What Michael did next

We are beginning to fill in some missing pieces of the puzzle concerning our father's later years.
If you know me, you'll have realised that blipper TMLHereandThere is my elder sister. She has revealed today, and at New Year, that a half- brother of ours has come out of the woodwork, looking for answers about his enigmatic father.

We now know that our father died in Mexico, following a stroke, in 2003. He had been ill for some time. S, the half brother, and I, seem to have experienced the same amount of confusion re. Father coming and going, without any warning, even though we are separated by nearly three decades. S is our father's last son, and just six weeks older than Michael (our father)'s first grandson from our 'branch'.

It is odd to think of being part of Michael's first family, because there may even have been other children before us. Father was clearly a little bit bonkers, and rhere is much, much more than I can say here, but most of it isn't good. What hurt me most, growing up, was the realisation that the 'special relationship' between us ( yes, I was a Daddy's girl) didn't count enough to nake him stay with us.

Our father left our family for the last time in 1974. He met his last 'wife' in Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s, but those middle years are still a mystery. Which is why I have chosen to blip this jigsaw, with the middle missing! I am still feeling rough. The chest infection is not bad in itself, but my voice is hoarse, and my ears are beginning to ache.

I did bump into my father once, in the 1990s in a bus station. He wanted to explain why he'd left our mother, and I wanted him to get on a bus, as he looked seedy and unkempt, and I''d had good reason to believe rhat his grasp on reality was tenuous, and I did not want to be sucked in to his alternative world. He got on the bus, carrier bags rattling with pills, and I never saw him again. At the time, he lived in Mexico (mostly) and I'd requested no further contact, believing that such contact would have been at best sporadic and disruptive. He wasn't one for carrying things through.

I am glad that he was looked after until the end by his 1990s family. I hope he gave them something back. They always believed he was from the Indian subcontinent (he did grow up there) but he went as far as to buy himself a Mexican birth certificate with a new name, thereby eliminating almost all traces of his old life.

Little wonder that the Mormons couldn't find his death certificate a few years ago, when I enquired! (Not that he was a Mormon, but they're a great help when it comes to ancestry research, or tracing missing persons).