Everybody was surprised (of course), some making their adjustments to their new expanded family with joy or detecting some meaning missing in their life in the new relationships, and some not. I'm assuming everybody could've gone on and simply continued to collect smiling family pictures, but knowledge has a tendency to disrupt "belief systems" within narratives we may have been comfortable with (or simply got used to telling ourselves was the whole truth) for a long time.
I suspect most of the people involved here (at least those attempting to preserve the integrity of their life decisions) were not going to ever discuss those decisions and events having taken place so many years ago. If anything, the secrecy in which they initiated these events only became deeper as time passed (the mother knew of her older daughter's genetic testing and had to at least have some suspicion of what was going to eventually be revealed).
Of course what intrigues me with these things is what were these people actually thinking (and feeling) inside? Mr. Hurwitz (like most guys), I think, was simply indulging in an opportunity (old horrible saying I once heard, "There's no such thing as a married man a 100 miles from home".). The opportunity presented itself and he indulged (with the additional benefit of burnishing what I'm guessing was probably his politically liberal "bona fides" (but again, I'm just guessing)). Now for Mrs. Hurwitz, there's an interesting question which caused quite a falling out between her daughters. Who was Mrs. Hurwitz's "true love"? Was it actually the father of her second daughter, Hy Greenberg? And after Hy informed the future Mrs. Hurwitz he wasn't really interested in being a married family man, did Mrs. Hurwitz reconnect with Hy out of a last desperate hope he might reconsider and deliver her to happiness, or was it simply a comfortable dalliance conceived (with other things) in a period of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Mrs. Hurwitz, no longer with us, is certainly not indulging anyone, including her daughters, with answers to any of these questions. Ironically, Hy (the only surviving biological parent of this extended family) seems to be quite delighted to have been reconnected with a daughter he never desired (or at least stated he never desired years ago).
Now the occasional reader I have may simply conclude I'm going off on some wild rant again (and honestly this is not out of the realm of possibility) and simply state this is a case of a wildly dysfunctional couple whose life as a couple simply reflected that dysfunction. And yet, Facebook today has a group for individuals for which Ancestry.com has labeled their genetic testing results as NEP (I love acronyms), which stands for "Not Expected Parents" so I guess this happens more often than I would have initially guessed before seeing this article. As for the Hurwitz's, they were certainly parents of the 4 children they raised, but I do wonder about those matters of the heart, as do their children. Was their initial union conceived as a best available choice? Were they reaching for achievement of an imagined life whose probability appeared to be diminishing with time? Did they reach a point where the rendering of care to their charges was enough? Did they take comfort and meaning from their long union? Did they, for lack of any better, or sufficient, term, actually care for each other?
Sylvia Plath, a talented American poet, who suffered greatly from depression and committed suicide at age 30 (as did her son some years later as these things seem to propagate across families) is credited with authoring the line comprising the title of this entry. I was familiar with the first part (having been used by Woody Allen for justifying his pursuit of his adopted daughter), but not so much with the second part which I think is just as true. We care about what we want and the caring follows the wanting. I think that observation explains a lot about a wide variety of people's behavior (and not just the relationship stuff, and political stuff, although I figure I'll use this to return back to a draft I started on risk management and risk remediation some months ago because it all depends upon how you perceive hazards, their associated harms and what you "want" to advocate/care for because it's what you "want").
James Joyce, whose work I admire so much, had a wild set of letters he wrote to his lover, and then wife, Nora. I'm going to include a link to them here, but will note they're wildly obscene (in the best sense of the word) for those who would rather not read such private correspondence. However, in all their obscene correspondence (and you can sense Nora's very able matching responses although not recorded) there is the charming sense of a man wildly in love with his once and future wife who just couldn't wait to get home. My understanding is that passion continued throughout their life together.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/02/james-joyces-love-letters-dirty-little-fuckbird/
Was James and Nora's love heavily based on "eros" and perhaps not so much "agape"? Probably. Do you suspect James and Nora's caring perhaps somewhat eclipsed anything ever felt by the Hurwitz's? Ah, I think so. Rest in peace, both James and Nora, and may we all have luck sufficient to find such "soul mates" in our lives.
