The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (14 page)

If for some reason Brooke had become unconscious, she and Jaycee would have revived him, Peggy told me, because she didn't believe he really wanted to die. She thinks what he really wanted was to believe he had a measure of control, that he could ask for an end to his life and be heard. “We showed him that we would do what he asked for,” she said, “and he thought it was real.” But it wasn't real, I said. It all sounded like an elaborate end-of-life placebo, an indication that in fact he was not in control, that he wasn't being heard. Peggy laughed and did not disagree.

She's not good at keeping secrets from Brooke, though, and by the time I contacted them both by Skype later in the week, she'd told him the truth about that afternoon. In retrospect, Brooke said, the whole thing seemed kind of comical. He mimed it for me, leaning back with his eyes closed waiting for the end to come, then slowly opening them, raising his eyebrows practically to his hairline, overacting like a silent-film star tied to the tracks who slowly realizes the distant train will never arrive. He looked good, handsome in his burgundy polo shirt, mugging for the webcam. Some new crisis, some new decision, was inevitable—in fact, last month it took the form of another farewell letter, stating his desire to die in the spring of 2014, which is when he expects to be finished teaching his next course, on
Don Quixote.
But at that moment, Brooke was feeling good. “I think it will be a productive summer,” he said. And he and Peggy smiled.

FROM
Matter

 

C
HERYL WHITTLE TRIED HER BEST
to fall asleep, but her mind kept racing. Tomorrow was going to be the culmination of three years of research and, possibly, a day that would change her life forever.

Around 4
A.M.
she popped two Benadryl and managed to drift off. But in just a few hours she had to be up and ready to go.

Cheryl and her husband, Dickie, are retired and live in eastern Virginia, way out on the end of the Northern Neck peninsula, which juts like an arthritic finger into Chesapeake Bay. It's a beautiful and isolated spot, where most people tack up
NO TRESPASSING
signs and stay close to home. The Whittles enjoy their life in the country, but Cheryl was eager that day to make the long drive to meet Effie Jane.

She showered, threw on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, dotted makeup on her cheeks, and scrunched a dollop of mousse into her thinning brown hair.

There's nothing showy about Cheryl, not even on a day like this. She's short and shy, with nine grandchildren and no pretensions. She grabbed a shoulder bag, heavy with the day's supplies, and kissed Dickie on her way out the door.

 

Note: Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

 

Her anxiety mounted as she drove her yellow pickup truck past sleepy cornfields, old plantations, and cemeteries, up the peninsula and into mainland Virginia. Then she pulled into the tiny parking lot of Panera Bread in Richmond. She didn't have to wait long before Effie Jane Erhardt found her—that yellow truck was hard to miss. Effie Jane pulled open the truck's passenger door and announced, “I'm here!”

Cheryl and Effie Jane met on
Ancestry.com
, a popular web site for people trying to fill in their family trees. After several e-mail and phone encounters, each woman felt a kinship that neither had experienced before. Both were born in 1951, and grew up about 20 miles from each other in the Richmond area. They both speak with soft southern drawls, had traumatic childhoods, are devout Christians, and, as children, felt like outsiders in their own families.

Cheryl quickly got down to business, retrieving a small cardboard box from her bag in the back seat. She opened the top, plucked out a fat plastic tube, and handed it to her friend. Effie Jane held the tube under her mouth and spit—and spit, and spit, and spit. She had never realized how much saliva froths and fizzes. She passed the tube back to Cheryl, who snapped on a plastic cap, gently mixed the tube's contents, and dropped it into a clear plastic bag with an orange
BIOHAZARD
label. Then the two women went into Panera for lunch.

 

Since 2000, when a company called Family Tree DNA sold the first commercially available home testing kit, an estimated one million people have dabbled in genetic genealogy—also known as recreational genetics, extreme genealogy, and even anthrogenealogy.

Traditionally, amateur genealogical research was regarded as a niche hobby for older white men, but today it attracts people of all ages, races, and walks of life.

The rapid transformation is the result of two technological revolutions. Twenty years ago, doing genealogy meant hitting the pavement: traveling to local historical societies, courthouses, libraries, and cemeteries to paw through dusty books and records. Then came the Internet, which made the most useful references—census and voter lists, birth certificates, military records, even the archives of local newspapers—accessible from home. Not only that, but genealogists started connecting with each other online, sharing their research and overlapping trees, creating a vast online database that anyone could tap into and, more importantly, add to.

In 1997 a company called Infobases, which sold compact disks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publications, bought
Ancestry Magazine
and its web site,
Ancestry.com
, turning the latter into a subscription genealogy service. By 2009, when
Ancestry.com
went public, it had a near monopoly on the booming industry. The world of ancestry research has become a perfect example of a highly scalable business based largely on freely provided, user-generated content. Today
Ancestry.com
has a few competitors, like
MyHeritage.com
and Brightsolid, but it remains dominant, with almost 3 million paying subscribers, 12 billion records, and 50 million family trees. Revenues from the company's ten popular web sites and the Family Tree Maker software totaled $400 million in 2011. In late 2012 a European private equity firm bought the company for $1.6 billion.

The second transformation came from rapid advances in genetic testing. After Family Tree DNA launched its test, other companies followed: eleven by 2004, and almost forty by the end of that decade. Today you find celebrities like Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma tracing their lineage on prime-time television shows. As the price of commercial genetic tests has plummeted—many now cost just $99—families like the Whittles have been able to join in.

Three companies—23andMe, Family Tree DNA, and
Ancestry.com
—have emerged as major players, and each is intent on growing its most valuable asset: a proprietary database of customers' genetic data. 23andMe has information from more than 400,000 people and counting, and Family Tree DNA has over 650,000 different genetic records.

The bigger these databases become, the more useful they are for filling in genealogists' ever-expanding family trees. But the growth of the databases also raises serious privacy concerns—not only for people who buy the tests, but for close or even distant family members who share some of their DNA.

Searching your genetic ancestry can certainly be fun: you can trace the migration patterns of 10,000-year-old ancestors or discover whether a distant relative ruled a continent or rode on the
Mayflower.
But the technology can just as easily unearth more private acts—infidelities, sperm donations, adoptions—of more recent generations, including previously unknown behaviors of your grandparents, parents, and even spouses. Family secrets have never been so vulnerable.

If you find a relative on a genetic genealogy database—say, a second or third cousin—then, with the help of Google, social media, digital obituaries, and other publicly available resources, it's usually possible to find closer kin. Adoptees have used their newfound genetic knowledge to browse photo albums and look for potential biological relatives on Facebook. Children of sperm donors have found siblings they never knew they had. Couples who used artificial insemination to conceive have discovered that another man's sperm was used.

And then there are people like Cheryl, who learn to their surprise, late in life, that they aren't the person they thought they were.

Over sandwiches at Panera, Cheryl and Effie Jane exchanged photos and told childhood stories. Taking advantage of the restaurant's Wi-Fi, Cheryl took out her laptop and logged in to the 23andMe web site, patiently explaining how the process worked. Cheryl was a veteran. Genetic testing had already shaken up her world, raising startling new questions about where she came from. She was here because she believed that Effie Jane was her sister. She was praying for it. If she was right, the journey she'd been on for the last three years would reach its end. Her mind could rest.

The women left the restaurant together, drove to a nearby post office, and sent the sealed package to a lab in Los Angeles. There technicians would screen Effie Jane's DNA for about one million genetic markers. Four to six weeks later, 23andMe would send Cheryl an e-mail saying the results were ready.

 

Cheryl's quest began one afternoon in late 2008, when she and Dickie were sitting in their living room watching
Oprah.
The episode included a segment about a Silicon Valley start-up called 23andMe that was selling genetic tests directly to consumers. One of the company's founders, Anne Wojcicki, was nine months pregnant. She told Oprah how her DNA test results and those of her husband—Google cofounder Sergey Brin—offered clues about their unborn child.

Cheryl, then a registered nurse, was intrigued. She had married Dickie when she was fourteen and he was twenty. The pregnancy that spurred their young union resulted in a stillborn girl, born with too much fluid in her brain.

After hearing Wojcicki's story, Cheryl thought that this DNA test might provide a genetic explanation for their daughter's death. What's more, she had been interested in genealogy for years and had done a lot of work on the line of her father, Josiah “Joe” Wilmoth. Perhaps DNA testing would expand that research.

Cheryl remembered some of the basics about how genes work from nursing school, and learned more after browsing 23andMe's web site. For instance, most of us have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, or long segments of DNA. Both sexes have twenty-two pairs of so-called “autosomal chromosomes”—each pair includes one copy inherited from each parent. But the twenty-third pair, the “sex chromosomes,” is different. Men inherit a Y chromosome from their father and an X chromosome from their mother. Women, in contrast, receive an X chromosome from their father and a second X from their mother.

To investigate her father's ancestry, Cheryl decided to look at the DNA of a male in her father's line. Joe Wilmoth had died in 1989. But his son Milton Wilmoth, Cheryl's older half-brother, was alive and well. So she called Milton and asked: If she paid for it, would he consider taking a genetic test?

Milton didn't own a computer and had no interest in his DNA, but he readily agreed to help his sister. So in early 2009 Cheryl bought three kits from 23andMe—one for her, one for her husband Dickie, and one for Milton—at $495 a pop. Two months after that, she was back at her computer poring over the results.

From what she could tell, nothing in her genes or Dickie's gave any clues about why their first baby had died. But not long after she took the test, 23andMe launched Relative Finder, a service that allowed customers to find relatives in the company's database based on shared segments from all twenty-three chromosomes. Oddly, Milton's name did not appear in Cheryl's list of DNA relatives. She tried signing in to 23andMe using Milton's account instead, and saw that her name did not appear in his list of DNA relatives either.

After a couple of months, Cheryl reached out to CeCe Moore, an expert in genetic genealogy who runs a popular blog on the subject. “I wrote to her and said, ‘Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? I can't get this thing to work,'” Cheryl recalls.

CeCe revealed the truth that Cheryl suspected but had been scared to confront: Milton was not biologically related to her. For Cheryl, there was only one explanation: she was a Wilmoth by name but not by blood.

The notion that Joe wasn't her biological father didn't sit well with Cheryl. It meant, after all, that her mother had lied to her—and maybe to Joe and everybody else—for decades. But Cheryl didn't feel anger toward her mother. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she felt comforted. Many things about her childhood suddenly made sense. When she was growing up, Joe never gave her much affection or attention. And when he drank, which was often, he could turn mean. “I never felt a part of him,” she says. “I grew up believing in my heart that I did not belong.”

The news was a painful shock, however, to Cheryl's younger sister, Sandi Satterfield, who was crushed at the thought that they weren't full siblings. Joe had always doted on Sandi, and Sandi had adored him, despite his flaws. Yet she worried about what it might mean for her own roots. Could it possibly be that she, too, wasn't his?

After prodding from Cheryl, Sandi agreed to take a 23andMe test to confirm that Joe was her father. When her results came back, in June 2010, they showed that she was at extremely high risk for colorectal cancer. Just seven months later she was diagnosed with stage IV of the disease. “If we had known this earlier in her life, she may have been able to take the appropriate actions to prevent this horrible disease,” Cheryl says.

But Sandi's DNA results also resolved her worries about her own lineage. Cheryl and Sandi didn't share half of their DNA, as full siblings do. They shared around 22 percent, making them half-siblings through their mother. Sandi shared 25 percent of her genome with Milton, which meant they were half-siblings through their father, Joe.