Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

It felt urgently important to me, to make Jacob aware of his ancestral lineage, the patch of earth from which he sprang, the source of a spirit passed down, a connection.

He hadn’t known my father, but at least I was able to give Jacob something formative that I myself had grown up with: a sense of grounding in coming from this family. He is the only child of an only child, but this—this was a vast and abundant part of his heritage that could never be taken away from him.

My results had also listed a first cousin who was unfamiliar to me. There he was, a blue icon like one that might be found on the door to a men’s room, identified only by his initials. This—Michael will later tell me—set off loud, clanging warning bells for him. But not for me. Obviously I knew all my first cousins.

This is so relatable to me, re-reading this book now. Last fall, I got a message on 23andMe from a man who’d recently gotten his results and said, “Hm, this is curious - you show up as a first cousin, and I thought I knew all my first cousins!” I had not previously known who my birth father was, and this new connection was the puzzle piece that led to me getting a delightful answer to that question.

I introduced my mother to one of my classmates named Rachel. “Rachel, where are you from?” my mother asked. “Philadelphia,” Rachel replied. “Oh, my daughter was conceived in Philadelphia.” Smooth, without missing a beat. In twenty-five years, I had never heard this.

I have also had some off-the-cuff, somehow memorable comments made to me that turned out to be Big Deals, years later, when more time had played out and more information became available. For me, the biggest one was a casual question from an uncle I was visiting for the summer, making small talk as he drove me around to show off their city. “So how is your dad’s son doing?” My dad’s…what? “Oh, Pete? He’s good.” (Pete was my mom’s son, that my dad adopted.) “No, his other…” and then my uncle paused, certainly realizing he was about to be sharing information that had not been shared with me. “Yeah, Pete - I was just confused. Glad to hear he is doing well.” That one took almost 25 years, my dad’s death, and my mom’s desire to tell me the truth, to make sense.

“What do you mean, I was conceived in Philadelphia?” I asked. “Oh, you don’t want to know,” my mother replied. “It’s not a pretty story.”

What sharpened my senses that night to such a degree that I would be able to retrieve the conversation in its entirety, thirty years later? At the time, I found the whole thing odd, slightly discomfiting, but of little consequence.

So amazing how our brains will register something as significant, even while our conscious thought puts it aside as nothing to be concerned with.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

You could say my father died or my baby’s sick to just about anybody, and they would respond with compassion and understanding. But how about: I just found out that my dad wasn’t my biological father and that apparently I come from an anonymous sperm donor.

My situation and discoveries were never traumatic, the way this author’s were. But I do appreciate how conversations with friends about things I learned over my lifetime are greeted with a sense of bemusement. People are intrigued, but also unsure about how to respond.

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

So many secrets, held for so many years! There are still more that I know are not yet uncovered, some of which will likely never be told. I never wish to know things I’m “not supposed to” know, but it makes me sad to think that some loved family members have been through hard or difficult experiences that they don’t think they can share.

They set a wedding date and began to dream of their shared future. But my father had unknowingly become a player in a tragedy. Dorothy had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—a death sentence back then—and her family had kept her condition secret from her. My father discovered the truth a few days before their wedding and, against rabbinic advice, telling no one except his best friend and his sister, moved forward with the plan to marry. Dorothy was—many of those who knew them together have told me—the love of his life. She died six months later.

I had scribbled down a very brief list of everyone I could think of—friends of my parents, elderly relatives, anyone at all who might still be alive, and could possibly know something, anything, about what happened

I need to do this! I would love to know who knew what, who knows what now, and what else there is that they might have to share.

There were so few people left.

“Oh, Dani. Well, I’m absolutely sure of one thing,” Charlotte finally said before we got off the phone. “Your father is still your father.” —

My mother and father were, and always will be, my parents. Knowing who biologically created me has never created any sort of doubt about that, for me. I think it helps that - unlike this author! - I always knew I was adopted, I knew this man and woman chose me, and chose to raise me.

when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories. These are truths of a sort—the truth of adhering to what one remembers.

there are facts, which are by their nature documentable. The weather on a particular day can be ascertained. As can the date of the explosion. Perhaps there is a photograph of the dress she was wearing. And so forth. But the intentions of your father? The inner life of your mother? At these we can only hazard our best guess.

What was I looking for? Some way of identifying my first cousin A.T. I was crystal clear when it came to one piece of logic. Later, when I obsessively tell the details of this day dozens upon dozens of times—the nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story—people will look at me blankly when I get to this part. I’ll have to break down this simple line of reasoning, one every family knows and takes for granted. If it was true, if A.T. was indeed my first cousin, then an uncle of his—either his father’s brother or his mother’s brother—would be my biological father.

I heard something familiar in the timbre of his voice. It wasn’t merely a resemblance. It was a quality. The way he held himself. His pattern of speech.

Now, Ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands in front of him as if bracketing the air in parentheses—a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew in a place beyond thought that I was seeing the truth—the

A cool façade got me through the day. The inner avalanche was somehow not apparent on the outside—this had always been the case with me. I held myself together even as I worried that I might pass out. I told my friend the story over lunch at Gracias Madre, aware that I was recounting it, not feeling it. I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I registered her kind, stricken face across the table, but part of me had levitated and was now hovering, as if the story weren’t my own.

I had texted earlier that day to let them know that I had, as I put it, seismic news. It seemed an appropriate choice of words. It was San Francisco, after all. Good seismic or bad seismic? the wife had written back. Just seismic. They looked at us expectantly. What was the news? Michael and I found ourselves tag-teaming the story as if we were actors in a play—a darkly comedic play—tripping over one another, mining the story, beat by dramatic beat.

It was a good story. A great story. I had pretty much lost sight of the fact that it was my story. We had them laughing. We had them on the edges of their seats. We spent most of the evening talking about it, over steak frites and good French wine.

This is also very relatable! I am never entirely sure whether I am truly, truly as unfazed as I generally feel by all of my complicated twists of family life, or if it’s just that it’s the only way to talk about it, and so I experience it through the lens of a narrative I have crafted to share.

as I careened through the hours, I had no patience, no capacity to be measured. The good doctor was my biological father. Meanwhile, the texts continued. Keep us posted with updates! I was hurt by her tone. How could she not understand that this wasn’t a soap opera, this was my life? But later, much later, I came to understand that I had presented it as entertainment.

I haven’t been hurt by how anyone has taken the news, generally, but I have sometimes registered that others have not seen it as the stunning/shocking surprise that I have. Also - see the other note! - it’s likely that I have played it out as an interesting new thing, rather than something dramatic and mind-blowing.

I stumbled upon words I hated: apparently Ben Walden was my bio-dad.

I greatly dislike the ways of talking about biological parents as differentiated from my PARENT parents. I wish we had a different vocabulary, although I can’t think of what it would be. I do tend to say “birth-“ or “bio-mom,” “bio-dad,” and “adopted mom and dad,” but I also almost always add, “my real mom and dad,” because that is who they were. The other two were just a tiny part of creating me. (Well, the bio-dad especially…of course, the bio-mom had a longer commitment of the pregnancy.) But my actual for-real parents were there for every moment of my life.

I wanted to hold myself apart, as if none of this really applied to me.

an attempt to understand the culture that my parents inhabited. In 1961, Edward Albee’s eviscerating play about a childless couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was about to open on Broadway. A Newsweek survey revealed that zero percent of Americans considered no children the ideal family size.

his family wished privacy in this matter. Situation. Matter. And again, privacy. The words disturbed me, but beneath the disturbance was something I wasn’t used to feeling. I walked through my days feeling weighed down by a peculiar, polarizing heaviness. I wanted to hide. It was shame, I realized. The Walden family wished privacy in the matter of me.

When I first ran into the discovery about who my birth father was, I was half-expecting their family to react this way. I was delighted when it was absolutely the opposite!

I wanted to eradicate this terrible shame, this sense of being defective, alien, other, as if perhaps I never should have existed at all. It was why, I now realized, I had included my website in my original email to Ben. It wasn’t only so that he could see that my motives weren’t mercenary. See? I wanted to say. I’m a real person—with a full, rich life, and a family of my own. I wasn’t just the product of some random morning

Similarly, when I was learning about new-to-me cousins, knowing they might be curious, I shared my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I was very conscious that I wanted them to see and think about me in a certain way.

Michael had a good-size family. His parents were still living and had always been a big part of Jacob’s life. Jacob had uncles, aunts, and an assortment of cousins as well. It had been a source of sadness to me that I hadn’t been able to give him the same. No grandparents, a half aunt who displayed little interest, and cousins who were black-hat Orthodox, with whom he shared nothing at all.

My voice shook. I was trying not to cry. Telling Jacob that my father wasn’t his grandfather felt like I was undoing the work of a lifetime, or perhaps several lifetimes. Jacob reached over and took my hand once he understood. “Are you okay, Mom?” His chair scraped back as he stood and came around the table to hug me—my beautiful boy, who wouldn’t exist if everything hadn’t happened just as it did.

My beautiful daughter, who also wouldn’t exist the same way if everything had not been just as it was!

I kept reminding myself that everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered. My new knowledge changed both everything and nothing. My life was like one of those large and complicated jigsaw puzzles that, once finished, displayed a completely different image on the reverse side: a streetcar in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a self-portrait. Same puzzle pieces. Same materials. Same shape. Different picture.

I haven’t ever felt like any of the news or revelations changed who I was, but they just really added layers of insight.

I resisted the ridiculous urge to tell Jacob that his grandfather was still his grandfather. What could that possibly mean to him? My father was an abstraction, an ancestor to him—nothing more. All those stories, the tallis, the sepia photographs scattered around our house of the little boy in the bowler hat—those were important to me. But they held no more of a sense of reality for my son than the fables and fairy tales I’d read to him when he was a child.

I feel this way about my daughter’s relationship with my parents. She barely remembers my mom, and my dad passed away a month before I became pregnant with her. So even if I were to try to help her maintain her sense of self as their descendant…really, she probably doesn’t even have one! She knows who they are because of photos on my walls, and she knows how much I miss them. But they aren’t real to her the way they are to me.

“Wistar was world famous for its colony of albino, virgin female rats,”

I highlighted this because I was curious to look into it further. I had recently heard of the Wistar rats for the first time.

Q: You mentioned the poem James Garner recites in the Chevy Tahoe ad. Is it by e. e. cummings?—Fred Good, Mount Dora, Fla. A: “Nobody Knows It but Me” is by ad copywriter Patrick O’Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.

I don’t remember this ad but I adore James Garner!

“You’re not an accident of history, Dani,” Shirley said. Her eyes were brimming. “Not as far as I’m concerned and not as far as the world is concerned. This isn’t about the cold scientific facts. I have to tell you—in every way, and I’m not saying it to make you feel good, and I’m taking a chance saying it because you’ll think I’m making it up—but between you and Paul there was paternity, ownership, kinship.”

“Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.”

“You have to judge things by the result,” Shirley continued. “And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed.

Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered. Oh, how I had underestimated my remarkable aunt.

I have this same feeling about my older sister, the first child of my mom from a previous marriage. She didn’t grow up with me, because I was born when she was almost 30 years old, she lived 3000 miles away, and by then she had 4 children of her own. But she loved me with her whole heart, and always was 100% family to me.

“Emily just followed you on Twitter,” he said. He showed me her name atop a list of my newest followers. Emily Walden. There she was. I felt a strange and instant comfort. She did know about me. She did. And she was reaching out.

My new cousins sent me friend requests on Facebook, and I was so pleased!

I touched follow on my phone’s screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another’s existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast. I see you. I see you, too.

I once heard a psychic say that the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion. In that case, the entire restaurant would be filled with my long-lost relatives: mother, father, aunts, uncles, floating, invisible, impassively witnessing the meeting about to take place.

Later, it will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land.

“Tell her it couldn’t have gone better.” In our remaining moments I let Ben and Pilar know that I would be in Portland during my book tour the following spring. This seemed to be a relief to all of us—the idea that we’d be able to get together again. “We’ll come to your reading!” Ben said. And then we hugged goodbye—each one of us hugged the others—and this time there was no awkwardness. Only a sense of having been visited by some kind of grace.

Meeting - first online, then in person - my newly discovered bio-father’s family was must like this. “How was it?” It truly could not have gone better.

His desire to set a new beginning to the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.

We did know one thing for sure, so obvious to us that we barely had need to discuss it. This baby—if there were to be a baby—would always know her origin. It would be woven into her earliest life like a bright thread, with no fanfare.

This is the author thinking of how she would have approached informing a child that was conceived through unconventional means. For me, that intention she had was very much how my parents handled the fact that I was adopted. It was always part of my identity: my origin story was that there was a woman who became pregnant, who loved me so much that she gave me up because she wasn’t ready to be a mom. And then, there were my parents, who loved me so much they chose me and raised me as their own precious, cherished daughter. Always, always it was a positive thing.

I touched on the sense that part of me would now and forever be a wanderer. A stranger in a strange land.

Just before Hanukkah, I called David Ingber, a rabbi who had become a colleague and a friend. It had been six months since my wandering had commenced. After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”

Everything is about the story you tell yourself about the reality of what has happened or what had come before.

The large, contented, peopled world in which she was raised. The small, confusing, solitary world that I escaped from. Her father—our father, yet in so many ways not my father—with his pink cheeks and thoughtful, kind demeanor. My father—the one whose voice I will hear for the rest of my life—singing

I would not characterize the world I grew up in as “confusing,” or anything to have escaped from. And here, the “she” is the author’s newfound half-sister. For me, my half-sister’s family was perhaps not always so contented, but it was absolutely large and “peopled”! And my upbringing was in strong contrast to that. I grew up very much an only child (despite the existence of a much older brother and sister), far from huge family holidays, tumbles of cousins and ever-present aunts and uncles. It was a very different experience from the ones my birth families had. It was even, now that I think about it, very different from the ones my adopted parents had: he had two brothers and a sister, all very close in age. And my mom was the youngest of eight sisters, with several aunts and uncles who were also part of her life. My parents had chosen early on in their relationship to leave the town where they had been born and spent their young adulthood, and move to California, then to Oregon. The nearest family member outside our immediate family of three was over 1000 miles away, and our visits to see family on the east coast were exceedingly rare. I knew my aunts and uncles mostly from holiday gifts and my mom’s stories. Cousins were people I’d met once or twice, and whose names tended to jumble together. Once in a while, family would come visit us in Oregon, and I always loved getting to know them, but all together that was probably something that happened only for a few weeks, every few years of my childhood. I was aware of being part of a very large family, but it wasn’t something I experienced the way some people do, and almost everyone else in my family did.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

I wrote him about a favorite novel, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and he wrote back that it was one of his favorites as well, so much so that he had recently read it for a second time. Was it a coincidence that we both loved the Stegner? Our literary sensibilities were remarkably similar.

Highlighted because I’d like to read this.

I watched a documentary by a Canadian filmmaker named Barry Stevens, who learned as a young man that he had been donor-conceived and began searching for his biological father in midlife. Stevens interspersed research into his paternity with film footage from his childhood in which he and his parents—his mother and his social father, as it turned out—were on vacation in California.

Highlighted because I’d like to see this. Two other relevant movies that I have seen - one of them multiple times, one that I just learned of recently: Three Identical Strangers, and Stories We Tell, by the amazing Sarah Polley. The documentary is apparently called Offspring.