…the phone rang, and a woman named D’Arcy Griggs said she was calling from Seattle to say she was his daughter. Her birth mother had died of cancer, but Griggs had met the mother’s family, who in turn had led her to Ogden, and no, she wasn’t after his money. Shaken, Ogden called his lawyer. He also ran a background check on Griggs and her husband, a prominent surgeon, to make sure Griggs’s tale held together. It did. Ogden told the whole story to his shocked wife, and over the next several months, Ogden and Griggs exchanged hundreds of e-mail messages, phone calls and photos, quizzing each other on intimate medical histories and marveling at how similar their coloring was, their love of adventure (she’s a skydiver; he’s a private pilot) and their distaste for green peppers and Spanish class. He took to calling Griggs “honey” and slid her photo under his desk blotter at work, alongside those of his other children.
Two months after their first talk, Ogden flew to Seattle to meet her. He and Griggs spent four days, morning to night, catching up on 34 lost years, staring in the mirror side by side, comparing noses and ears and hair. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I totally fit, as if we shared the same personality,” Griggs says.
Ogden was so reluctant to leave that he even stayed an extra day. As they prepared to part, one or the other of them (their memories are fuzzy on this detail) pointed out that they couldn’t be sure they were related unless they had a DNA test, so they found a lab through the Yellow Pages and were tested. Both felt certain it would confirm what they already felt to be true.
When the news came back that Ogden wasn’t the father, he was crushed. “It broke my heart,” he said. “We talked to each other and cried, and I even called the testing lab to say, ‘Are you really sure?’ ” As confused as Ogden had been about how to become a father to a 34-year-old stranger, he was even more confused about how to stop being a father to a 34-year-old daughter he had quickly come to love.
Griggs was devastated, too. Her biological mother was dead, and she had lost the man she thought was her father. She sobbed for days. Even seven years later, she cried as she recalled it: “I had finally found a connection, a family I belonged to, and then I thought it was gone. But he didn’t go away. I think of him as my ‘almost dad.’ I call him before I call anyone else in my family whenever I’m upset. When I was going through my divorce, we talked three, four, five times a day for weeks.
“If we had met on the ski slopes or at an airport, we might have hit it off as friends, but the fact that we believed we truly belonged to each other is why we loved each other right away like we did,” she told me. Griggs is no longer interested in finding her true biological father. For her, Ogden is enough. On each Father’s Day, she sends him a card and scrawls across the top, “I wish.”
More to parenthood than genetics, for sure.
