Ever competitive, my mother was delighted to have reached her eighty-third birthday in 1996. But this was not just down to satisfaction at achieving such an impressive age. She had only publicly admitted her actual age when she got to eighty. As long as I can remember, she had trusted that her appearance and her level of fitness would convince everyone that she was considerably younger. She was right in that. Judging by the incredulous reaction she received on revealing her true age to her golfing friends, they had never thought her to be anywhere near eighty.
No, her delight at making eighty-three seemed to have its basis entirely in her individual competitive streak. She had now beaten her own mother. Grandma had only made it to eighty-two. What an extraordinary attitude to take to growing older. But then Bea had been a competitor all her life. (Though the older I get myself, the easier it is to see her point of view. As I work on this book, I am conscious of how close I am to my father’s final birthday. I have to admit that I look forward to overtaking him in the race of years.)
Since her early twenties, Bea had held down, for a woman in that era, a series of relatively prestigious jobs. She had only given up work to get married in her late thirties. But this was the way of things in the 1950s. Wives were expected to keep house and be kept in turn by their husband’s earnings. To have done otherwise would have been most unusual for the time, at least for the middle classes. It would have been to diminish, even degrade my father as the ‘head of the household’ and the family’s breadwinner.
Before her marriage Bea had taken part in virtually every sport available – to females, that is. Golf, swimming, tennis, badminton, skating, riding, hiking: she had succeeded at them all. That energy had to go somewhere.
Once married, she threw herself into household management and domestic organisation. Shopping, cooking, baking, cleaning, washing, ironing, sewing, knitting: she succeeded at them all. Managing a limited and constraining household budget, she was still able to make sacrifices. Somehow she managed to free up enough money to send her sons to – as she saw it – a socially enhancing and prestigious fee-paying school. Seven years into her marriage, the couple were able to afford the mortgage on a substantial stone-built, terraced house in a leafy suburban street. They were going up in the world – that was her plan. She would never have to look back.
Widowed in her sixties, she maintained her independence. She was still winning golf competitions on an extremely hilly course – against all comers of any age – well into her seventies. Disdaining trolleys, she carried her own packed golf bag over that same course until ill health drove her from the fairways.
Habitually referring to the friends with whom she played golf as ‘the girls’, my mother was desperately trying to hold on to her lost youth. The glamour she had kept into her forties and even her fifties was rapidly fading. Never off the golf course, her complexion was plagued by the ‘high colour’ induced by frequent exposure to the east coast elements, as well as by the natural ageing process. She felt the need to resort to face creams and heavy make-up to disguise what she conceived of as a deficiency. She was never able to accept that this was an inevitable result of growing older and spending hours out-of-doors in almost all weathers. Her blonde Barbara Stanwyck hairstyle was long gone, replaced by a crisp straw-coloured perm. But she wasn’t to be outdone.
Throughout her marriage, my mother was always determined to be young at heart and up-to-the-minute in all things. She was a founder member of the Young Mothers group attached to her church and continued to play a part in that – at least as long as my brother and I could still be classed as children – despite the fact that she was into her fifties by then. She was a keen keep-fit enthusiast and, when we took our family summer holidays on the west coast, strode out resolutely on long walks and swam in the sea almost daily. Never liking pools, particularly heated ones, she used to enthuse about the ‘glow’ of a cold-water swim – a sensation I reckoned to be little more than the onset of hypothermia. Loving dancing, she did her best to keep up with the latest dance crazes as long as she was able, even winning a prize at a clubhouse social to add to those she had won on the course.
Why You Won the First Prize for The Twist
You’d barely dropped the ’40s style,
that Barbara Stanwyck look you loved,
when in the ’60s raged in all the brashness of their youth.
Bemused, you soon caught on, got with it,
went for trouser suits and flares, from bangs to perms,
peroxide in your urge to fight it,
age – the only snag. But you knew
that the beat goes on. Next summer at the golf club hop,
that Chubby Checker hit, and you were it.
They couldn’t keep you in your seat
as one more dance craze proved you’d kept your youth.
Twisting with the best of them, you took the prize.
What was it? Did you ever say?
Truth is, it was the way you wore your years;
your grip strong on each iron, every wood; on being you:
that someone always called a girl – who lived it too.
Still harking back to the terminology of previous eras, she was as determined to be ‘with it’ as she had previously been to be ‘in vogue’ or just ‘the tops’.
The trouble was, her idea of this was as out-dated as her vocabulary. Like her growing pile of still-to-be-read newspapers, her fashions always seemed to be a good while out of date. Happiest latterly in sports gear, at least since turning seventy, she would step out in violently coloured jumpers, tweed-effect crimplene slacks and golf caps of every variety, wearing these on almost every outing as well as on the course. But her style gelled with those of her friends ‘the girls’ – and she still felt one of the crowd right up until ill health took hold of her.
These friends, though, were little more than acquaintances. They were partners with whom to play a round of golf or to have a coffee with up at the clubhouse. That was all. Bea had never been regularly sociable in the way of inviting friends round to the house, and since my father’s death, fewer and fewer visitors were there to engage her. I still wonder if that confining of her social life to outwith the family home was another symptom of her fear that the various secrets of the past might come out. She had long ago lost any regular contact with her best friend, my ‘Aunty’ Joan and, barring Christmas cards, was not in touch with more than a handful of correspondents. She had continued to keep up with relatives but, with most of her generation passed away, Bea was increasingly lonely.
She was also out of sorts with the modern world. This she saw rapidly running away from her. I had tried to keep her ‘up to speed’ with changes, but I fear this was a fruitless task. At one point I bought her a radio/cassette player to listen to tapes of her favourites from the past – but it was only the radio part she used. The recordings I made for her – Fred Astaire, Jack Hylton, Al Bowlly and the like – were all unplayed, as I discovered after she died. She had never so much as broached the cassette deck. Perhaps it was the preponderance of the Sony Walkman that put her off. She railed about people’s inability to be separated from their music and couldn’t understand why the streets were full of listeners on the hoof, all ear-pieced up. More likely, she was just unfamiliar with the technology and a bit baffled by it (a trait I myself am increasingly prey to). She would never countenance getting a mobile phone – not even for emergencies – and I did repeatedly try to persuade her that this would be a sensible precaution. It took her ages to accept that a remote control for her telly was a good idea. Only as she got more infirm towards the end of her life, did she grasp the benefits. Previously, she’d seen a remote as promoting idleness. She was right in that, of course.
Despite being taught to drive by Gilbert in the late ’50s, and using the car independently for ten years or so when we were boys, she abandoned driving as soon as my brother and I had passed our tests. It was the move from column shift gear changes to stick shifts that threw her, I think. She never got used to those. When our father died, it would have made all the difference to her if she’d been an independent driver, but she was adamant she couldn’t go back to it.
‘It’s too late now,’ was all she ever said.
My mother did manage a few independent holidays after my father’s death. Pairing up with a cousin, she was able to join other relations for a fortnight on the Hebridean island of Iona for a number of years. Ultimately she found this frustrating. The cousin in question, though younger than Bea, was nowhere near as fit. On walks, Bea would be constantly frustrated at not being able to keep to the long-striding pace to which she was accustomed. But she felt she couldn’t leave this cousin behind and forge off on her own. Even if she’d wanted to do so. She was of the generation where women never did things singly. We had also tried to persuade her to holiday on her own. None of the cruises or tours specifically aimed at older singles ever seemed to appeal to her. Even the small-scale cruise we suggested, round the Highland west coast she so loved, failed to catch her interest. But it wasn’t the locations. It was the idea of holidaying solo that put her off.
‘What on earth would I do on my own?’ she’d always ask.
‘You’d be bound to meet people,’ I would reply, ‘you’re such a great talker. You’re never stuck for something to say.’
‘But people are always in couples – I’d just get in the way,’ she would respond, always having an answer to every suggestion.
It was no good. I couldn’t sway her.
But she still had her golf. She still had her ‘girls’ to socialise with, to compete with, to best if she was able. She could still cut a figure on the course – one of Edinburgh’s steepest and most challenging. As long as she had that, she was relatively content.
* * *
Despite her competitive rejoicing at making eighty-four, by then Bea was far from happy. Her health had been robust throughout her life. She had suffered from only one bout of serious illness I can remember from my childhood and was always the one to minister to other sick members of the family. But things were starting to go wrong. She couldn’t rely on staying fit any more.
By eighty-four, she was not in a very good state. A series of ulcers on her legs had finally prevented her from playing her beloved game – virtually her raison d’être – and she was becoming morose, even morbid. This was the frame of mind that prompted my poem ‘Clearance’. Such a mood tended to lead Bea to talk about her own approaching death. Not my favourite subject, and one I would try to deflect her from whenever I could. But, despite my efforts at changing the subject, she would return to it almost as a default setting. During one such conversation, I tried to cheer her up by flippantly suggesting that she had nothing to worry about in the afterlife.
‘St Peter’s just going to fling the pearly gates open wide,’ I joked, ‘and welcome you with open arms.’
Her brow clouded at this remark and she looked me straight in the eyes. For a person with genuine religious convictions and an almost literal form of belief, what she said next was chilling.
‘I have done some really terrible things in my life,’ she told me in all seriousness, insisting that she wouldn’t be welcomed into heaven at all.
How does one face such a statement? If I’d had more faith myself, perhaps I would have offered to pray for her. Instead, I only remember laughing it off. Trying to cheer her up, I resorted to further light-hearted and fatuous quips. At any rate, nothing more was said on the matter. My mother never enlightened me as to what these ‘terrible things’ might have been. Though, of course, I had my own suspicions.
At the time, I thought she had been referring to her resistance to my father’s wish to bring his first-born daughter together with his sons. I imagined Bea was feeling guilty about her intransigence in this matter. Maybe beginning to regret how she had managed to stand in the way of Gilbert’s dearest wish until it was too late for him. This was undoubtedly on her conscience. After my mother died, I discovered that, in her final years, she had written to Catrina to apologise for her actions and express her regret that Gilbert’s wishes had only been honoured after his death. Clearly a guilty conscience.
But now I wonder. Was she attempting to set the scene for some sort of confession? A life-long member of the Church of Scotland, she was not of a denomination that regarded confession as central, even particularly important. To the Presbyterian, faith is largely a lonely covenant with God. While much church-going was – indeed still is – a matter of living the conventional life and of maintaining standards, my mother was more heavily committed than that. She would even, on occasion, request advice from her minister on doctrinal matters. I have never forgiven the man for his crass insensitivity in coldly informing her, when she asked about some relatives’ children, that unbaptized babies were inevitably destined to be excluded from heaven. She accepted that pronouncement at face value and, repellent though the notion is, never thought to question it. All the core beliefs were givens for Bea. She took communion regularly and attended the Sunday services close to weekly. While there was undoubtedly a socialising aspect to her church attendance, she nevertheless always had a feeling she had ‘let the side down’ when she missed even a single week.
So, in her raising the question of those ‘terrible things’ she felt she had done, might my mother have been gearing up to confess the secret of her own first-born daughter? Was she attempting to enlighten me about the context in which she had found it impossible to accede to my father’s wishes? To find a way for me to understand her attitude to my father’s first family? It would certainly have had that effect. It was only after discovering my mother’s secret that I gained any real understanding of why she had thwarted my father’s longed-for union of all his children. Even if I don’t approve of or agree with those reasons, I can at least now see what motivated her. The sheer psychological pressure she must have been under is obvious.
But I am still haunted by her remark. I cannot help wondering what it was she regarded as so terrible. Was this the act of giving birth illegitimately, or of having a sexual relationship – or even several – while unmarried? Both, of course, are against conventional Christian morality. There was no doubt that she was a more convinced Christian in her later years, so these youthful acts may well have been preying on her mind. Or was it the subsequent action of giving her baby up for adoption? Did she regard that as ‘terrible’, as a dereliction of her duty as a mother? She truly needn’t have, as the baby went on to have a happy and secure childhood with her adopted family. At the time, there was a ‘genuine and widespread conviction’ that illegitimate children would have improved chances in life with adoptive parents. This would ensure, as Jane Robinson points out, that they were ‘unencumbered by the stigma and the other unlovely disadvantages of illegitimacy.’ So Bea had done what was right, in the circumstances.
But most likely she was simply weighed down by an unspecified burden of guilt attendant on the knot of secrets she had been harbouring for most of her adult life.
The episode, though, is reminiscent of the similar occasion a couple of decades previously when my father had used the loan of his cufflinks to hint at the existence of his first wife. I had failed to follow up on that one too. Perhaps Bea had hoped her bleak remark would prompt my delving further into what she was referring to. Was she seeking a way to unburden herself of the secret she, like Cousin Lil, had carried for so long? The secret so many people had died unable to relieve themselves of? If that had been her intention, did my own urge to lighten the mood thoughtlessly deprive her of that opportunity? The incident remains yet another never-to-be-solved mystery.
My father’s long incarceration in hospital after his heart attack had given my brother and me the time to say the things that our unemotional, almost repressed, upbringing had prevented us from saying previously. But we had no such opportunity with my mother, something I’ll always regret. Might her hints at serious wrongdoing have been an attempt to spark a response from her son? Was she looking for an expression of love and sympathy, such as I’d given to Gilbert during the last few weeks of his life? I only wish I had been more open to that sympathy and taken her remark more seriously. As with so much else, I’ll never know what lay behind it, never know what my mother was reaching for.
Bea died in the early spring of 1998, shortly after her eighty-fifth birthday. Collapsing of a sudden in her sheltered flat, she had summoned an ambulance via the emergency bell. She was rushed into hospital with a ruptured aneurysm. Informed immediately, my brother and I were soon at her bedside. Her descent was rapid. She was in severe pain and was heavily sedated, so it is unlikely that whatever halting words we found at the time would have registered. But again – we’ll never know. We can hope though.
* * *
All families have secrets, of one sort or another. That is clear. The revelations after my parents’ deaths, and others’ accounts of similar experiences, have underlined that. But such secrets need not solely be things hidden from family members, as in my case. They can be that most pernicious sort – the violent husband, the drunken mother, the demented child – where a whole family conspires to keep silence, using guilt as the driving force and emotional blackmail as constraint. Or they can be the sort whose presence is acknowledged, but can never be spoken of – the relative in an asylum, the unmarried parent, the unmentionable terminal disease. But, whatever their nature, the secrets are almost always there, almost always somewhere.
Why should I have expected my own family to be any different? In 1976, the first revelation felt unique. In 1998, after the second, the symmetry seemed to provide a further unique element. The dual discoveries of two half-sisters may well be uncommon, as may their sudden revelations at precisely the same interval after each parent’s death. But such secrets, it is clear, are very far from unique. For so long I thought the revelations had stolen the truth of my childhood. I now know they have not. It is still there, just the same. Trying to dismiss these discoveries from my mind was no use. It was actually my attempt to do so that was stealing my childhood. Now that I have told their story – the story of these revelations – it has become something separate. Something distinct from that other story – the one of my own family’s past as I lived it, experienced it at first hand. That is unchanged. It still remains, still endures.
The abiding image of my boyhood family – of us united and on the move in my father’s company car, his rather classy Ford Consul or its later replacement, the Cortina – has been somewhat tarnished. But it has neither been destroyed nor fundamentally undermined. The family we were back then, we always will be. Self-contained and comfortable; Gilbert driving while Bea is admiring the view; the ‘grown-ups’ in the front seats, the boys in the back; the car windows up to preserve my mother’s hair-do; the transistor radio playing on the parcel shelf; and us all bowling along on holiday or off to the seaside. The scene I portray in my poem ‘Wild Thing’.
We were our own ‘human limited company’– to echo Lorna Sage’s description of her family in the same period. And, as Sage goes on to say, ‘the car…played a part in making us one’. Together we were ‘travelling along life’s highway, socially mobile, [our] own private enterprise’, the Johnstone family firm bound together by mutual support, by mutual investment. In my childhood, it had all seemed so immutable. But really, all I need to recognise – and to accept – is that my own family’s private enterprise had that bit more of the private in it than I could have imagined at the time.
* * *
It may appear that I am bitter over the two revelations that so altered my view of my family. I have been so at times, I have to admit, but ultimately I am not. Although the emotions, doubts and resentments I went through on discovering the hidden secrets of my parents’ pasts were very real, and still have a certain hold on my imagination, in the end I am glad – grateful, even – for their disclosure. Much loss has been attendant on them but from loss, strangely, often comes gain. And while the anticipated outcomes of each half-sister’s contact with her birth parent’s family failed to materialise, there has been much gain made from these occurrences – in my case, substantial gain.
For one, there is the connection with my Cousin Lil. She is someone whom I would probably never have met again, let alone got to know, had these family mysteries never been revealed. Our exchange of letters eventually resolved as many of the questions my mother’s secret had thrown up as was possible. But the correspondence continued for the rest of her life and resulted in my wife and I making a number of visits to Lil in London in the early part of this century. By the time I got to know her she was in her nineties and living in sheltered housing in South Kensington. The contrast between her circumstances and my mother’s was stark. While Bea had in her final year moved to a bright, airy flat with two bedrooms, lounge, kitchen and bathroom, Lil was confined in a single room, little more than a bed-sit, with a small en-suite bathroom and a cupboard containing a kettle and a two-ring Baby Belling cooker. Taking up at least two thirds of the space in this room was her piano – a Bechstein boudoir grand – which she had been bought by her father after she won a prestigious piano competition in her youth. Although by the time we got back in touch with her she was no longer able to play, she felt she could never part with it. Recently rehoused from the flat she had lived in for many years, due to developers refurbishing the building, she had given up the chance of a move to a more commodious, but smaller-roomed flat in order to find space for her beloved piano.
‘It has been my life,’ she told us, ‘and it’ll stay with me until the end.’ The claustrophobic bed-sit was the only option.
Perched in cages on top of the piano, its polished surface protected by a plastic sheet, were her two companions, a pair of budgies. While they offered Lil her only constant companionship, their droppings, which she relied on her carer to clean up, did lend the room a rather stale air. Housebound since the death of her last close friend a year before our first visit, she relied on these carers for shopping, meals and much else. Most of her time was spent watching the goings-on in the busy side street in which she lived, but she was still mentally agile and read a great deal each day. I was honoured to be able to present her with a copy of my first collection which she was sufficiently taken with to write a response to in some detail, telling me about her own early excursions into writing sonnets.
One of the topics we discussed both in person and by post was my mother’s family photographs which I had inherited. On first entering Lil’s room I had immediately noticed a hand coloured, 19th century print hanging on her wall. This was, Lil told me, a studio portrait of her grandmother, my great-grandfather’s first wife. The picture had caught my eye as I had its companion pieces in my own collection – similarly hand coloured portraits of my great-grandfather in his younger days and his mother, my great-great-grandmother, whose birth takes us back as far as 1815. Since Lil’s death, all three portraits have once again been reunited.
That photograph prompted me to ask for Lil’s help in identifying a number of individuals who appeared in the old family snaps I had received on my mother’s death. Despite much discussion, we never got very far with the identifications. Lil wrote:
I’m afraid you have me floored this time! I’m sorry but I can’t put names to faces I don’t know. It’s difficult to recognise all the uncles from before I was even born! I suppose I know so little of the Edinburgh relatives because Mother died when I was thirteen and, after that, our regular visits up from Newcastle dwindled. Before then we used to drive up in Dad’s car – a grey, open-topped Morris. We were all frozen going over Soutra. If you reached 40mph you were travelling!
Hours were spent looking over these images, which prompted Lil also to tell me about her father’s involvement in the Amateur Cinematographers’ Association in Newcastle. Having already admired his skill as a still photographer, this other angle on his art didn’t surprise me. Although Lil was unable to give me dates, her father’s era meant he had been involved in the very early days of film making. Unfortunately, all his film work was lost in air raids during the War, but Lil gave me a bit of background to his – and, she explained – her work in this field.
When we were all members of the Association, Dad’s film of a story I wrote for them called ‘Beyond the Horizon’ was shown at the Annual Public Screening. It was filmed at the tiny fishing village of Cullercoats. It was a beautiful film showing the beauty of the sea in all its moods. The fisher folk were fascinated and lent us the genuine costumes which they wore. The girl who played Kirsty, the fisher girl, was ideal for the part. We had a lot of fun but when war came it was disbanded and, after that, many films were missing which was sad, so much had gone into their making.
Despite not visiting Edinburgh regularly after her thirteenth birthday, Lil was also able to pass on several stories of my mother’s family decades back. All of these were new to me. From one story it would seem that my mother’s insistence on ‘proper English’ while I was growing up had not been a concern a couple of generations before. Lil continues:
I would be seven when we first went to our grandmother’s big New Year celebrations in the house in Viewforth. I remember her gatherings so vividly. There were no radios for Big Ben to announce midnight then. So, on one occasion, Grandma looked out of the window and remarked, ‘It canna be twelve yet – the folk are still walkin’ aboot.’ Then my uncle’s rejoinder, ‘Whit dae ye expect them tae be daein’? – lyin’ doon?’
Lil lived to a very great age, dying just short of her 102nd birthday in 2011. Although her mind was reasonably sharp until the end, the infrequency of our visits meant that she was increasingly unable to place us. Inevitably age had taken its toll on her memories and my wife and I had slipped back into the blur of the recent past. But I would never forget the dozen or so years we had been in touch, nor all the stories she had been able to tell me about the more distant past.
Similarly, without the revelations I might never have known more than the parents of my own childhood – the apparently conventional, somewhat staid couple of my early years. With the discovery of their secrets, two whole new people have become embedded in my consciousness. A couple who had vivid and eventful lives before meeting, and whose own meeting was by no means straightforward. Of course, rationally, the knowledge that my parents’ earlier lives must have differed from what I was aware of as a child is self-evident. But the radical difference in the circumstances that have been uncovered is that I would never have known the details of this had the secrets stayed hidden. That is a gain of real value to me. Similarly, the discovery that Gilbert and Bea were two people who had spent their own early years confronting and working through similar feelings and experiences is a gain. Even though it is almost certain that one of them wasn’t aware of the losses and anguish the other experienced through illegitimacy and forced adoption, I have been able to bring these stories together and, in a strange way, reconcile them.
In effect I have, through an extraordinary congruity of circumstances, been able to construct my own versions of my parents’ memories. Memories that, I like to think, they would have divulged at least some of, had our family been living in the more open climate of recent decades. The upshot is, I have got to know them all the better. I have lived with them both more intensely and more intimately during the writing of this memoir than I have at any time since their deaths – and arguably at any time since my childhood. Uncovering the facts and imagining the detail of their pasts has connected me to them adult to adult in a way both unexpected and unanticipated. They are here with me now as I write the final chapters of this book, as I draw this story to a close.
Stories and more stories. Histories and more histories. These seem to be characteristic of my mother’s family. ‘History is a string full of knots,’ says Jeanette Winterson, ‘all you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more.’ While plenty of knotting has gone on in this story, it is the untying – the following of Ariadne’s thread – that I have been exercised by. But I can see now that new knots of a less tangled nature have been made, and they are welcome. Ultimately my family’s secrets served to make links and connections, to trace back some of the threads that had previously been so muddled and entwined. I am only too aware that none of this would have happened without the initial revelations, without the path they put me on.
* * *
I have many things to be grateful to my parents for, not least their example of a long and successful marriage. It is significant that both my brother and I, although married young, have gone on to enjoy lengthy and sustained marriages. We have both been happy and settled with our chosen partners. The upsets and uncoverings of the past have not altered that.
Rather than bitterness, my abiding feeling is one of regret. I bear no grudges against either parent. This memoir is an attempt, in some way, to make up for the fact that I was never able to tell them that. I think no less of either of them for the things in their lives they got caught up in. It was the attitudes of their time, not any inherent malice or mischief, that made them act the way they did. It is these very attitudes, coupled with their cultural background, that prevented, or dissuaded, them from being open with their sons.
The poet and writer Tom Pow, in his book of travels In Another World, reports one of the people he meets as speaking very wisely on this. ‘You can’t compare different times… You can’t judge by hearsay, only by your own experience,’ he writes. What the speaker Pow quotes is certain of is that experience teaches us all not to pass judgment. ‘After all, you can’t choose when to live,’ he concludes.
How much closer to our parents would we brothers have been, particularly as adults, if we’d been able to show that we valued them no less for these things that were later revealed? How much happiness could we have given to my father, whom we had sorely tried through our fractiousness as teenagers, if we’d been able to share his joy at reconnecting with his daughter? How much relief, both spiritual and emotional, could we have given my mother if we’d been able to welcome her daughter into the family circle? Or at least to reassure Mum that she was not judged for the acts of her past?
My ultimate sadness is that, effectively, I never knew either parent as a fully rounded whole. Large parts of their lives – parts that made them who they were in later years – were hidden from me. Much has now been revealed, or imagined, but it is still not the same as sharing it at source. While I was growing up, in that superior way of the self-assured – but self-obsessed – adolescent, I would routinely ascribe their actions to motives that bear not the slightest connection to the reality of their situation.
I am saddened that it is all too late. Neither of my parents will ever know that I would have had no less regard for them because of all the things I have discovered since their deaths. I would have understood them more – but I would have loved them no less, for any of it.