“I grew up without a father and assumed he was long dead. As an adult, I learned he was alive—and lived just a short drive away”

As a little girl growing up in Toronto, I remember trying to find my father by looking him up in the phone book. My mother, quiet and proud, had told me his name and where he was from, Antigua, and nothing more. But his surname is common—here I’ll use “John” to protect his privacy—and I didn’t know which listing was his. Although I had a generally happy childhood, I cried many tears over my lack of a father figure. If anyone brought up my father, even indirectly, such as commenting on how much taller I was than my mother, she would quickly change the subject. I learned very early not to ask.

This reluctance to talk about him spurred my clandestine investigations. I don’t think she ever knew I was looking for him. Every search felt like a betrayal since she was the parent putting food on the table, making sure I was clothed and taking me on vacations. In the late 1980s, I went to journalism school, where I learned skills that helped me find people who didn’t want to be found. By searching city directories, I learned that a man with my father’s name had lived in a rooming house on Markham Street, just behind Honest Ed’s. But I was never certain it was actually him. In the mid-1990s, I found an address for him in an Antiguan phone directory. I wrote him a letter but got no response.

My mother died in 2006, and she took her secrets to her grave. I found a black-and-white photo of a man in a police or military uniform while going through her belongings. When I showed it to friends, some thought I resembled him, but I never completely agreed. Eventually, as the years passed, I began to assume he was deceased. Then, in 2023, I tried a mail-in DNA test. I thought I might find some distant relatives, maybe a sibling. I bought a kit from Ancestry and sent in a vial of my saliva. The closest paternal relations I found were some second cousins scattered across England, the US and the Caribbean, who knew of the Johns but not where they were currently located. They were able to provide me with the names of my father’s siblings. He was one of six children, one of whom had an unusual name. I had learned from my second cousins that many of my ancestors had chosen policing and military careers. But DNA testing hadn’t brought me any closer to meeting them.

Being the determined, family-oriented person that I am, I would occasionally contact random people with the surname John from Antigua, asking if they knew of him. In January of 2025, I found a local Facebook profile for a Ms. John, who I thought had an honest face. I sent her a message, in part because I figured she wouldn’t lie to me. It turned out that she wasn’t related to my father but knew of him through her older brother, Fred, who she said knew him better.

When I first spoke to Fred, he told me that the man he suspected was my dad had been a police officer in Antigua and had immigrated to Toronto in the 1960s, before I was born. Then he told me that the man was burying his son in Scarborough the following weekend and asked if I would like to attend the funeral. This sounded like madness to me. Was it possible that my father was alive and well and living just a short distance from me? That I’d had a brother I’d never known about all these years? I didn’t believe it could be him, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to attend the funeral.

When I got to the church, I sat by myself near the middle of the room. A projection screen at the front displayed a picture of the man who might have been my brother. He had a pleasant toothy smile, but I didn’t think I bore much resemblance. There was a woman with a young girl beside her, greeting guests not far from the casket. I guessed that this was his widow and child. They invited the immediate family up to see their loved one’s face one last time before closing the casket. At least three or four elders went up to view the casket. Which one was my supposed father?

As I waited for the ceremony to begin, I read the funeral program. There, under next of kin, was the unusual first name I’d read before. It wasn’t until then that I knew I was in the right place. My brother was being buried, and my father was somewhere in the room.

I sat through much of the funeral in a daze. My brother sounded wonderful—funny, talkative, smart, a loving family man. I grew up an only child, and I yearned for a sibling. I always wondered what it would be like to have an older brother looking out for me. Turns out my brother was six years younger. I thought about how I might have bossed him around and tormented him while secretly being proud of him.

As the funeral procession went up the aisle, I still couldn’t figure out which one was my father. At the end of the ceremony, I asked Fred to point him out. He was standing about 15 feet in front of me, back straight, stern looking, dark complexion. I never would have recognized him from the photo I’d found in my mother’s belongings. I was flabbergasted. The man I had spent almost 50 years searching for was standing right there. I learned through funeral speeches that he had lived in Pickering for most of my life, less than an hour’s drive away.

Fred suggested that I go and introduce myself. But the man had just lost his son, and the timing didn’t feel right to introduce myself as his long-lost daughter. I chose to walk away, knowing that I could find him at a later date if I wanted to. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t unable to find me. He had simply chosen not to.

A few months after the funeral, I asked two intermediaries to contact my father on my behalf. He told one that he was “upset” I was looking for him and refused to pass on his contact information. I was perplexed. Upset? What for? To the other, he never responded. From relatives, I heard fragments of anecdotes about his womanizing. Oddly, I was relieved. This meant that his absence had never been about me. I was merely wild oats.

I found my sister-in-law’s email address online and sent her a couple of messages asking to connect. My emails went unanswered. The knowledge that I have a niece haunts me. I would have liked to get to know her and be the cool aunty. Maybe one day she will learn of me and reach out. Four months after the funeral, I wrote my father a four-page letter. It was cathartic to lay out in detail how long I’d searched for him, how growing up without a father had affected me. I never received a response.

The knowledge that the man who created me wanted nothing to do with me was devastating. I have long been an insomniac, and for months after finding my father, I slept only a couple of hours a night. I was irritable, weepy, unable to work at times. But, after many months of grieving, reflection and therapy, the normalcy of life without a father is slowly returning. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I experienced a double loss: the brother I never knew and the father I will never have. The search is over.