Damn, Damn, Damn!

In Cookie's line of work, most of the time you are just performing a family "audit".  Person A is related to people B and C, themselves the children D & E, and F&G.  That's the way it works.  Pretty straight and forward delivery of the promised package.

"You mean I have no one interesting in my family," a client will ask.

They have plenty of interesting people.  What they want is SST: STARS, SCANDAL, and TITLES.

While we are all related to someone who is famous - Cookie is the fifth cousin four times removed from Bessie Wallis Warfield, but then again, ANYONE who has family that lived in or around Baltimore or Anne Arundel Counties in Maryland before 1750 can most likely claim he as blood kin - the simple fact is that most families are interesting, but not "James Michener" famous.

Huh?

James Michener, the late great fiction writer (Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii, etc.) would write these huge sweeping narratives.  In Hawaii, when it was published, the inside flaps included a family chart, which you needed because of the marriages and intermarriages of the families.

Most people have interesting stories in their families, but a lot of people want bragging rights.

I met a woman once - an optician - who asked what I do, and I told her - and then she said "WELL!  You never guessed that you would be fitted for glasses by a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln, did you."  It wasn't a question - it was a statement.

No, and I wasn't at that moment either.  This idiot had never bothered to look at her family, she just relied on stories told and passed down.  This was in the olden days, before the internet.  When you had to crawl through libraries and courthouses like a cobra looking for documents and indices that told you which book the documents were in. 

That woman's problem was that Lincoln's last surviving direct descendants at that time were old men with no children to pass it on.  Today, I could have asked this woman if she had DNA proof of such.

Then, yesterday, I came across something not good.  Not good, at all.

"Client" is someone close to me, someone, I am protective of,  and it is an adoption case.  I am, by professional standards and respect for said Client, unable to tell you what I found.  Suffice it to say, and no - this in no way involves anyone in the news - was one of those moments where you say to yourself: "damn."

Breaking bad news to someone is hard.  Breaking to a loved one that you have known for most of your life is really hard.

Damn!, Damn! Damn!

The news was don't go a step further on your mother's line.  Just don't.  You don't want to go further on this lead. Nope.  Just don't.

What was there was bad.  What I found just made it worse.

The news on her father's side was a bit more like Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched trying to explain something and it began with "Well...."  And it ended with "I can't tell you if you should move forward with this, or not.  It's up to you and you have my support."

Its all been verified, we just need to pull the legal documents.

That's the upshot of it.  Sometimes you don't find a winner.  You find what you find, and that is a win. And sometimes you don't find what you thought, and there is a win on that level, too.

In this case, just one of those things that have you uttering then yelling "damn, damn, damn!" like you are Florida Evans finding out that James has died.

I'm taking today off.  I need to get my shit together after what we found yesterday.