apprehensively, i called her back. she informed me that an investigator had contacted her looking for me. it seemed that my biological father had died and i had been named as a beneficiary in his will.

guess i should backtrack a bit. my parents were separated when i was 3, divorced when i was 4, my mother remarried when i was five and my biological father (or 'real dad' as i referred to him as a child) surrendered his parental rights when i was 7, allowing for my mother's husband to adopt me. it feels strange to refer to my dad as my mother's husband, given that he is the only father i've ever really known and i've never considered him either my mother's husband or my stepfather. he is plain and simple, my dad. for clarity, i will refer to my biological father as 'ed' (his name) and my mother's husband of the last 28 years as 'dad'.

i hadn't seen ed in almost 30 years and hadn't been in contact with him in over 10 years. i wish that i could say that i barely knew him, but the truth is, i never knew him at all. oddly enough, i had spent some time discussing with a close friend how i planned to seek him out once i got settled financially just two days prior. now he was gone. i wasn't sure how to feel. i'm still not.

freaked but intrigued, i left a message for the attorney handling his estate and waited. when she returned my call later that day, i learned the following. ed had died last november of non-hodgkins lymphoma. he had been looking for me since he learned that he was ill. there was property (a house, a car, etc.) but it had been left to a woman who had cared for him in the last months of his life. the rest of the estate was left to me, if i was located within one year of his death. there were no other beneficiaries. there were some documents that i would have to sign to enter the proceedings and stake my claim. the estate would close in a few months, probably by the end of july. the value wouldn't be definitively determined until then, but her estimate was a jaw-dropping, dumb-striking figure. not life-settling, but certainly life-altering. guess that makes me an heiress.

to be continued...