The Stranger in My Genes: A Memoir

by Bill Griffeth

Bill Griffeth, longtime genealogy buff, takes a DNA test that has an unexpected outcome: “If the results were correct, it meant that the family tree I had spent years documenting was not my own.” Bill undertakes a quest to solve the mystery of his origins, which shakes his sense of identity. As he takes us on his journey, we learn about choices made by his ancestors, parents, and others—and we see Bill measure and weigh his own difficult choices as he confronts the past.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, Genetics, Autobiography, Book Club

196 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 6, 2016

Reviews

[Pamela · Rating 2 out of 5]

He may not need resolution, but the reader does.

[Easyreader · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, brief but repetitive, is all about how emotionally devastating it was to the author to learn that he was not the genetic son of the man who was married to his mother, who had raised him, and who he thought was his father in all respects. That he hadn't known this crushes him. But when he brings himself to ask his mother what had happened and what led to his birth, he walks away after his mother makes a one-sentence apology for her "mistake." Now that characterization of the situation -- which could apply to all sorts of incidents -- does not clarify whether the extra-marital sexual relationship which led to the author's birth was voluntary or involuntary, short or lengthy, or any other question: the author chooses to interpret the statement in the way which is least painful to him, not to search for the actual facts of the case. I find it hard to believe that the author is an investigative reporter.

[Mary Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bill Griffeth chooses to romanticize the man who, by all reasonable inferences, raped his mother. After discovering through a DNA test that he has a different father than his brother, all family members agree that his mother would never have had an affair. And, when he confronts her with the DNA results, she reports "I made a mistake when I was younger" and that "it" happened at a deserted construction site with a former boss. When she refuses to discuss it further and looks at his with "dead eyes", Griffeth takes that as her admission of an affair, rather than seeing the pain of a woman who had lived with trauma for decades. He briefly considers asking, but just says that his mother would not admit to a rape, to save his feelings, and dismisses the issue. When Griffeth discovers that that his biological father had multiple marriages, he briefly considers that he may have been a seriel philanderer, but then reject that, since he "doesn't know him". But, he repeatedly refers to the "shame", "embarassment" "indiscretion" of his mother, who he does know as a good, moral woman. He then spends the rest of the book with his fantasies of the Father's Days and times on the golf course he could have spent with the man he clearly admires from afar.

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could totally relate to this memoir - well sort of. I wasn't raised with my birth father either but I did get to meet my father when I was 18 whereas the author never got to meet his birth father and found out in his 50's thru DNA testing that the dad he thought was dad was not his father. The turmoil and heartache of piecing together one's family history is compelling. I loved how thoughtful he was of his mother who kept her secret from everyone. He wanted answers but did not want to cause heartache to his 95 yr. old mother Painful times for everyone involved, but all in all truth is healing

One particular paragraph summed up my feelings towards family history and that was on page 91
"If genealogy had taught me anything, it was that when our lives are stripped to the bare walls - no job, no money, no possessions - we are left with a fundamental truth that defines us, and it's family. Careers and professional achievements are filed under "What We Do." It's family that makes us. "Who We Are." Family relationships supersede all others. You may not get along with your relatives, and you may not be interested in your ancestry, but you cannot escape their influence. Family gave you your looks and your mannerisms, and helped shape your very identity."

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a genealogist, I've done DNA testing for myself and I administer kits for multiple family members. I'm fully aware of the potential for unexpected findings, and I haven't taken the warnings lightly. I readily admit that I did breathe a sigh of relief when DNA matches confirmed that I was a part of my genealogical family and that we brought the right child home from the hospital, but I never truly understood how much my identity would change if the results had been different. Bill's story pushed me to reflect on how much my own genealogical findings have influenced the way I think of myself and the importance of my relationship to every person in my family tree.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been a long magazine article. Slow to get started and a lot of melodramatic moments about how shocking it is to find out your father isn't your father. Cliches abound.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It satisfied my genealogy nerdiness.

[Karla Huebner]

This book is in the process of being passed around my DNA Interest Group, and eventually my turn came. As someone fairly involved in family history, and sufficiently experienced with DNA testing that I've given some talks on the subject, I was looking forward to reading the book. Initially, it held some promise: it's by a devoted genealogist whose tests revealed that his dad was not his biological father.

Well, that had to produce strong emotions--and it did. The author assumed the test had to be mistaken, and it took some retesting to convince him. He then had to solve the mystery. OK, this all makes a reasonable premise for a compelling story. Unfortunately, the author disappoints us.

My initial feeling, as I began to be disappointed, was that by this time I should know better than to expect memoirs by journalists to be good books. Journalists are good at churning out copy, and investigative journalists are good at interviewing people and digging up information, but generally speaking their memoirs (at least, memoirs not about their careers) are lamentably weak efforts about remarkable experiences that deserve better. I think that this is the natural result of their training: they learn to write simple common-denominator, generally rather short, news items about events external to themselves. When it comes to writing books that deal with their own deepest emotions and experiences, their journalistic experience is of very little use for anything but digging up some facts. They don't know how to write about themselves and their families in anything but the most trite prose. (The better writers among journalists can write long pieces for a broad audience without sounding cliche, but most journalists are not good enough writers to do that.) I would also posit that, perhaps, many journalists are not by nature introspective people, which adds to their inability to write very well about themselves.

In the case of this particular memoir by a television financial journalist, his shock at discovering his unexpected parentage does not even make the reader sympathetic (which it really ought to), but causes numerous readers to comment that he spends much of a very short book whining. I was sympathetic to a point--I knew how disorienting it was when paper evidence suggested that one of my great-grandfathers might be of colonial American descent when everyone else in that generation was an immigrant (DNA eventually proved he was really the son of German immigrants, which was easier for my family to adjust to). But I wasn't impressed that the author spent so much time rejecting the evidence and then didn't really dig very deeply. As other readers have commented, it's jarring when, once his proper and religious mother admits to having made "a mistake," he assumes that she had a wild fling with her employer rather than that, as the evidence suggests, she failed to fight the man off. Sure, I can understand not wanting to press his mother further on a difficult subject, but ultimately this is a memoir that leaves the reader rather unimpressed by and unsympathetic to the narrator, and leaves the reader wishing the author had done more digging to more fully understand who both of his biological parents were.

[Carol Wit · Rating 2 out of 5]

My thoughts is that there were too many questions that the author left unanswered.,
Myself being an NPE, I would have dug deeper to get to the truth. There is one instance where the author had a very close DNA match, he never contacted that person., If you already know there are matches that you do not know, you would want to follow up on all of them. Also there were many unanswered questions that he never asked his mother.,
My opinion, why write the book?

[Russell Atkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was talked into getting a DNA test by his cousin as they were both genealogy buffs looking to explore family history. The results came back showing his father, the man who raised him, was not his biological father, or so it seemed. His first reaction was denial. Then as he studied more about inheritance and DNA he understood that it might be true and there could be several explanations for it. I know of at least three.

I enjoyed this book for several reasons. The least important one is that the author has the same name as my favorite uncle. I'm also a genealogy buff and have had my DNA done, with a surprise in store for me there. The author takes a long time getting to the meat of the story, but the book is generally well-written. The aspect that I found most compelling, if somewhat difficult for me to grasp, is how emotionally he took this revelation. It consumed him for years and tore him apart. Whom should he tell? Was it a lab error? Should he ask his 95-year-old mother about it? It seemed to me that it should not have been so surprising. If you don't want to know that kind of information, don't take a DNA test. There are multiple bold face warnings about this kind of thing on the testing company websites and instructions.

The other aspect that truly surprised me was how little he and his other relatives understood about DNA. The father gives a boy his Y Chromosome. Why is that so hard to understand? The author's oversimplification of much of the DNA science was a disservice, too. This is really junior high science class stuff, but apparently it baffles and frightens a lot of people. The book gave me a sense of how deeply some people feel about their identity, or at least what they think of as their identity.

I have one warning. I listened to the audiobook that was produced by Silicon Valley Reads. It was an odd, rather amateurish production and the reader, while not bad, exactly, had an odd cadence that I found disconcerting, almost like he was reading to very small children. I suggest reading this one.

[Magi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Griffeth's story was almost identical to mine only I was 72 when I found out my father was no in any way related to me as he said, my cousin, said do your DNA you have done all the family history and it would be great to connect the DNA with your research. I know he feels in regard to his mother mine never missed mass every week and confession every Saturday that was the biggest shock for me was my mother had an affair and I am the result.
So this is a very good book well written and there millions of us who are now finding our real family thanks to DNA that can relate to this story. Thank you for taking the time to write this wonderful book and I would recommend anyone to read this bit like a bible of researching DNA and your missing family.

[Rosanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the urging of his cousin, the author takes a DNA test and uncovers a family secret that shocks him and turns his life upside down. He doesn't believe the results and takes the test two more times only to have to face the truth. The father he has known and loved all his life, who is now deceased, was not his biological father. He embarks on a painful journey of self discovery to make sense of his life and family history. One of the reading selections for Silicon Valley Reads 2019.

[Janelle V. Dvorak · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a long-term family history junkie, I was really excited to read this book. The advent of DNA testing has brought about some joyous reunions and some devastating revelations, and this book deals with one of the most devastating, the "non-parental event". In layman's terms, a "non-parental event" occurs when one finds to one's total surprise that one or both of one's parents are not one's biological parents via DNA testing. This happens more often that one might think, and I was interested in the author's reactions, having been the culprit who confirmed my own family's "non-parental event". His reactions were quite dissimilar to my own, although he was dealing with having a different biological father than he thought, and mine was a grandfather. After thirty years of genealogy, I put a much lower value on the sanctity of bloodlines than the author.

It was a very dramatic story, fairly well told.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Several reviewers dissed Bill Griffeth as a terrible investigative journalist based on this book, but in fact, he was a financial journalist and co-anchor of several financial shows on CNBC. I would love to read the follow-up, Strangers No More, but the book is rather pricy and my library does not have it.

[Katharine Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Stranger in My Genes" - written by Bill Griffeth and published in 2016 by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. DNA stories are fascinating and Griffeth's is a classic one, the case of a NPE or Non-Paternity Event. He casually sent in a DNA test on the prompting of a genealogically-minded cousin and his world imploded. This short well-written account explains how he dealt with the news and with his 95-year old mother, and includes back story about his pride for and attachment to the Griffeth line. "Family secrets are the buried treasure of genealogy; they're like pearls carefully harvested from ordinary oysters." A fun read set in my bailiwick.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written story about DNA results that are unsettling and how to process a new identity. I read this on my 3.5 hour roundtrip ride between Mpls and Eau Claire for family events.

[Jenny Impellezzeri]

a great read on geanology and hidden mistakes from the past

[Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the reality this book provided about finding a non-paternity event via DNA testing. Wondering if the author ever reached out to his biological paternity family after publishing this book.

[Roberta · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book gets to keep 2 stars because a little of the family history is actually pretty interesting, there are a number of photos, and the author keeps it simple with a non-technical explanation of DNA that is adequate for the purpose it serves in this book. That accounts for about 2 chapters of the whole book. If this had been properly edited, it would have made a fine blog post.

As I started reading this book, I thought that it was most likely going to be a 4-star book. But as I continued reading, the author annoyed me more and more. I don't like to rate books on whether or not the author is personable but, in this case, the author is also the main character in the book and the main character acts like a total &%$*# self-centered bone head.

When Griffeth and his cousin, Doug, have DNA tests that are not a match the author is re-tested and asks his brother, Chuck, to send in a sample, too. On page 26 he charts only three scenarios, first that the lab was mistaken, second that Chuck and Doug are the same and he has a different father and third that he and his brother were fathered by the same man and Doug has a different father. In this third scenario, he would lay the blame on their grandmother. He doesn't chart the results from Doug's siblings so we have no why of knowing from his chart if Doug's mother was the one who "strayed."

But Griffeth soon admits that he always knew that he was different (better) than his siblings. Over and over again the author points out how superior he is to the rest of his family. He repeatedly draws contrasts between the intellectual and the hicks. He even includes a photo so he can point out that he is wearing wing-tips with his brother in cowboy boots! Who needs a DNA test, just check out their shoes.

Nearly the entire relationship between his mother and biological father was fabricated out of the author's own imagination. From a genealogy DNA test (not even an acceptable paternity test) his mother changes from a quiet, conservative housewife into a flaming femme fatale. He weaves an entire affair from mere hints about one-time contact with a man that his mother can't even identify in a photo.

The possibility that babies might have been switched at the hospital never comes up. The author raises the possibility of rape but it doesn't fit the scenario that is has already developed and he dismisses it altogether when he finds out that his biological father hails from Kansas because, he tells us, it isn't possible for someone born in Kansas to commit rape. While I fumed, my husband logically suggested (with at least as much logic as the author was using) that the 1200 or so rapes reported every year in Kansas must be committed by people who were driving there from Nebraska and that maybe Kansas should set up roadblocks.

Near the end of the book, he describes his pilgrimage to visit places his father has been. On page 174, he says "I was coming around to the notion that the best thing for me to do would be to stop sugarcoating my situation in euphemisms and see it for what it was." But all he does is try to assign blame for his "complicated paternity." He whines about his mother not realizing that she was pregnant by someone other than her husband, "If only she had put two and two together." He fantasizes about the wonderful relationship he has convinced himself that he would have had with his biological father.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very hard to put down memoir. It was a very interesting and good read about an unexpected DNA result and the author’s quest to learn more.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a genealogist, I found this book particularly fascinating. However, I think this story has broad appeal and isn't just for family history enthusiasts.

Bill Griffeth is a CNBC reporter and a genealogist. He's the author of an earlier book about his family's Protestant roots. Being a Griffeth is very important to him. And then he finds out he's not. A Y-DNA test reveals that Bill is genetically distant from his siblings in a way that means their father is not his father. He's devastated, but also curious. This book details Bill's journey of discovery, as he sorts through the test results, confronts his elderly mother, and attempts to track down his biological father.

I had some qualms about what Bill decided to do in regards to his biological father's family. It's made for good discussion with my genealogist friends. Ultimately, though, it was Bill's decision, and he defended it well. This is a situation no one expects to find themselves in, and there's hardly a road map for dealing with such an occurrence. I hope that the act of writing about it was cathartic for Bill in some way, and I'm glad he decided to share his journey.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been delving into my own genealogy off and on for nearly 50 years, and I am finally writing a family history book. I have also done some DNA testing. So, I eagerly anticipated that this memoir would be a very interesting read. Fortunately I have not had to deal with the sort of discovery that the author found. I can understand his anguish, after spending years researching a family tree that turned out to not be his own. But the story just seemed like it would have made a very interesting magazine article. The book was short, at only 188 pages, and yet it felt like the details were stretched out and dragged on and on to turn it into a book length story.

I have some questions, and perhaps I would have been more satisfied if there had been some more answers. Though I suppose that is exactly how Bill felt.

I do think the title and cover photo are just perfect.

I don't think I have ever seen the author on TV, but I own and thoroughly enjoyed four books written by his friend and literary hero, author Lawrence Goldstone, mentioned in the Acknowledgements.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a lifetime of researching his own genealogy, Bill Griffeth is startled to discover—through DNA testing--that the man he called “father” all his life was not actually his biological father. “The Stranger in My Genes” follows his path of discovery and the mental turmoil he faced. Each chapter retells the decisions he faced regarding sharing this knowledge with his family, learning about his biological relatives, tracing his biological lineage and coming to terms with who he actually is. The book reads like a memoir with a bit of psychological sleuthing thrown in. Down-to-earth, genuine, heart-warming, this book is a quick read and compelling one.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short easy read on a topic that interests me in general as a genealogy and DNA researcher with my own (now solved) family mystery and because I share DNA with the author's Griffeth cousin. One small quibble is that the book confuses mtDNA with X-chromosomes (brothers with the same mother are expected to share identical mtDNA, not necessarily X-chromosomes, and mtDNA results for the author and his brother were almost certainly what he was comparing not X-chromosome data as stated). I therefore don't recommend it for the science aspect but that represents a very small part of the memoir.

[Charlene Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one got three stars because the author spent too much time whining about the loss of his identity. Anyone who undergoes genetic testing for ancestry purposes must be willing to risk finding out uncomfortable truths about themselves and their ancestors. Was it a shock? Sure, but why spend more than a few pages going on about it. Otherwise, I enjoyed reading this.

[Producervan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Highly recommend!

[Joe Kraus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tell family history, both how to write it and how to theorize it. I suppose I always wondered about such things, but the novelty of DNA evidence has added another dimension to it. What, for instance, does it mean, if my mother’s biological mother was Irish? She never knew that, and there’s no way any cultural legacy came down through her. Why would I feel anymore “Irish” as a result of that happenstance than I might feel, say, Korean as a result of my good fortune at growing up close to a Korean family who welcomed me into a home that smelled comfortably of kim-chi?

It’s a big question with answers I haven’t come close to articulating, but Bill Griffeth has taken a shot at it. In this memoir, the CNBC anchor processes his experience discovering that he was not the biological child of the man he knew as his father but rather the product of a brief affair his strait-laced mother had with a one-time boss.

I imagine such news would be shocking to anyone, but it hit Griffeth especially hard since he’d been the family genealogist. He’d traced his ancestry through his father back seven or eight generations, uncovering, for instance, the remarkable fact that a distant grandmother had been killed as a witch in Salem. That ancestry meant something to him, defined him.

And then a DNA test told him it was someone else’s story; he was not, as he’d imagined in his earlier research and family writing, her descendant.

So, the story is a powerful one, and credit to Griffeth for framing it as he does. It would be easy to ignore the fact of the DNA test – and he describes his impulse to do so. It would also make a certain, perverse emotional sense to reject the person he’d thought he was, to get angry at his mother for promulgating a lie. (Though, in what’s another twist in the convoluted story, the mother acknowledges an affair but admits surprise that Bill was its product. She’d always assumed her husband was the father.)

Instead, Griffeth uses this memoir as a way to work through his conflicted feelings.

I’m down with that, of course, because that’s precisely the job of memoir. I don’t want reporting about a life. I want writing that lets us see the author discovering their mind as they write. As Montaigne put it, “What do I [already] know?” The essay/memoir is a tool of self-discovery, not a repository of what we’ve already figured out.

That said, I think Griffeth takes the easy road in organizing this chronologically. The memoir as a whole may be about processing his painful discovery, but his retrospective journal-like approach cordons off the weight of later discoveries. We get several chapters, perhaps even a third of the book, with him living in the uncertainty of the test’s validity – even though, as he writes, he knows full well that the results are certain.

As a consequence, I think he defers the real work of this until the last couple chapters. Those are interesting but unfinished. Above all, there’s his conundrum: he has the opportunity to reach out to someone who is likely his half-brother, to meet the “stranger in his genes” as he eloquently puts it in his title.

I don’t question his decision not to reach out (at least not while his mother is still alive) but I do want more on that decision. He’s making what I trust is a wise decision for himself, but he’s not exploring – not doing the necessary essayistic work – to make his thinking clear.

Finally, while Griffeth has a reporter’s capacity for organization, he’s not always a strong writer. He does keep the prose moving, but I have a hard time forgiving a sentence that runs, “My parents’ adventure in life together, which would last 52 years, had begun.”

I can’t say I love the work here, but I am grateful for Griffeth for pioneering questions that will come all the more to the fore as our capacity with DNA reveals more and more such stories. He thought he was one person, then DNA told him he was someone else. As a thoughtful and brave writer, he worked to wrestle the story he thought he knew into a new and more complicated one. A lot of people are going to fail in that work – I certainly have in many drafts the world has never seen – and I admire the nuggets of success he gives us here.

[Kevin Furr · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I told you what this book was about, it might sound boring. But in fact it was a great read, I could hardly put it down. Beats the pants off most fiction I've read lately.

An account by the likable CNBC host Bill Griffeth about pursuing a surprising family secret. Griffeth was talked into doing a DNA test by a cousin. After getting an unexpected result he retested. Ultimately it was inescapable -- Griffeth, in his mid-50s, learned that his late father was not in fact his biological father. That's not too much of a spoiler since it comes early and sets up the whole narrative. It's a situation made all the more delicate by the fact that his straight-arrow widowed mother was still very much alive and in her 90s. Now she had some 'splaining to do.

I think this kind of stuff is very interesting. My sister and I have done DNA testing and learned we have a mystery, an undisclosed relative ... not involving my immediate nuclear family but close enough to be interesting. My family has a skeleton in the closet, which remains a mystery because no other close relatives have done DNA testing, which means we don't have enough information to triangulate the relationship specifically enough to know where this person came from.

Now in Griffeth's case, he found out he's a bastard child and clearly had a lot of trouble dealing with the new reality. Long before doing any DNA test Griffeth had become a genealogy buff and family historian, the sort of guy who loves to draw family trees, haunt old graveyards, and tell tales of that ancestor executed in the Salem witch trials. So along the way he addresses other family secrets as a sequence of reveals that's pretty entertaining itself.

Confront the mother? Is the father still alive? Does he discover, in his mid-50s, that he has siblings he never knew about? Does he contact his new relatives? Are they CNBC viewers?? I won't give away these spoilers but of course that's all a part of the suspense in the narrative.

[Jan Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the corny title, this book was surprisingly interesting and very well written. For those of you who don't know (and I didn't know either) Bill Griffeth is a financial analyst on CNN. His hobby is genealogy. The youngest of 5 children by a large margin, he spent lots of time looking over historical records, census, hiking through overgrown cemeteries and contacting distant relatives to research his ancestors. For example, his last name is an unusual variation on the more common Griffith. He determined when the family changed the spelling and why.
When a cousin asked him to take a DNA test, he was initially uninterested, but after the cousin insisted, he submitted a sample. He received an email from his cousin, who was the account administrator, a couple of months later, with the startling news that either a huge mistake had happened in the lab, or Griffeth's father wasn't his biological father. Griffeth, stunned by the news, assumed that there must have been a mistake. His mother, a pious, devoted wife of his father couldn't have possibly strayed. Or could she? Because she was 94 years old he didn't want to create unnecessary drama, so he took another test, and then another from another company. All results were the same. If his dad, Claude Griffeth wasn't his father, who was?
Griffeth alternates between childhood stories of his parents and grandparents, and his current search for his biological father's identity. He was surprised at how anxious he became. He suffered a profound loss of identity and his once close relationship with his mother suffered.
A Stranger in my Genes is a quick read. I especially liked how things unfolded gradually and there was no neat ending. I recommend this for people who are into genetic genealogy. I interlibrary loaned this book through the Duncan Public Library.

[Thurston Hunger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe 2.5 stars. A quick read, Griffeth's TV background likely leads to short chapters and simple sentences. The story itself while concealing a "secret" or two is not complicated, Griffeth shuffles the chronology to thicken this already thin book.

Of course I do believe in nature *AND* nurture, it's just that I find nurture a whole lot more interesting. Also filed under nurture, one's free will can flex its might, as opposed to some pre-written text with four letters. (Maybe 5, I see you uracil.) This nurture-bias could be a weakness of mine, more interested in what comes next than in what came before, although like the author I likely have more history than future at this point.

History is okay by me, but what my great-great-biological-grandfather did doesn't really feel like its much of my blueprint, plenty of teachers and mentors are more intrinsic. And certainly my Mom and Dad, even if DNA proves I lack their chromosomal recipe. About halfway through the book, I thought Griffeths had an epiphany where he dismissed all of this "real father" malarkey. That felt rewarding. Actualized. Dare I say courageous....

But no, more hand-wringing (and no small amount of back-patting to boot) persist.

And as our book club pointed out, there's more than a little Mom-shaming at play here. I know the last word of the afterword has Griffeths thanking his Mom for his life, but as late as pp 172 he's pedaling tripe like this "If my mother had put two and two together back in the day, or at least had the courage to admit it, I might have grown up knowing both of my fathers."

He backpedals some in the subsequent paragraphs but eventually returns to sobbing, "morning a man I would never know."

Best of luck being the best man you can be in your remaining days...