My father’s headstone has the wrong date on it, and I’m the one who ordered it. I’ve stood there for nine years and never noticed it. My daughter noticed in about four seconds. The death date is right, but the birth year is eleven years off, and the monument company still has my original order form. The form matches the stone, which means I wrote what I’d been told my whole life.
I ordered his birth certificate from the state that afternoon. It came in six weeks, and the year on it matched the stone. I stared at the document for a long time because it meant the mistake wasn’t on the headstone at all. The name of the town on the certificate was one I had never heard my father mention. I called my aunt and asked if she knew anything about it, but she immediately asked why I was looking into his birth records. Then she went quiet and said, “You need to stop asking questions until I can find something.”
She called me two days later and asked me to come over alone. From a box in her attic, she pulled out an old envelope with my father’s name on it. Inside was a school record, a photograph, and a letter from a woman I’d never heard of. The photograph showed my father as a child, but there was another boy standing beside him who looked almost exactly like him. On the back, someone had written two names and the same town listed on the birth certificate. My aunt finally admitted that my father had never liked talking about the years before he moved away.
I asked her why the birth year had always been different in our family records. She said she didn’t know, but then she handed me the letter she’d been hiding for decades. It was written by my father’s mother and addressed to someone with my father’s name, but the handwriting was unfamiliar to me. The final paragraph mentioned a child who had been “sent away for his own protection” and warned that the truth should never be put in writing. At the bottom was a date from the year before my father supposedly left that town. I looked at my aunt, and she finally said, “That wasn’t your father’s birth year. It was the year he came back.”:::
