“The truth is I always knew there was something that set me apart from the rest of my family. I was shorter, with a fuller figure, and I always felt there was something foreign about my looks, at least compared to theirs. My hair was darker and more textured, and my features were stronger. And to be honest, my mind worked faster. I loved learning for its own sake. I was naturally curious about everything.
My mother was fine with all this; she was proud of me. She would tell me I was the smartest one in the family and that I was bound to go far in life.
But my father didn’t love me. My sister was his favorite and he treated me like an outsider within the family. When she and I both needed braces, for instance, he paid for hers without thinking twice, but my mother had to beg him to do the same for me. That was just one way he treated us differently, but there were so many.
He was never happy with me, no matter what I did. I got straight As on my report cards and I was a star pitcher on the softball team in high school. People would travel from two counties over to watch me pitch, and one time even the mayor of Montgomery came to see me in action. But my father came just once in four years and I’ll never forget how stiffly he sat on the bleachers, silent and stone-faced, refusing to cheer.
I could never figure out why he disliked me so much. I was a good kid and I just wanted to please him – I never stopped trying."
"There were other mysteries in my life too. There was what happened at the ballpark that day.
I was fourteen and my softball team – the East Montgomery League – was about to play a game. The diamond was my happiest place in the world back then and it was fresh and ready, the powdered white lines gleaming against the green. It was my diamond. I dominated the space inside those white lines.
The coach gave his pre-game pep talk and got us all fired up. I remember he told us we were going to win because we were the strongest and toughest players that side of the Mason Dixon line. Then he added, and we’ve got a wildcat on the mound.
That was me. He meant me. I was going to take my team to the playoffs. I could feel it.
But the very next moment, when I went to stand up, there was the awful sensation of my knee twisting. And ten minutes later, the coach was telling me: you’re not gonna pitch this game.
I can’t describe the heartbreak of that moment. After all the work I put in that season, the hours I spent on my fast ball... I couldn’t believe it was happening. I tried to argue but even I knew he was right to pull me. I could hardly even stand on that leg, let alone pitch a game against our stiffest competition.
That’s when I heard someone calling me. “Miss?”
A man I had never seen before was calling to me from the bleachers. He had a broad, soft face and a stocky build. I remember he was wearing a button-down shirt and there was a pen and small notepad in its pocket. He was motioning for me to come over.
“Miss, may I have a word?”
I looked at the coach but he just shrugged, like it was up to me. I wasn’t sure whether to go over to him – he was a stranger, after all. But then he said: “I can take that pain away.”
Now he had my full attention. I was desperate, so I limped over to him and he asked me whether I’d ever heard of hypnosis.
I said yes, even though my ideas about that came straight out of a comic book. To me it meant a man with a mustache, in a jacket and bow tie, swinging a gold medallion in front of a woman’s face. He told me he knew how to do hypnosis and he could get rid of my pain so I could pitch in the game.
He was looking at me in a way that’s so hard to describe. His attention felt so personal. I could not have said why, but I had the feeling he was there for me. His energy wasn’t predatory, just laser-focused. On me.
But the strangest part of the whole encounter was the comfort I felt as soon as I sat down next to him. He felt familiar, like I already knew him somehow. Like he was some long-lost uncle. And that feeling of familiarity led me to trust him. I asked him how it worked.
He said the kind of hypnosis he did had nothing to do with cheap parlor tricks and he wasn’t going to get me to do anything crazy like hypnotists did with people on TV. He said he was going to bring me into a state of deep relaxation, where I’d be open to suggestion. He said that pain was just a perception, that my mind had the power to block it, and all I had to do was listen to his voice and follow his directions.
He told me to close my eyes and breathe deep and slow while he counted backward from ten. He said I would be completely relaxed by the time he got to one. And it was true – I remember all the tension leaving my body as he counted in reverse. Listening to his voice was like floating on a raft, away from the diamond, the game, my coach and teammates and all the people there to watch.
When he was done with the countdown, he told me everything was perfect. He said: You’re exactly where you need to be; you’re an absolute natural. And now your pain will depart from your body. It will leave you completely and come to me.
I remember wondering if he meant that in a literal way. Would my pain really travel into his own knee?
I can recall what he said as clearly as if it happened yesterday. He had a poetic way of talking — he didn’t sound like anyone else from around town. Every bit of pain is leaving you and coming to me. With every word I speak, your pain is melting away. It’s fading by the moment, rising into the air and dissipating like vapor. And now it’s barely noticeable at all. And now your knee is as good as new…
And by some miracle, it was true. The burning sensation just vanished like it was never there.
Then he told me: Now I’m going to bring you back to the ballfield, where you will not only be able to pitch all nine innings without any pain or difficulty, but you’ll do so with a heightened awareness of exactly what to do at every step of the game.
Well, everything happened just like he said it would. When I opened my eyes again, he told me I was good to go. He clapped me on the shoulder and said: “You go out there and tell your coach you’ll take it from here.”
I stood up and my knee really did feel as good as new. When I went back out to the mound, I wasn’t even limping. The pain was completely gone. And a couple of hours later -- when I turned to look for him after I’d pitched one of the best games of my life and we’d won a spot in the playoffs – so was he.”
“Maybe I was so spiritually hungry as a young person because I didn’t have a loving father in my life. But I had a painful yearning for a relationship with God. At twelve or thirteen years old, I would check out books on transcendental meditation from the library and sit in my room, trying to reach a higher level of consciousness.
No one else I knew was interested in anything like that. It was just me, sitting cross-legged on the rug at home, with no guidance and no community. It was lonely.
This was the deep south, and everyone I knew went to church. Most of my friends belonged to the Christian Life Church, so eventually I began attending services there too. It was a place where people spoke in tongues and people were always being “saved”. It worried me that almost all my church friends seemed to have been graced with this gift. Their eyes would close or glaze over and they would start talking in another language. It sounded like gibberish to me and I never knew what to think. I would sit there with my head bowed, wondering if it was real or they were just pretending. I secretly thought they were faking it, but what if I was wrong? What if all of them really had been touched by the Spirit and I was the only one who had been found unworthy?
I wanted so badly to be a good Christian, but deep down, it never felt like the right fit for me. I always longed for a more rigorous intellectual approach. I wanted to engage in serious study and talk deeply about spiritual ideas. I wanted to question all the Biblical contradictions that made no sense to me and I wanted the space to struggle with my faith.
I’m sure there are some churches out there that would have been okay with this, but not the ones I was involved with. But I stuck with what I had, because I needed whatever spiritual sustenance I could get, and at the time, I could see no other options.”
“A few years later, I graduated high school at the top of my class. A guidance counselor told me I was smart enough to pursue any career I wanted. So I sat down with my parents in the living room and finally dared to share my secret dream with them – the dream of becoming a doctor. And as pitiful as it sounds, I thought this might finally impress my father. I dared to hope that he would be proud of me.
But he lost no time in dashing that fantasy. He told me, No, no, girls don’t do that. You’re not doing that. I’m not paying for it.
I thought maybe my mother would speak up for me at that point. Didn’t she always tell me to aim high? But she didn’t say anything. Her expression was pained but she stayed quiet and just stared at the floor.
I wish I could say I had it in me at the time to defy him. To strike out on my own. Find a way to put myself through a pre-med program in college and then medical school. But I didn’t. I sat in my room for a few hours by myself and then finally I went back to the living room and said I would go to nursing school instead. That was a choice my father found acceptable.
I was twenty-one and the year was 1985 when I graduated from the nursing school at Auburn, and the hospital that hired me put me straight into the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. It was the most challenging department I could have found myself working in, but once I found my rhythm, I came to love it. I was a valued nurse – fast, efficient, calm under pressure and good with patients. For a few years, I was quite happy where I was. And then, another mystery unfolded in my life.
About four years into my career, in the spring of 1989, a mysterious grief closed in on me very suddenly. I’ll never forget the day it arrived – it was an afternoon in late March and I was midway through my shift. I was standing in the Emergency Room with a chart in my hand when a kind of pain came over me. It wasn’t physical but it was so sharp that it almost felt like bodily pain. I was overwhelmed by the urge to cry, out of the blue, for no reason at all. I could not give in to that urge, of course, because I was at work. But getting through the rest of that shift was like trying to push my way through chest-high snow. It was the longest workday of my life. I went to bed as soon as I got home, hoping to sleep it off, but in the morning, it was still there, like a weight on my chest before I even opened my eyes.
For weeks I walked around with this terrible grief and nothing helped to dispel it. I never experienced anything like it before. I prayed every night for God to deliver me from it, but it went on and on. I remember thinking, over and over throughout those days: it’s like someone died. That was the state I was in when the Army came calling.”
“The recruiter told me that as a nurse, I had a valuable skill set, one that would let me serve my country and see the world and receive a whole range of benefits for the rest of my life. In the throes of my depression or whatever that episode was, I felt desperate for a change. I did want to see the world. I wanted to see Europe and I especially wanted to go back to Germany, where I’d visited my mother’s side of the family as a kid. It was a place I’d felt fully included in the circle of love. I asked the recruiter if I could request a placement there.
She said most recruits had no say in where they were placed, but she thought I could negotiate the location I wanted. She told me I wasn’t an ordinary recruit, which was likely meant to flatter me, but it turned out to be true. The army offered me a very attractive contract which included placement in Germany. And when I signed on for a term of four years, I felt more hopeful than I had since that day in late March when everything turned dark.
It was still 1989 when I began my service at the Landstuhl Army base, the year the Wall came down in Berlin. It was an exciting time to be a soldier. The end of the Cold War was on the horizon and communism was crumbling throughout eastern Europe. Most of all, I loved being a military nurse, even though I was surrounded by profound trauma on account of the Gulf War. I worked 60 hours a week, caring for soldiers with SCUD missile injuries, blown-off limbs and severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was during this time that I joined the most wonderful church I ever found, on a nearby Air Force Base called Ramstein. It was Reverend Eddie Washington and his wife Ruth who made it so special. They were a Black couple in their sixties and to me, they represented all that was best about Christianity.
The Reverend began each prayer with the same words: Jesus, this is Eddie. And Mrs. Washington was lovely and gentle and graceful. She had studied at the Julliard and both she and her husband often played musical instruments during services. They held a weekly Bible study in their home each week and it was kind of a mixer for singles within the congregation.
That’s where I met Dan. He was seated across the circle from me in the Washingtons’ study. At the end of the session, he asked if he could call me. As I wrote down my number for him, I remember thinking: it’d sure be nice to hear from this one.
I didn’t wait long. Our first date was at an Italian restaurant and after that, we were inseparable, though we agreed to wait until we were married to consummate our love.
Dan wanted to be a pastor and work as a missionary overseas. I imagined we could lead a life like Eddie and Ruth’s: leading a congregation of our own, holding a Bible study in our home. I was excited by the idea of a life grounded in service: going on missions to faraway places, serving wherever the need was highest, or maybe even living Dan’s dream of working on a Mercy Ship.”
“Six months after my wedding, I got a phone call from Montgomery. My father had lung cancer and was not expected to survive the year.
I still can’t believe how kind the Army was. They granted a Compassionate Leave to both of us – to my husband and myself – so we could fly home and care for him. It amounted to an early release. We would only have to return if the Army needed to draw on its Inactive Ready Reserve units.
A local hospital hired me straight away and I would stop in to see my father every morning before work. My mom had his bed set up in the family den. Each day I would try to assess his stability, adjust his meds if necessary, help my mother with the linens.
To be honest, it was always a relief to leave for the hospital. I found the home hospice shifts so much more difficult than tending to strangers. My father was fading slowly but there was no question he was going to die, so it felt like all the unfinished business between us would be unfinished forever. I had so many unanswered questions: why did he always treat me like an outsider within the family? Why didn’t he ever love me the way he loved my sister? It seemed likely I would never know.
Even if I could have worked up the nerve to ask him, his mental state seemed altered. He was angry at my mother for no reason I could see. She was just as devoted to him as she’d ever been, following his care instructions to the letter. But he was short with her, and behind her back, he made a lot of strange remarks to me, all of them baffling.
He said: You know, your mom is not who she seems to be. And: Mark my words, Alesia, once I’m gone your mother will marry again in under six months.
I had no idea what to make of this, but then again, I also figured maybe there was nothing much to wonder about. As an ICU nurse, I had attended many dying patients and I saw over and over how cancer can affect the patient’s brain toward the end. A lot of the people spend their final days in something like a dream state. They get confused, they mistake their loved ones for other people and say things that don’t make sense. And it’s not unusual, either, to see personality changes. So when my dad became strangely bitter and angry toward Mom, I just chalked it up to an effect of the cancer.
About five months into his illness, I found out I was pregnant. That was so bittersweet: a new life was forming just as another was ending. As it happened, my dad died two months before the birth of our son Luke. So I didn’t have much time to dwell on his last words, but he did make one final mysterious remark about my mother right before he passed. He said to me: She is not telling you everything you need to know.”
“Dan and I moved to Seattle soon after I gave birth so he could attend divinity school in the area. Luke was the sweetest, most beautiful baby and I was in such high spirits for the first few months of his life. It was my most cherished dream to provide my child with all that I myself hadn’t received, and I loved imagining how much farther than me he might go. I had accomplished a lot without much backing. So I could only imagine what a son of mine might do with all the support, encouragement and resources I could provide.
It was so frightening, then, to realize he suffered from hypotonia. His head kind of lolled like a marionette’s. His eyes slid around and never came to focus on a face. When he was finally diagnosed with autism along with severe cognitive impairments, it was the most heartbreaking news I’d ever had. For days, I could barely breathe through the fear and grief.
Here I have to say that I have never loved anything or anyone more than I love Luke. And often I think he’s closer to God than any other human being I’ve ever known. Being his mother is a very deep joy, honor and privilege. He has taught me so much about love and life, resilience and faith.
But it’s also true that his diagnosis shut down so many possibilities for us. As a missionary family, we couldn’t be burdened by the need for any kind of assistance ourselves. Seattle had a lot of resources for children with special needs; I didn’t know of any other city that offered anything close. And children with autism need stability. They thrive on predictability and routine. So we would not be setting up house in some third-world country and we would not be living and working on a Mercy Ship.
Instead, Dan got a job running a youth group at a Ukrainian church in Bellevue. He was popular with the kids but it didn’t pay much. I continued to work in the ICU and my salary carried the family.”
“In 2001, I called my husband at work. We’d been married a decade and had a second son by then. Luke was eight at that time and Elijah was four. Dan was a good father, but things between us had been strained for some time. He seemed distant and unhappy, and he didn’t have much to say to me. Our intimate life was suffering from the demands of work and two young kids and Luke’s special needs. To be honest, it had dwindled to almost nothing, and not by my choice. I was afraid that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be strangers to each other before very long. So I called him that day, just to say, you know, Hey, listen, can we talk tonight? Something between us is off and we need to figure out how to fix it.
He didn’t say anything at first, and when he did, it was evasive. I don’t know what you mean. Nothing is wrong. I’ve just been tired.
Just then I heard this click that meant someone else was trying to reach him on his other line. He told me: I’ll talk to you later -- I need to take this call.
I was about to hang up but then I heard my husband speaking to the other caller. By some glitch, I was somehow able to hear Dan on his other call after he switched lines. And I could hear the other person too. I heard: Dan, I can’t stand this waiting anymore.
I’ll never be able to describe how shocking this was. Because the conversation I was able to overhear was like a replay of the one Dan and I had just ended, except it was someone else’s voice begging my husband for connection and intimacy. It was the softest, gentlest voice, with a Spanish accent, saying: Dan, something is wrong between us. You have not truly been yourself for some time. We cannot go on in this way.
It was so obviously the words of a lover that it felt like acid splashing all over my insides. I stood there paralyzed, holding the phone with both hands, as the pleading went on. Please, Dan, I want more than anything to be with you. The words were almost a whisper, but there was so much desperation in them.
But the most shocking part of all was that the voice belonged to a man.”
“2008 was the year my health troubles went through the roof. I had severe pain in my left arm which flared whenever I tried to use it, which was very debilitating given that I’m left-handed. My doctor recommended neck surgery, which I had, followed by a hysterectomy in 2009. But the pain didn’t go away; it just went down my left leg. I started having terrible headaches, along with seizures that caused me to move backward in circles.
Finally a doctor sent me for a brain scan, which revealed a massive motor cortex tumor. I had surgery a few days later, a complicated operation that required many different procedures. I had an embolectomy to kill off the blood supply to the tumor. I had a procedure-induced stroke on the table, which left me unable to open my mouth or speak. Then after a craniotomy, I suffered a severe case of hospital-acquired MRSA which brought me right to the edge of death. I was incapacitated for months and at one point, I needed a walker to get out of bed.
But for me the hardest part by far was that, even after I recovered, I wasn’t able to resume my career. My mind was not the same. My short-term memory was not as reliable and I could not focus with the same attention as before. The very sad truth was that I would never again be equal to the exacting demands of the ICU.
My primary care doctor was very direct about this. He said I’d served on the front lines of my field for 30 years and it was all right to retire a little early. But it was so much harder than I ever thought it would be, to wake up in the morning without that sense of purpose and somewhere to go. I felt stripped of my credentials, my professionalism and my dignity.
On top of all that, my marriage with Dan finally ended that year too. After discovering his affair years before, we went to counseling and resolved to keep our family together for the children’s sake. But after my final surgery, I saw an email he wrote to his brother – which he left up on the screen, by the way, almost like he wanted to get caught. In that email, he confessed to another extended affair during the months I was fighting for my life. That was when I lost the will to make it work.
Our confrontation went differently this time. Dan was no longer guilt-ridden and scared. Once again, his infidelity involved another man, but society had changed, which was a good thing. Same-sex marriage had been legal in Washington state for two years already. His church-based support group, Exodus International, had dissolved the year before. And the organization apologized to the public for spreading the false idea that homosexuality could be “cured”.
Dan told me this was who he was. And I myself no longer believed that same-sex relationships were a sin. It was the lying I couldn’t abide. I was tired of maintaining our pretense of a working marriage, tired of the dishonesty, tired of Dan coming home drunk every night and passing out on the sofa.
After he moved out, I was basically a single mother during the school week. And money was very tight at that point. But it was still a relief not to live a lie any longer. I was lonely with him gone, but then, I had already been lonely for a very long time.”
“My doctor told me to find some way to occupy my mind. He suggested finding some kind of mental puzzles to work on, to fill the empty hours — but he also said they might help to ward off further cognitive decline. So I took up genealogy, which had always interested me. A lot of genealogists compare their research to working a puzzle. For the sake of my boys, I wanted to learn more about my family history on both sides.
When I bought my own DNA test, I took the advice of a genealogy mentor and asked my half-brother Ronnie to test along with me. Ronnie was my father’s son from his first marriage. Since we shared a father but not a mother, the idea was that our common information would reveal which genetic content came from the maternal side of my tree.
My results came back in the middle of a spring afternoon. I was standing in my kitchen and my laptop was on the island when I saw the message from Ancestry: Your DNA results are in.
As long as I live, I will never forget the shock of that first glance at my ethnic breakdown. I thought I was going to pass out. The edges of my vision went dark, like I’d dropped into a tunnel. I started to hyperventilate and the room was spinning. I was so afraid of fainting that I grabbed the edge of the countertop with both hands and slowly lowered myself to the floor.
I actually wondered if I could be dreaming. I don’t know how long it took me to stand up and look at the screen again. But there it was, still right beneath the pie chart icon, under the heading “Ethnicity Estimate”:
European Jewish: 52%.
“It took me four years to find my biological father, and by the time I learned his identity, he had already passed away. His name was Ollie James Cohen, and he had been a somewhat famous – and even somewhat infamous – criminal defense lawyer based in Louisville, Kentucky. When I finally saw his picture, it was like looking into a mirror. And it felt familiar on another level, too, one I couldn’t put my finger on at first.
I now believe the man at the ballpark that day was him. After my mother’s secret affair with him, she went back to her husband and told no one else about it ever. Ollie Cohen knew I believed my birth certificate father to be my real dad. He couldn’t reveal himself to me. But he could come and see me every once in a blue moon, without my knowing the truth about our connection. When I was working as a restaurant cashier during nursing school, I believe he also came in as a customer a few times.
But the most amazing realization I had was that Ollie died in late March of 1989. Likely on the very day that mysterious pain broke over me and almost broke me down. Remember how I walked around thinking: It’s like somebody died? Well, somebody had died. My father had died, and somehow there was enough of a connection there for me to feel his departure from this world, even if I didn’t know that’s what it was.
This DNA surprise was the most traumatic experience of my life. People who don’t know what it’s like always find this hard to believe, but it’s true. It was more traumatic than my father’s rejection, my son’s severe impairments, my husband’s infidelities and homosexuality, my long list of terrible health troubles, my near-death from MRSA.
I’ve been through a lot, but none of it represented the kind of loss, on so many levels, that this revelation did.
People who haven’t experienced anything like it – they don’t get it. They say things like: Why does the test change anything? You’re still you.
Or: All your biological father did was donate some sperm – why does he even matter?
Or: How can you mourn the death of someone you never met or even heard of before now?
But think about it for a moment. Try to imagine learning that the man you thought was your real father had no biological link to you at all, and that you represented his wife’s worst betrayal to him, and that’s why he was never able to love you.
Imagine realizing that a huge amount of genetic information has been kept from you, information that could have changed your whole life if you’d known. If I’d known my genetic vulnerability to brain tumors, I would have discovered mine much earlier. If I’d known how common low-functioning autism has been in my extended family, I might have made different reproductive decisions. I was robbed of that knowledge and those choices.
Imagine finding out that your mother, who you trusted above all other people, had kept up such a deep lifelong deception.
Imagine never getting to meet one of your parents, even though they were alive and not all that far away for most of your life.
Imagine the isolation you’d feel when no one around you understood what you were going through.
Imagine that an ethnic identity you thought was yours for half a century is suddenly stripped from you.
Even worse, imagine the cultural heritage that was rightfully yours was hidden from you for your entire life.
That has been one of the very hardest aspects of all this for me. I now identify as Jewish. And I’m thrilled to be Jewish. No spiritual path has ever felt like such a perfect fit. And so much of it is centered around that rigorous intellectual study I pined for all my life. The toll my health issues have taken on me have slowed my studying, but I love learning Torah at my local Chabad synagogue.
Soon after learning I was Jewish, I was invited by a friend to her daughter’s bat mitzvah. And I just sat there and cried through the entire ceremony. I was crying because it was beautiful but I was also crying tears of grief for myself, for the birthright that will never be mine in the way that I still long for. People tell me I can have a bat mitzvah at my age, that many older women do, so I’m not ruling that out, but right now it’s a distant dream. Still, I love to immerse myself in Jewish learning and experience that connection with my heritage. I just wish I could have started around 50 years sooner.
I also like to attend services at the synagogue. I just sit there and listen and let the prayers and melodies of my own people wash over me. Even if I don’t understand everything I’m hearing, I can take in the beauty and feel that bond with my ancestors and there’s definitely a comfort in that.”
“There were no resources for people experiencing DNA surprises when I needed them. No support groups or therapists who understood the unique issues we all struggle with. I promised God that if He would just let me find my father, I would work for the rest of my life to make sure no one hit with a DNA surprise would ever again need to feel as alone and at sea as I felt when I had mine.
I’ve kept that promise, and how. For years, I’ve put in up to 60 hours a week – none of it paid – to provide a range of services to this community. I work as what’s called a Search Angel, using my genealogy knowledge to help other people track down their family members. I’ve advocated for legislation fighting for every person’s right to know their true genetic heritage. I co-founded a non-profit called Right To Know, to serve anyone who had been deprived of the truth about their origins. We provided educational seminars, established a hotline for free counseling, created a mentor program pairing newcomers with people who were further along on their DNA journey, and created a database of therapists who have received special training in this area. We also created and fought for new laws combatting secrecy in adoption, fertility fraud on the state and federal level, and a range of other abuses that have been so hurtful to their victims.
Today I lead a group called NPEN, which stands for Non-Parental-Event Nurses or Not-Parent-Expected Nurses. We’re a group of nursing professionals volunteering to support the needs of people who are navigating a DNA surprise. Nearly all our team members have personally struggled with an NPE event themselves.
Altogether, I have helped hundreds and maybe even thousands of NPEs and I’m proud and honored to be able to say that.
I may not have much of a Jewish education, but I love the concept of tikkun olam, the idea that Jews are called upon to partner with God in repairing the world. The most healing part of my own DNA journey has been drawing on my range of skills to practice tikkun olam in my own corner of the world. It turns out you can take me out of the healing profession, but you can’t take the healing professional out of me. I found a way to harness my trauma for the greater good, and to me, that feels like the most Jewish act of all.
✡︎
To support or find out more about NPEN, visit their website at https://nursingfornpes.com/.
What a wonderfully open and beautiful story of navigating life and making the world a better place for the ones that most need it. Thank you for teaching love with your very life!
What an amazing story--I feel privileged just to have read it.