I grew up as the eldest child and the only boy in our little family. A 1971 divorce had left my mother with two young daughters and me. That changed slightly when I turned eighteen. One day not long after stepping across the threshold into adulthood, my mother took me aside and gave me a talk. One that each of my two younger sisters would get. 

The Talk

Durning that talk, my mother revealed that before I was born, she had given up a child for adoption. A boy whose birth certificate had named Jonathan—my absent older brother. 

After the talk, it dawned on me that I was no longer my mother’s oldest child. Nor was I her only son. At least not on paper. 

Still, nothing changed in the day-to-day activity of my life. I continued playing the role as the eldest of my siblings and the only young man in the household. My grandparents acted no differently. Jonathan, the older brother I would mever meet, was a cipher, someone lost to the closed adoption system of the early 1960s. And well, that was that. 

A First Step

When my mother remarried in the 80s, my new stepfather brought his family along. A widower, Paul had two daughters and a son who was much older than I—Kurt. 

My stepbrother has always been more of a name than a person to me. I can remember having met him only three times in my life—at my mother’s second wedding, my stepfather’s 80^th birthday, and again at his funeral eighteen years later. I suspect those will be the only times I’ll ever see him. Our connection is tenuous. Two people related only through a parent’s marriage certificate, not by blood nor a shared life. 

For years, Kurt joined Jonathan as names I carried in my head—two older brothers. One I’d never met and the other I’d hardly met—the cumulative time Kurt and I have spoken to each other would likely add up to less than a quarter of an hour. 

A First Half

My biological father Bill alit back in Columbus, Ohio just long enough to remarry before setting off again. By the time my father had a second son, Bill was living with his new family in Los Angeles. Eventually, I went to California to visit. When I met Josh, my fraternal half-brother, he was getting ready for elementary school, and I was a junior at the Ohio State University. Not much to talk about back then. No shared past.

Josh and I have met a handful of times since that brief wave hello in Cali. 

He came to my wedding in NYC. My wife and I lived there while he attended the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, Long Island. My father came when he graduated in 2004, and that was the last time I saw Bill alive. It would be the only time he ever sat together with his two adult sons. 

The next time I saw Josh was in 2017 at our father’s full military funeral in Arizona—the only time all of Bill’s children have ever been together. Josh and his sister Laurel with me and my two sisters, trading stories, us revealing tales of the grandparents they don’t remember. I do bump into Josh online from time to time. We both look more like our mothers than our father, though we both have red beards. Had rather—mine has turned grey.

The Second Half

In 2018, I received a most suspicious email. A complete stranger, Julianna Shilliday, found my information on Facebook and asked if I knew a particular person who was married and living in Los Angeles. The email also took pains to say they didn’t mean to disrupt our family, but they found a possible close relationship on a genetic test, and they will go away if we want, etc., etc. 

The person Julianna asked about was my youngest sister Michel <her spelling). Thinking I could smell whiffs of a scam, I responded tersely that I would forward the email to my sister and “watch what happened from this side of a computer.” I.e., letting them know I’m wary and this is as far as I’m willing to go. 

The person who had written was Jay Shilliday’s daughter. 

Who’s Jay Shilliday? The name the adoptive parents gave Jonathan, my older brother, who had been given up for adoption 57 years earlier. 

Near Misses and Coincidences

As a harbinger of the many near miss coincidences that would be discovered over the next few years, the afternoon I had sent the email to my sister, Jay happened in Columbus, visiting from Oakland, CA. My sister had called my mother right after getting my email and explained about the genetics test and gave Julianna’s phone number to our mother. That afternoon mother and son met. Over a half a century after they were separated. 

You Look Like My Father

Not long after, I met Jay’s daughter Emma, my brand-new niece. She was working in NYC and living in Brooklyn, so meeting over dinner made great sense. And the first thing she said coming towards the table in the restaurant where I’d been waiting was “My god, you look so much like my father.” 

Which, it’s true, we both take strongly after our mother, especially in the jawline. So much so, it startled me when I first caught sight of him several weeks later. He was walking with Emma down the hall of my apartment building in Brooklyn for dinner, and it was obvious he was my brother—no doubt. 

All My Absent Brothers

Of all my absent brothers, I am closest with him. Sure, we missed 57 years of growing up together, getting into, out of trouble, of being jealous and envious and peeved and annoyed, and probably crushing on the same girls in high school—we’re only a year apart. And it’s true you can’t make up for school yard scuffs and helping each other with homework. With him living in Oakland and me in Brooklyn, well, that makes it damned hard to grab a drink together. But we get together when we can. Sometimes in NYC, a couple of times in Oakland, sometimes in Columbus, too. That’s usually around Christmas, but he’s got loads of families to see—his adoptive family, his newly discovered father’s family, his children’s families, my family with our mother. Yeah, sometimes we get to squeeze our shared family in there someplace. 

Almost Met

Each time we meetup, we marvel at how close we came to almost knowing one another. Not only in Columbus, where we grew up in different suburbs, and where I hung out with some of this high school buddies when I went to college at OSU. But also in Chicago, where we both worked in the Schatz Building in the Streeterville neighborhood at the same time in the late 80s, just on different floors, he as a sound engineer and me as a waiter—unsurprising older and younger brother occupations. There is a chance I sold him coffee. I wonder if I had ever remarked how much that one guy looked like my mother. Or if I’d been too busy to notice. 

Biggie and Li’l

Discovering an older brother didn’t change life much for me at 18, but getting to know him in the past few years has been a pleasure. Sure, we don’t have that quiver of entertaining stories to tell at family gatherings. But Biggie (Jay) and Li’l (me) still get to tell stories. Our own apart but even better, the many where we might have met and gotten to know one another. That’s for another time, because the list is long and maps out two brothers who lived lives just out focus from each other.

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