The Ghosts We Inherit

A Family Secret and the Sister I Never Knew.

My father in 1956 - Manuel Rebelo S

Before I close the chapter on my paternal side, there’s a secret, an unspoken part of my family history that has lingered, half-concealed, at the edges of my consciousness for years. I’m hesitant to write about it. To voice it feels like turning the key in a locked door that has not been opened in decades. But it is a door that has been rattling at my thoughts for far too long. A door that demands to be opened. So, here I am, seeking to understand, to reconcile, and to reach out into the uncertainty of a past I did not know existed until it was whispered in my ears, years ago, in the middle of an argument between my mother and father.

I was eleven or twelve when I overheard their heated exchange. A moment of pure childhood confusion, when I could not fathom the gravity of what they were fighting about. My father was drunk. My mother, red-faced, angry, her voice sharp like a knife, said, “You have a daughter. A child you left behind. You don’t think I know about her.” The words hung in the air, sharp and foreign, like a jarring note in an otherwise familiar occurence of fighting and then pretending all was well. But this was different. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t understand what it meant. Why would my father have a daughter that I had never known about? What was this secret that had been kept from me for so long? I couldn’t ask any questions. The argument escalated, and I was swept away by the confusion of the moment, left to wonder in silence.

Years passed. I continued to carry that moment with me like an uninvited thought—an inexplicable, haunting echo. But like so many events in our lives that somehow don’t fit the narrative we’ve devised for ourselves, I never had the courage to ask my father about it, and my mother, perhaps too hurt by the past, never offered an explanation. It became a wound I had no words for, a ghost I didn’t know how to confront. Only now, many years later, have I begun to piece together the fragments of what that moment meant. What does it mean to have a half-sister whom you’ve never met? A sibling who, for all intents and purposes, was erased from my life before I could even begin to understand the possibility of such a connection?

In the years that followed that overheard conversation, I learned little bits of information. Pieces of the puzzle that I had to assemble on my own. It wasn’t until I began to ask the right questions—quietly, cautiously—that I started to understand the gravity of what had been kept from me. The truth emerged slowly, like picking at a scab that hasn’t fully healed. My father, it turns out, had fathered a daughter before he left Portugal for Canada. This child, a girl, was born sometime in 1955 or 1956. My understanding is that she was born on the island of Terceira, one of the Azorean islands, where my father had been stationed during his mandatory military service at the U.S. air base in Lajes. The circumstances surrounding her birth remain blurry. There are conflicting details, but what is certain is this: my father, perhaps too young, perhaps too unsure, perhaps too consumed by his own life and the promise of emigration, never took responsibility for this child. I was told he left Terceira, left the woman behind, and fled to Canada, where, in his new life, he seemingly erased all memory of her. In his mind, perhaps, the past was simply something easily discarded.

It is strange, isn’t it? The way history operates in such cruel silence. The way it can be swept under the rug, covered over, and ignored as if it never existed. As if the love, the pain, the joy, the sorrow—all the complexities of a human life—can simply be forgotten. My father died in 1985. His silence speaks volumes now that I’ve begun to ask these questions. But there are no answers. Just whispers from relatives, half-formed memories, and a sense of mystery that will likely never be resolved.

I’ve tried to piece together the timeline, to understand when and how everything had happened. From what I can gather, my father’s involvement with this woman was brief—perhaps a fleeting romance, perhaps something more complex—but it ended with her pregnancy. When he was stationed in Terceira during his military service, my father’s life was interrupted by the weight of duty. And yet, the duty he was called to was not just to the military; it was to this child who had no idea, or so I surmize, of the father who had abandoned her.

Through the years, I have given my father a sort of grace. Perhaps he never truly grasped the weight of his actions. Perhaps, in his youth, he believed that leaving would be the end of it—that the ties would be severed with the move to Canada, with the promise of a new life. But I wonder: did he ever think of her again? Did he ever wonder what became of her, the daughter he never held in his arms? Or was she simply lost to him, like so many other things that fade with time?

When I began to ask members of my family about this child, I was struck by how little they seemed to care. They knew about her, of course. How could they not? My father’s secret was hardly a secret to them. It was simply something that had been buried, a shadow cast over their lives that no one was willing to confront. When I pressed for more details, the answers were vague, fragmented, or entirely dismissive. There were no attempts to reach out to her. There were no gestures of connection, no efforts made to see if she was alive, to acknowledge her existence. She had become, in their eyes, nothing more than a footnote in a life that had moved on. And yet, for me, she was a ghost that I cannot let go of. What kind of life did she have? A child born to an unwed mother in a community entrenched in its religious fervor must have become the object of gossip, if not ridicule. The child and her mother.

The question that haunts me now, that I cannot shake from my thoughts, is this: How could my own father—the man I had spent my life looking up to, the man whose legacy I had inherited—be the one to have lived such a life of secrecy? It’s a question I can’t quite answer, and perhaps I never will.

The idea of a half-sister—someone who shares my blood, my heritage, my history—feels both distant and incredibly close. It’s as if she exists in a parallel universe, just out of reach, yet always present in the background of my thoughts. If she is still alive, where is she? Is she living in Terceira, still carrying the weight of my father’s absence, or has she left the island, searching for a place where her past won’t haunt her? And if she is alive, what would it mean to reach out to her? Would she want to know me? Does we resemble each other in any way; blue eyes? fair hair? or is she stubborn like me? Would she want to know about our father, the man who left her? Or would she, like my father, prefer to keep the past buried, sealed away in the dark corners of forgotten memories?

I wonder if the pain of knowing the truth would be greater than the pain of never knowing her at all. It is a struggle, a silent war between the longing for connection and the fear of discovering a truth that may shatter everything I thought I knew about my family, my father, and myself. And yet, despite all the uncertainties, there is a part of me that wants to know. A part of me that feels the pull of family, the bond that ties us together even when we are strangers to each other. A part of me that feels a deep, unspoken ache, a longing to reach out to someone who may share my blood, my history, my story. A part of me that wants to bridge the distance that separates us, to see if we can connect in some way, if only for a brief moment, before the ghosts of the past reclaim us once again.

In the end, perhaps the question is not whether we can ever truly know one another, but whether we can forgive the past enough to move forward. Can I forgive my father for abandoning this child, this sister who might still be out there somewhere, lost to time? Can I forgive myself for not understanding the pain of that moment when I overheard my mother’s words? And can I find peace with the ghosts that haunt my family history? The answers are not clear. The road ahead is uncertain, and the questions may never be fully answered. But in asking them, in reaching out to the past, I hope to find something—a connection, a reconciliation, or perhaps just a little clarity. And perhaps, in that reaching, I will find something that I have been searching for all along: the courage to forgive, and to embrace the complexities of the family I have inherited.

It feels raw. It feels naked. But this is the question that needs to be asked. And for once, I am willing to listen to the echoes of the past and see where they take me.

Note: I am open to the idea of connecting with my half-sister. If anyone out there reading this thinks they have information that could help me, I’d greatly appreciate it.