Clear as Fog

By Michelle Tullier

“Are we related to anybody famous?” I asked my mother when I was about twelve years old.

I didn’t like that the answer was “No,” so I repeated the question until she walked over to our encyclopedia set and took down the volume for the letter L. Her finger made a quick skim of the index, and she flipped to the page covering Louisiana.

“Him. We’re related to him,” my mother said.

I grabbed the book eagerly and saw an image identified as the 17th-century French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle who canoed the lower Mississippi River and claimed its fertile basin land for France. Something didn’t feel right. If we were related to someone as important as the founder of Louisiana, why hadn’t I ever heard about him? Why hadn’t we made a family trip to walk in his footsteps? I wanted to believe that man was my ancestor. I had longed to be related to someone who was not just a celebrity but a person of import and impact. In high school when I learned about Simone de Beauvoir in philosophy class, I daydreamed about being related to her—a possibility, I thought, given my French heritage, though I knew few specifics of that lineage. It seemed every time I asked about family history my mother swooped in like a defensive back making an interception to save the game, and I didn’t understand what game she was playing.

Decades later, I ordered an Ancestry.com DNA kit just for kicks. I hoped the results would shed light on my French ethnicity, hand me a long list of not-too-distant relatives, and, perhaps, reveal a notable person in my family tree. When the results came back, my ethnicity breakdown seemed odd, showing more Irish and English than I would have expected. Disappointed by the ethnicity results, but not suspecting anything untoward, I turned to the people matches. I did not recognize any surnames, but that didn’t concern me either. Most were third or fourth cousins, or even more distant. I was very busy at the time that I saw my results, juggling a demanding job and parenting a teenager. I told myself that someday I would take time to build a family tree and figure it all out.

Two years later, that someday had still not come, but I was having an unhurried lunch at my desk, so I took a few moments to log back into Ancestry. I was heading to Ireland on a work-related trip and happened to remember those ethnicity results, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit them before the trip. I logged in and was met with a red dot on the bell-shaped notifications icon. The bell tolled for me, so I clicked there rather than going straight to the ethnicity page. The message said I had new DNA matches to explore. Anticipating screen after screen of unrecognizable names stretched out to Saturn’s seventh ring, I rolled my eyes. But I still had half a turkey sandwich to eat, so what the heck, I would take a look.

The first match was displayed as initials only, with the statement “Predicted relationship: Close Family.” The match was made at a confidence level classified as “Extremely High.” I pictured long strands of genetic matter strutting amongst puffed up DNA coils, double helixes cocked, so proud of the match they’d made for me. I saw that this person’s profile was administered by someone who listed their first and last name in full. I recognized the last name as that of close family friends when I was a child, and I realized the initials of the person I was matched with were those of a son in that family, who was around my age.

There is a technique in photography called bokeh, from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze.” Taking a bokeh photo makes the primary object of focus sharp and clear, while surrounding or more distant objects are blurred. There is good bokeh—Isn’t that a striking close-up of a pink camellia with the green leaves softly blurred behind it? And there is bad bokeh—What is that jarring mess of shapes and shadows, ruining a perfectly nice picture of a flower? I didn’t know if what I was seeing in that moment of discovery was good or bad bokeh. The books that lined the wall several feet across from my desk, arranged by topic and by rainbow colors within each grouping, streamed like melted Neapolitan ice cream. The files stacked on the credenza a few feet to my left blurred. The cell phone resting on my desk was barely visible through the fog. The keyboard below my fingers was, well, maybe not even there anymore.

Oddly, through the fog, there was clarity. I knew the connection of that name to my parents. I knew the connection of that name to my mother, who had always seemed particularly friendly with the father of the family. I knew, on some preconscious level, how this had come to pass. My mother would later admit to having had an extramarital affair and said she had planned to tell me on her deathbed. I couldn’t even begin to unpack the narcissism and grandiosity in that statement.

I had never, for one single moment in my life, suspected that my loving and generous “Daddy,” was not my biological father. But I knew this was not a mistake. I knew this explained what had been missing in my life even though I had never thought anything was missing. I knew this was how my life was supposed to turn out. I knew I was losing a father and gaining a father. People speak of life flashing before their eyes at the moment of death; my life flashed before my eyes at this moment of birth as a new person. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense.

I also discovered that I had been right all along: I am related to someone famous. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, renowned 18^th-century philosopher, statesman, and author of Faust, widely considered Germany’s answer to Shakespeare, is someone I can now call “Cousin Wolfie.”

I took the last bite of my turkey sandwich, closed my eyes, and waited for the fog to lift.

Michelle Tullier is the author of nine self-help books, including the Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination (Penguin, 2012) and has recently turned her focus to creative nonfiction, with the book No Finer Place in progress—a memoir of DNA secrets and finding one’s sense of self in the murky middle of the NPE experience. A graduate of Wellesley College with a PhD in counseling psychology from UCLA, she is a former university career center executive director and faculty member who taught the psychology of work. Tullier lives on an island in Maine because her goal in life is to not be hot. Find her on Twitter @Tullierauthor and reach her through www.michelletullierauthor.com.