Embrace A Surprise Like This 101-Year-Old

They Arrive At All Ages

Denise is lucky at almost 70 years old. She still has her mother-in-law, not just living nearby in a nursing home, but going strong at the age of 100+. Denise and her husband, Vic, just put on a grand celebration at their retirement complex, a place they whimsically renamed in fun from Century Village to “Cemetery Village.”

Wisdom from Granny Gloria arrives in many forms, packaged uniquely each time they visit. Most times no one asks for the latest package, but Granny pays no mind to that. When you’re 100, you probably spend less time worrying about tact or reticence.

She’ll dutifully warn you if you’ve gained too much weight lately, or if the dress you wore to a particular event is not flattering on your build. Little bits of wisdom she knows will help you, right? But family members, even daughters-in-law, forgive the little gaffes, for Gloria’s heart is pure.

She loves and welcomes people immediately, drawing them in for those soul-feeding hugs you didn’t know you needed.

As in all families, secrets once buried under hard-packed dirt are being excavated these days with sharp, modern tools, like the internet. Many times, the keepers of these secrets are long buried themselves, so family members are left holding some treasure and not knowing what to do with it now.

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Many people describe the special deliveries they have received, either right on their doorstep or in the form of a private message in their Facebook inbox. And they wonder what to do with such surprises.

Once I created my “Stories With Shell” site, people started sharing their tales—like they have been waiting for one like me to put these treasures out to the world when they could not find the avenue. They might want to tell their stories but do not have an audience. When I first started writing on this platform several months ago, I did not quite know that one of the themes of my Substack would be 🔗 Family Secrets, but here we are.

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Vic’s Uncle Donny, Gloria’s brother, did not inherit that gift of longevity and passed away at a very young age, 57, many years ago. The extended family wrote this off as the consequences of the high life. He was a skilled ballroom dancer (in fact, a winner of the Harvest Moon Ball in NY). Also a drinker, and a handsome, Italian ladies’ man. Though married, he participated in a few dalliances on and off the dance floor. Back in the 1950s, any witnesses to his inappropriate behavior kept their mouths shut for Donny’s wife’s sake—at home with three boys to raise, mostly on her own.

No one really talks much about Uncle Donny these days, but his grown children make up a slew of cousins that Vic keeps in touch with on a regular basis.

Due to a popular Christmas gift in recent years, some of those grown children did their 🔗 DNA test in a fun pursuit of their Italian ancestry.

🧬 [Check out my review on DNA testing in the above link.] 🧬

Eventually, one of Donny’s boys-now-men, Vincent, received a Facebook message from a brave, Italian woman named Sheila.

“It looks as though you are my half-brother,” she stated as directly as possible.

Vincent was both cautious and suspicious, as many are when confronted with a ghost that rattles chains everyone thought buried with the dead. He wondered what she might want from their family. How does she know this is an accurate result? Can we get a second opinion?

“How do you know your birth father was, in fact, my dad?”

“Where were you born?”

“Where do you live now?”

He came just short of asking Sheila what she could possibly want in telling a story like this.

See, this is the common gut-feeling that keeps people suspicious at first.

What do these secret-tellers want?

Accepting a new family member too readily makes one worry that you were made a fool all these years. Like someone held a secret from you and you were not clever enough to uncover it. The tight, known family wants to keep this new person at arm’s length in case that new sibling may disrupt the illusion everyone’s accepted as real.

The new story somehow changes the narrative that all have told about the parents now gone and, thus, unable to defend themselves. Not many want to rewrite their family history or supplant their family tree and start over.

What does this new person want—to graft in her own new branch?

But after warming up to the possibility of the truth of it all for a couple of weeks and searching Sheila out on Facebook, Vincent shared her picture with Vic and some of the other cousins. Immediately, Vic recognized an uncanny familiarity in her face, for she so closely resembled his own mother that Vic knew instantly that her story was true.

She had to be Gloria’s brother’s offspring, never once mentioned in fifty + years.

Vic did his own testing and confirmed their shared DNA. Soon, he welcomed Sheila into the family fold and took her himself to visit his mother, Gloria, who was excited to meet the niece she never knew.

Gloria freely embraced Sheila with an instant warmth and connection. It was like they had known each other all along.

They learned that Donny’s mistress-let’s-call-her (because Baby Mama was not a title back in the ‘50s) gave Sheila up for adoption through Catholic Services, and Sheila grew up with her new family in the very same area where her biological family lived. No one the wiser.

And now, how coincidental, she lives within two miles of Vic and Denise and her almost-101-year-old Aunt Gloria in Florida.

Turns out Sheila didn’t want anything from the family but perhaps a connection—or even better, a relationship. And Gloria was all for that—pulling her right in as one of her own, penning her name onto the family tree. 🌳

They all became fast friends, and Sheila comes to all the family gatherings these days, including Gloria’s 100^th birthday party where the two posed for a picture that looks like a young version and an older version of the same woman.

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