The Man We Never Really Found — Even When He Was There
He took a child from his mother. And then spent a lifetime leaving him again.
There are men who leave.
And then there are men who stay just long enough to be remembered—but never long enough to be known.
My grandfather was both.
He took my father from his mother when he was five years old.
That is where this begins.
Not context. Not background. The beginning.
And then—he left anyway.
Not all at once.
He came and went. In stretches. In fragments. Just enough presence to interrupt a life—but never enough to belong to it.
My father didn’t talk about him much.
Not because he was hiding anything.
Because there was nothing steady to hold onto.
I remember him in pieces.
An apartment that felt too quiet. The kind that presses in on you.
No warmth. No softness. Just stillness… and him.
And books.
Shelves and stacks of them. The smell of paper. Something dry. Unmoving.
I didn’t know where to stand. Or how to exist in that space.
And then—there was the gift.
A small, remote-controlled black poodle.
He placed it in my hands without explanation.
But he brought nothing for my siblings.
Not a thing.
And even as a child—you feel that.
When something isn’t right.
Even if you don’t yet understand why.
Later, I was told I looked like Valentina, my father’s mother. Waldemar’s wife.
More as I got older.
And I’ve gone back to that moment more times than I can count.
Because it doesn’t fit.
The man who could take a child from his mother…is also the man who chose one child… and not the others.
Why? I don’t know. And I’ve stopped trying to answer that.
Because what I understand didn’t come from him.
It came from my father. Because my father could have become that man.
Everything in his early life pointed him there.
Taken.
Left.
Told—clearly—that he wasn’t wanted.
And yet—He stayed.
He didn’t explain it.
He didn’t promise it.
He just… stayed.
There’s a sentence that tells you everything.
My grandfather left him in a boarding house when he was thirteen and said:
“Your mother didn’t want you. And neither do I.”
There are moments that split a life in two. That was one of them.
I don’t know everything about my grandfather. There are gaps that will never close. But I know enough.
Enough to understand that some people don’t know how to love without wounding.
And enough to see this clearly:
Whatever began with him…didn’t end the same way.
Because somewhere between being taken… and being left…
My father made a quiet decision: It would end with him.
For most of his life, one part of the story stayed missing.
A name.
A place.
A woman he was taken from—but never returned to.
Waldemar left behind confusion.
But he also left behind something else—A question that refused to disappear.
And years later… That question would lead us back to her.
P.S. Since sharing my father’s story, I’ve been hearing from readers in a way I didn’t expect.
One woman said she had to pull over while driving because she was crying. Another wrote, “It felt like I was reading my father’s life story.”
That’s when I realized—this isn’t just my family’s story. It’s something many of us carry in different ways.
The silence. The questions. The parts of a life we never fully got to understand. If this piece stirred something in you… there’s more to know.
It’s the heartbreaking story of my father’s eighty-year search to find his mother. It’s the heart-warming story of the brother he never knew he had, and the one final gift his mother left him that proved, after all those years of not knowing, she never stopped loving him.
If you’ve been thinking about reading it, now is the time.
Warmly,
Sandra
P.S. For a short time, I’ve lowered the price of The Search for Valentina Getsch—to $0.99 for the Kindle version. (This special Kindle pricing will last for the next seven days.)