`It was a dark secret. The kind that destroys lives,
devastates families and decimates faith. Nobody shared it in any way with
Valerie Spruill while her "husband" was alive. Four 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. That’s not until her uncle
finally told her what no one else had: She had unknowingly married the father
she never knew.
“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.”
“It is devastating. It can destroy you!” Spruill told CNN late Thursday by
telephone. “It almost did.” 60-year-old Spruill 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. She confirmed 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 not more than 2,300 people. 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 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 these,” 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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