifty-eight years earlier by an unwelcome guest at an impromptu party in her first apartment away from home, Eileen had given up a daughter for adoption within months after the assault.
At twenty-one, after the assault, Eileen sought refuge with her cousin, my mother, staying for three months in our Pittsburgh home when I was just an infant. She painfully revealed that, as was common for mothers who had prearranged to give their babies up for adoption, she was never allowed to hold or even see her child. Eileen had never revealed to my mother that she had been pregnant. The secrets ran deep.
During her stay in our home, Eileen recalled how she and Dad privately concocted a story to tell her parents. Unbeknownst to my mother, Dad and Eileen schemed to create a new narrative to protect her family. She was staying with Mom “to help with the kids and to pursue her career options.” Dad managed to secure a job interview for her… with the FBI. She mentioned in our conversation that she had always wanted to work for the FBI after seeing flyers at her local post office.
Of course, Eileen never went on the interview. It was just part of the story to tell her parents. She couldn’t bear to burden them with the truth—about the assault, the pregnancy, or the adoption. She knew that an abortion would have been out of the question and that her parents would have been devastated. She would have been disowned. Mom never knew her cousin Eileen was pregnant, and Eileen never knew that Mom was keeping a secret of her own, that Dad was not my biological father.
During one of our several re-acquainting conversations, Eileen recounted a cocktail party Mom held in the spring of 1962. Dad gleefully announced that he was going to be a father again at age fifty-eight, celebrating with friends and neighbors that Mom was pregnant with my younger brother, Russell. This was shortly after Moyer Brothers Construction, Dad's life’s work, had imploded. He was surviving off the last fumes of the business that had weathered the Great Depression, forever hopeful that it could be resurrected. Memories of the company faded like a sputtering engine running out of gas on a desolate road. He never ran a company again, spending the rest of his days searching for a financial backer to leverage his lifetime of hard-won construction experience, struggling to reclaim his past success.
Dad also faced IRS troubles from complications with overseas work for the naval airbase in Spain during the final years of his construction company. He had paid his workers, but he had nothing left to pay the federal withholding taxes he owed. Tax fraud charges hung over him, alleging hundreds of thousands of dollars—the money he would have made from the airstrip in Spain. However, under Franco's regime, a Spanish manager was required on the project, and that manager reportedly stole funds and fled to South America, leaving Dad with even greater losses. Though acquitted of tax fraud, the IRS later garnished his wages, and his legal appeals were eventually exhausted when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case. That's when life got harder. Despite these setbacks, Dad remained a stubborn maverick, unafraid to defy convention. Friends and neighbors remained unaware of his devastating financial losses, and Mom did her best to hide them. Eileen understandably believed he was still a wealthy businessman. He managed to find work with another construction business owner in Pittsburgh who shared his passion for flying.
Looking back, I was struck by how Dad had lovingly plotted in secret to protect Mom’s cousin Eileen, conspiring to conceal the truth from her parents as she navigated the social complexities of the early 1960s. I wondered about the spontaneous warm feelings my siblings and I had for Mom's cousin, unaware of the reasons why. We just loved her, taking unconscious cues from Mom. That love was unconditional. Both Mom’s and Eileen’s secrets remained safely hidden until the DNA test and my relentless curiosity clumsily brought them to light.
Meanwhile, Eileen was stunned by the staggering news I had shared with her.
Could this be some kind of hoax?
I assured her that the DNA test was likely accurate. Cathleen re-tested on the same DNA website, and within weeks, a mother-daughter match was confirmed.
Eileen had endured the traumatic sexual assault and carried her secret to term. She had discreetly relinquished her child for adoption a lifetime ago, hoping she was offering her baby a much better future. Separately, I spoke to both Eileen in Kentucky and her estranged daughter in Denver, urging them to take their time in processing this overwhelming discovery. Finding a long-lost parent or child stirs up a tumultuous mix of memories and emotions, creating a precarious tightrope most of us are unprepared to walk. Adoption reunions can be unpredictable, and it’s crucial to be sensitive to the needs of both mother and adult child.
At their request, I used my sleuthing skills to identify Eileen’s perpetrator and Cathleen's biological father. Eileen provided a name, and I located high school yearbook photos of two potential matches. She instantly identified the man. He had long since passed away, but his face had lingered in her psyche for sixty years. Healing from such trauma is a long and arduous process; it's a marathon, not a sprint. It’s grueling work, but time helps.
Cathleen, overwhelmed by the discovery and haunted by the trauma of being an adoptee, struggled with her own emotions, holding on to the thin thread of her religious faith as a spiritual anchor. She never knew what her mother looked like. We had scientifically answered life-altering questions in a matter of weeks, and she needed time to adjust. After several electronic interactions, my two cousins arranged to meet the following summer, coinciding with their respective birthdays. Eileen, now in her eighties but remarkably youthful, and Cathleen, feeling weary in her late fifties with the heaviness of her unknown origins.
Both women were anxious as the reunion approached. Despite their sincere efforts, the emotional stakes were high, and their reunion did not unfold as smoothly as hoped. The weight of all those years, compounded by the primal wound of their separation at birth, triggered deep grief and loss, reverberating down to their DNA.
As Faulkner suggested, the past is never truly behind us; instead, we build upon it layer by layer. Life rarely offers tidy resolutions, much like John O'Toole's tragic quest for his lost quarter—discovered only moments before he was struck by the elevator’s counterweight.
Cathleen’s adoption and Eileen’s trauma from the assault resurfaced, leaving deep emotional scars and subconscious defense mechanisms for both women. Though their journey had a difficult start, they gradually began to understand the immense complexity of their situation. Disentangling their intense, conflicting emotions would take far more time than they had imagined. True healing requires painstaking repair work of the family fabric, thread by thread, however imperfect. But this could take years, and for now, their wounds remain open, a gash in the tapestry of life, with long-term reconciliation still out of reach. These secrets, layered like echoes of a haunting choir, reverberate through the generations, their harmonies shaped by the pain and silence of the past. It’s a haunting reminder of the silent losses families endure across generations—wounds future relatives may never know but somehow feel in faint, inexplicable echoes from distant places in life’s great Cathedral of Learning.
Though Cathleen and Eileen's reunion remains unresolved, the echoes of our shared history reverberate through time, shaping us in ways we may never fully understand. And while some mysteries have been uncovered, others still wait to be revealed. There were a few more genetic echoes to follow, and I would soon discover more definitive DNA evidence for the identity of my biological father.
Secrets from My Twilight Zone is a version of my personal story. It is inspired by true events. However, characters, dialogue, and some events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
Nice job recounting this story. Thanks for sharing it!
An amazing story and beautiful writing. Have you seen the film "Antwone Fisher" with Denzel Washington? There are two scenes where he is actually looking at generations of his relatives who have passed on. They are all preparing a dinner and welcoming him to it. It's a powerful scene and causes me to wonder if we will see all the generations of our relatives we've never met in this life one day.