Are You My Father?: Answering Life’s Unexpected Questions

By Cliff Dean

Imagine being sixty-five and having already lived a full life (school, family, career, travel, hobbies, and adventures). Retired and living the good life, on one seemingly ordinary day your entire world suddenly changes when you discover you have a thirty-four-year-old son whom you knew nothing about.

That is what actually happened to me, and here is the true story. A young man, raised solely by a loving mother, spent thirty-four years wondering about his biological father but never expected to actually get answers to his questions. Then one day, through the marvels of DNA technology, he unexpectedly discovered the identity of his father. And he got to ask his questions, and he got them answered.

In such a situation, what questions would you ask?

This book details the exact questions that he did ask during our first week of discovery, along with my verbatim written responses to him. After that first week, we settled into a slower pace of discovery. Over time, I answered many more questions, using each question as an opportunity to tell him a bit more about my life—who I am and what I have experienced.

I hope you find it all as amazing and fascinating as we did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982225919

Cliff Dean

Like you, I’ve spent a lifetime looking for happiness. I’ve diligently explored the nooks and crannies of happiness’s hiding places for over seventy years. I’ve done a lot, experienced a lot, and learned a lot about how to be happy. I’ve been a son, sibling, spouse, parent, and grandparent. I’ve been a student, manual laborer, salesman, legal secretary, court reporter, and air traffic controller. I’ve won National Science Foundation grants and worked in microbiology labs. I’ve been a firefighter, mountain man, survivalist, and master naturalist, as well as a yoga instructor. I’ve lived in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, faced bears, moose, elk, and cougars, and survived for months at a time by catching and eating rattlesnakes. I’ve jumped out of airplanes and off cliffs and waterfalls. I’ve flown military combat aircraft and been trusted routinely with the lives of tens of thousands of people, as well as the safety of Air Force One. I’ve written books, won poetry contests, published a magazine about birds, sung in choirs, acted on stage, created stained glass windows, sculpted clay creations, and designed popup cards. I’ve lived on the East Coast, West Coast, the South, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Southwest, California and Hawaii. I’ve lived on coastlines, mountains, deserts, farm country, and a Pacific island in the middle of a vast ocean. Here is what I have learned about happiness.

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Copyright © 2019 Cliff Dean.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-2590-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-2592-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-2591-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904288

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/30/2019

for

Logan

and all others

who have ever wondered

who their parents really are

CONTENTS

PREFACE

FIRST CONTACT

Did you happen to donate to a clinic in the early 80s near Arizona?

How tall are you?

What size shoe do you wear?

What name would you like me to call you?

How are you feeling about this discovery?

How are you feeling about … the ensuing process?

How is your family feeling about it?

Do I have any half-brothers or half-sisters of whom you are aware?

Are there any medical concerns or illnesses that are unusually prevalent in your family?

What is your family like?

Who is the most important person in your life?

Who else has been important in your life?

Who are some of the great thinkers you like?

What do you consider (or other people generally consider) to be your biggest strengths and weaknesses?

ANSWERING LIFE’S QUESTIONS

What does home mean to you?

Do you have any unique or quirky Christmas traditions?

What was the best vacation you ever took?

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you were going to die?

Have you ever accomplished something which others thought you couldn’t do?

What is the most unexpected compliment you ever received?

Have you ever lost something that was really important to you?

Why did you drop out of college?

Tell me about your first day in the mountains.

Have you ever celebrated something that is not usually celebrated?

Tell me about a time that you felt a sense of awe.

Tell me about a typical day in the mountains.

What is the most memorable test you ever took in school?

Have you ever done something that surprised you because you never thought you would really do it (good or bad)?

How did you meet your first wife?

What song evokes the most emotion and strongest memory for you?

Tell me about your wedding.

What is the most unusual job you ever had?

Have you ever felt out of your element due to culture shock or anything else that may have thrown you off balance?

Who was the worst boss you ever worked for?

At what point in your life have you felt the most powerful?

Tell me about the significance of any one framed picture in your home.

How did you meet your current wife?

Tell me about a time you said, I love you.

Tell me about a time that you were forgiven

What is the dumbest thing you have ever embraced?

What do you do when things go wrong?

What do you think people will say about you at your funeral?

What advice would you give your younger self?

PREFACE

I was a bit startled to discover one seemingly ordinary day that I had a 34-year-old son that I knew nothing about.

Having already lived a full and interesting life, at the age of sixty-five I was retired and living in Florida with my wife of nineteen years. One day she casually mentioned that one of her sisters in Arizona had just been contacted by a very nice young man who was looking for me. She had no idea why he wanted to find me.

I sent this young man an email that simply said: How may I help you?

His return email was eloquently written and thoroughly surprising. Two phrases from it sum up the contents succinctly: I can only imagine this is one of the more ‘out of left field’ messages of your life… and I think you may be my biological father.

A few months earlier my wife, at the suggestion of our daughter, requested me to submit a DNA sample to Ancestry.com. Both my wife and daughter were interested in tracing their family trees and filling in all the blanks they could. So I obliged them.

Eventually I received a fairly detailed report about the specifics that could be determined from my DNA sample. It had a few minor amusing surprises about ethnicity, geographical origins, and such things. I shared it with my family (wife, daughter, brother, sister) and we had a few laughs, then I totally forgot about it.

The young man whom I had contacted had also submitted a DNA sample to the same company. He was thirty-four years old and was conceived through artificial insemination, thus he knew virtually nothing about his biological father and never expected to know anything. He was thinking that perhaps he might stumble upon a half-sibling through his DNA search. But he had no such luck, so he also had forgotten about it all for several months. Then, on a whim, he finally checked the website again and was shocked to see this message:

Confidence: Extremely High

Relationship: Cliff Dean is your Father

Shocked, he spent two days Googling the internet, tracking down every Cliff Dean he could find on social media and comparing notes with search engine discoveries. He totally endeared himself to me with this summary of his search through all possibilities: …you won the prize for ‘Most Likely to be My Biological Father’ AS WELL AS the prize for ‘I Hope He’s My Biological Father’.

He had discovered my wife’s unusual maiden name and managed to find one of her sisters (with that same surname) who lived in his vicinity. He speculatively contacted her, which resulted in finding me.

His summation was direct: Did you happen to donate to a clinic in the early 80s near Arizona? Or am I missing something and this is the weirdest random email you’ve ever received?

I had indeed once been a sperm donor at a clinic in Phoenix, so I responded affirmatively to this initial question. Thus began the process of us getting to know each other. I offered to answer any and all questions he might have. During the first week after initial contact we exchanged emails totaling over 16,000 words!

Following are the first questions actually asked in real life by someone who found his biological father after three decades of speculation. My answers to his initial questions are quoted verbatim – exactly what I said to him in real time during that first week

The QUESTIONS

FIRST CONTACT

Did you happen to donate to a clinic in the early 80s near Arizona?

How tall are you?

What size shoe do you wear?

What name would you like me to call you?

How are you feeling about this discovery?

How are you feeling about … the ensuing process?

How is your family feeling about it?

Do I have any half-brothers or half-sisters of whom you are aware?

Are there any medical concerns or illnesses that are unusually prevalent in your family?

What is your family like?

Who is the most important person in your life?

Who else has been important in your life?

Who are some of the great thinkers you like?

What do you consider (or other people generally consider) to be your biggest strengths and weaknesses?

FIRST CONTACT

(Note: This was the very first question. It was asked in order to establish with certainty that I was indeed the Cliff Dean which Ancestry.com claimed was his father.)

QUESTION: Did you happen to donate to a clinic in the early 80s near Arizona?

COW TOSSING

In the mid-to-late ‘70s I spent time at the University of Idaho completing an undergraduate degree in philosophy. I lived in a dorm with lots of other students and became friends with one of the guys just a few doors down from my room. He was a big bruiser (about 6’6 and 350 pounds) but one of the nicest and gentlest men you would ever want to meet. He was training to be a veterinarian, so I tagged along with him on many of his veterinary experiences. That was where I learned cow tossing."

In one of the veterinary trainings/experiments he was involved in, he had to give cows an injection after he had wrestled them to the ground. Of course the big trick was getting the cow safely off its feet and lying on its side on the ground so that the necessary procedures could be accomplished. He figured I was big enough and strong enough to help him, so he showed me his tricks for tossing cows. Together we would go flip all the cows onto their sides so that all the veterinary students could do their work. It was a unique form of essential and useful entertainment.

The two of us did quite a bit of interesting stuff like that together, and I got to know him pretty well. In one of our conversations he revealed to me that he was a child born through artificial insemination and we discussed at length his feelings and attitudes about that. He was totally and completely positive about it and grateful for it. His parents had wanted a child very badly, but his father was never able to provide viable sperm. They had finally asked a family friend to donate sperm, and he was born as a result. Both he and his parents viewed the sperm donor as an unmitigated blessing to them all. My friend had grown up happily on a farm in a family full of love.

He impressed upon me the reality that, in a world where so many children are unwanted and unloved and uncared for, anyone who seeks out artificial fertilization is highly likely to really want that child and will actually do everything within his/her power to provide loving care and a good home for that child. His positive emotional intensity about the subject made a big impact upon me, and I never forgot it.

Sometime later I started an MBA program at the University of Oregon, but soon discovered that I really did not want to become just another cog in the wheel of Corporate America.

Trying to figure out how I wanted to make a living, eventually I decided to train to be a court reporter. I researched literally all the schools in the entire country at that time which offered such training and finally selected the Arizona School of Court Reporting in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. (By the way, it no longer exists. It met its demise decades ago.) I was married at the time and my wife was employed in Eugene, Oregon. So she decided to stay in Oregon and keep working to keep us afloat financially, while I hopped on my motorcycle and drove to Phoenix.

As it so happened, there was a sperm bank just a few doors down from the school. (It later moved its location away from downtown.) I hadn’t noticed or paid any attention to it, but one day one of the owners came over to talk to the owners of my school and he noticed me. He introduced himself and suggested I come by to see him at the sperm bank later. When I did, he offered me the opportunity to become a donor – if everything about me checked out. I discussed this at length with my wife, accentuating my positive feelings about possible benefits and blessings of artificial insemination as informed through my experiences with my veterinary friend back at the University of Idaho. She wholeheartedly agreed with the idea, so I became a regular sperm donor at the clinic for the next year or two until I left Phoenix to go to school in Oklahoma to become an air traffic controller.

By the way, I never became a court reporter. It turns out that I was too analytical. I couldn’t easily just turn off my brain and mindlessly take transcription. I was too interested and involved in what was happening, considering implications, figuring out strategies, mentally correcting errors of the speakers, etc. But I was fantastic at actually producing correct and accurate transcripts of other court reporters. So I got selected by three official court reporters at the Maricopa County Courthouse there in Phoenix to start and run an automated transcription service for them. This was at the very beginning of the technology being developed to use computers to automate transcription from machine stenotype shorthand into standard English. It was extremely challenging.