A beginning ... of sorts

I’m not sure how to begin telling this story, because there are so many “beginnings.”
During my first semester at Milligan College, my father died. That was October 2002. I didn’t know of his death until a year and a half after my graduation in May 2005 with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism. I got the news on Nov. 13, 2006, in an e-mail from my sister, Ivonne, whom I hadn’t seen since we both lived with our father in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1966. I was 10 and Ivonne was two. She and her older brother, Lloyd, were born to him and his second wife, Belkis … whom he had married after he divorced my mother, leaving her alone to raise three young boys in Florida. I hadn’t seen my father in 40 years when I learned of his death. Meanwhile, quite a bit of water has flowed under the bridge.

At the age of nine, I flew to Caracas to live with my father and attended school there for a year. Belkis and my father had a strained relationship and they separated during my stay. She and the kids returned to her family home in the Dominican Republic, and I stayed with my father’s friend Laura until I returned home to the U.S.

Ivonne now lives in New Jersey and teaches in the New York City School System. Lloyd lives in New York where he sells imported jewelry. Ivonne had received the news of our father’s death in the spring of 2006, in an e-mail from our sister, Monica, who lived in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Monica had contacted Lloyd to tell him that she was his sister.

My father and I had corresponded by letter over a period of several months in 2000 and 2001. He told me then that Lloyd and Ivonne lived in the New York area, and also told me about Monica. I didn’t hear from him anymore, and while surfing the Internet (in 2006) I discovered Monica’s post on Lloyd’s blog from the previous spring. I sent her an e-mail, and was surprised when Ivonne responded with the news of our father’s death. Monica, who speaks very little English, had forwarded my message to her.

Ivonne informed me of yet another sister, Lorena, who was a lawyer in Venezuela (She is now a nun). In addition, I had previously learned of my two brothers that my father had with Laura, the lady I had stayed with in Caracas. Laura picked me up at school and took care of me while my father worked. She was a very nice lady, and she planned to marry my father in 1968 but discovered that he and Belkis were still married.

I found out about my brothers sometime in the 1970s but had no contact with them until after that first e-mail from Ivonne in 2006. One of them had gotten to know our father in the months before his death, and he and Monica attended his funeral. That was Monica’s first encounter with her father. He had been living with his last wife, with whom he had no children. Lorena had met him at the age of 18, when her mother introduced him to her as her father. Prior to that, she had thought her stepfather was her biological father.

(Continued next post)