I met him when he was 60 and I was 50, in 2008. He had been a bachelor all his life, although he’d lived with two different ladies at different times for about a year each. He had no children. We dated a couple years until my kids were out of the nest, then moved in together in 2010. We married in 2011. We moved out of the Seattle area and bought a house in Oregon in 2012. His sisters never thought he’d get married, especially once he hit 60, and when he had asked one of his buddies (who was into owning real estate) if he thought it was possible to still buy a small piece of property and put a mobile home on it for cheap, the guy said “At 60? Nah, man, you’re too late for that.” So that was the first set of milestones-a girlfriend, a wife, stepkids, and a house in 4 years. Not bad.
The next piece is the best part. We hummed along for about 5 years, enjoying life and doing the semi-retired lifestyle in our own place. No big changes. Then, everything changed in the blink of an eye. We got our Ancestry dot com results back, just wondering how much of whatever ethnicity we might be. Two weeks later he got a match on his account that was astronomically high. It was a young girl with Asian and UK heritage. Long story short, this girl submitted her DNA to look for her Vietnamese parents’ American GI fathers. Both her mom and dad were Amerasian children born during the Vietnam war to Vietnamese mothers and American fathers. We got on face time with the family and had the parents send in their own DNA. Sure enough, he matched as the father of the girl’s mother. In an instant my husband was a father, a father-in-law, and grandfather to not one, but four grandchildren (ages 16, 18, 20, and 24). Three girls and a boy! A few months later, the 20-year-old grandson and his girlfriend got married and had a baby girl. Now he’s a great-grandfather, and they are expecting their second child.
We met his daughter and her family for the first time the week he turned 70. The family all live in Florida and have all come here to Oregon to visit, more than once. I’ve been to see them in Florida (my husband cannot travel) and his sisters have taken the whole family into their lives and hearts, traveling to see them and hosting them in their homes in Georgia and Texas. It’s truly been a miracle. In 10 years my husband went from lonely bachelor in a run-down duplex to husband, stepfather, homeowner, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, all over the age of 60.
I just tell people, “He was a late bloomer”.
Credit – original owner ( respect 🫡)