It was a dark secret. The kind that destroys lives, devastates
families and decimates faith. Nobody shared it with Valerie Spruill
while her husband was alive. For years after his death, she heard bits
of the story. It was something about an absentee father, something about
her husband
.
None of it made sense, she said. That's
not until her uncle finally told her what no one else had: She had
unknowingly married the father she never knew. "It is devastating. It
can destroy you," Spruill told CNN late Thursday by telephone. "It
almost did."
Spruill, 60, of Doylestown, Ohio, went public with
her story this month, first published in the Akron Beacon Journal, with
the hopes that it would help others facing what seem like insurmountable
problems.
It's a story that has gone viral, attracting attention
as faraway as Australia and India where the questions are always the
same, she says: How could that happen?
It's a question that
Spruill said she has been grappling with since she first learned the
truth in 2004, six years after her husband Percy Spruill died.
"I
don't know if he ever knew or not. That conversation didn't come up,"
she said. "I think if he did know, there is no way he could have told
me." She confirmed that her husband was indeed her father through a DNA
test, hair taken from one of his brushes.
The aftermath of the
secret was devastating emotionally - and physically, Spruill suffered
two strokes and was diagnosed with diabetes. All of it, she believes was
brought on by learning the family secret. "Pain and stress will kill,
and I had to release my stress," Spruill said. "I'm just telling the
story to release my pain."
She has a deep, abiding faith in God,
who she believes has guided her through the experience -- and others
that have shaped her life. "You have to have faith," she said. "If God
brought me this far, he's not going to leave me now." Spruill met and
married her husband-father in Akron and settled in Doylestown, a working
class suburb of about 2,300.
It was her second marriage. Spruill
was a nice man, a good provider. He was kind to her three children from
her previous marriage. "We had a good life," she said. She initially
struggled with anger, with hating Spruill for what happened. But therapy
taught her what happened wasn't her fault. Her faith taught her to
forgive.
Initial response to her story has been mixed: "More
positive than negative," she says. In recent days, she has been in
contact with a couple who found out after they were married that they
were brother and sister. They told her, she said, that her story is
helping them deal with their own experience. "They are trying to be
friends now," Spruill said.
Others, though, have been less kind.
"They've said things like 'Some secrets should stay secrets,'" she said.
"I can't do anything about what they think. I just know what I think.
God is always mighty, and he teaches you to tell the truth no matter
what."
Spruill knows not everybody tells the truth. It's a lesson
she learned as a child the hard way. By all accounts, Spruill's mother
got pregnant as a teenager while dating her then 15-year-old father.
She
was 3-months-old when she was sent to live with her grandmother and
grandfather, who she initially believed as she grew up was her father.
Spruill said at about age 8 or 9, she discovered that the woman who
often visited the house was not a family friend but her mother. But
nobody, she said, talked about her father.
There's nobody left to
give her the answers about her husband-father. Her mother, Christine,
died in 1984. Her grandparents have long since passed. So, too, have a
number of Percy Spruill's relatives.
Spruill knows her mother
worked as a prostitute and even got caught up in 1980 high-profile
corruption scandal surrounding James Barbuto, a probate judge who was
convicted of intimidating investigators and gross sexual imposition for
attacking a courthouse clerk in his chambers.
"My mother showed me lots of love. All said and done, I have no regrets in my life at all," she said.
She
believes she has siblings or half-siblings from Spruill's previous
relationships, including the one with her mother. She said she wants to
find them and let them know they are not alone. Spruill, herself, has
three children and eight grandchildren. She struggled with telling her
children that the man they believed was their step-father was their
grandfather.
A therapist "advised me to tell my kids," she said.
"I told them about two years ago. They are remarkable. They are handling
it better than I am." In recent days, shortly before the news broke,
she also told her grandchildren. "They have been so supportive. They are
telling me they love me, telling me they will do whatever I need," she
said.
In her spare time, since retiring from the accounting
department where she worked for 34 years at Goodyear, she has been
writing down her story with the hopes of publishing it. "I thank God
that he gave me a chance to live through all of this," she said. "It is
nothing short of a miracle that I'm still here. I want people to know
that they can survive something like this
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