On an average Tuesday morning nine months ago, I decided to check the messages linked to the email address on my author website. I had deleted the spam the day before, so when I opened the inbox there was only one email. Its subject line: “Trying to find information on family history.”
I figured it was probably spam too, but I opened it anyway.
“Hello,” it began. “My name is Rachel, my mother is Tiffiny. I found you through lots and lots of searching, and I was wondering if your boyfriend that you write about is James Beaman? My mother found through ancestry testing that he was her father.”
“Oh my gosh,” I wrote. “It’s so amazing to get your email!”
I told her that I was engaged to Jim Beaman in 1990 until he died on Jan. 3, 1991. I didn’t tell her that he died by suicide, that he was funny and mercurial and had a drug problem, that his death changed my life, and I got a lot of money for a memoir I wrote about that and publishing that book also changed my life.
I went downstairs in a daze, tears in my eyes. I wasn’t feeling sad or reliving the trauma of my fiancé’s suicide. I was weeping with joy, because Jim Beaman had been gone for 36 years, and I had just learned that there was still a piece of him left.
Jim’s daughter, Tiffiny, was now 55, with three daughters of her own. She was conceived when the late, great love of my life was in San Diego on his way to Vietnam at the age of 20 and had a fling with Tiffiny’s mother. He never knew he had a daughter, and for most of her life his daughter only knew his name.
I got an email from Tiffiny shortly after hearing from her daughter.
“I’ve been searching for my father for my whole life,” she wrote.
“I’ve been searching for him ever since he died,” I replied.
When I wrote that sentence, I felt how true it was. I remembered it all: The longing for him after he died. The searching, like the long beam of a World War II searchlight arcing across the dark sky, knowing he must be out there and at the same time knowing I wouldn’t be able to find him. And then I thought I did find him for a while, sort of. And then the desire to find him got beaten out of me by a trip to the psych ward, and eventually, by the passing of time. The searchlight got dimmer until it went out.
As I lay on the daybed in my study it all came back to me. Not the longing and the searching but the memory of the longing and the searching, the old sorrow, the painful emptiness of the place Jim occupied in the world. I could feel the hole in Tiffiny’s life too where her biological father should have been.
I felt amazed and astonished, gratified and satisfied, to learn that I had a compatriot, a fellow citizen in the land of no Jim. We had both been searching to fill the Jim-shaped space in our lives, and now we had found him, not really but sort of, because we had found each other.
We made a date to talk on Zoom. I thought about what I could tell her: how witty and smart her father was, how there was a magic that lingered around him. I found some photos in a firebox that I keep under my daybed — they were among his stuff that I acquired after he died — and I picked out 10 to show Tiffiny. I held the pictures up to the screen during our Zoom meeting, and then I took photos of the pictures and texted them to her.
Tiffiny lives two-and-a-half hours away and drove to Iowa City to meet me in person a couple of weekends after our Zoom. When she walked in and stood in my kitchen, I felt an instant connection. She didn’t look a lot like Jim, but she had his deep-set blue eyes.
“I brought you some chocolate sugar cookies,” she said, and took it cheerfully when I told her I couldn’t eat them because I was gluten free.
We sat on my couch and went through the pictures of Jim. “My mother told me my father was the handsomest man in the world,” she said wistfully. “All my life I just wanted to see a picture of him.”
I thought: Well, you’ve hit the jackpot. I liked her immediately, and it made me happy to introduce her to her father. We talked all day about Jim, about her, about how I was so in love with Jim that I couldn’t let him go after he died. She stayed overnight, and we had breakfast the next morning, and then she went home.
During her visit, my memories of Jim, maybe the ghost of Jim, seemed clear and present. But since then, he has mostly slipped away again. Except I have those photos of him on my iPhone now, and whenever I text Tiffiny, there they are. Most of them don’t bring back memories or fill me with a sense of him. They don’t even seem like pictures of someone who was once incredibly important to me. But there’s one picture that feels different.
Jim told me that a priest at the Catholic school he attended once said to him, “There’s nothing I could say about you that wouldn’t be true.”
I know what the priest meant. There were many different versions of Jim. And you can see it in the pictures, taken at different times in his life: the toughness and the sweetness, the kindness and the meanness, the good and the bad and everything in between. But in this picture what you see is pure Jim, the real Jim.
It’s a picture I took myself while sitting in the rocking chair in his apartment as he stood beside me looking down. The ceiling over his head looks pale blue, his eyes are pale blue, his clothes are pale blue — he’s wearing a gray sweater vest that looks blue, and under the vest is a blue-and-green plaid flannel shirt. It looks like he’s looking down at me from a blue place.
The color of the afterlife is blue. Or so I thought during my searching-for-him-in-the-afterlife phase, because I had a couple of blue dreams that seemed like messages from him. There was a crackly static-electricity feeling in those dreams and the color in them was almost exactly the color in this photo.
Which is how I came to think that this was a picture of him looking at me from the afterlife. Not literally, of course, but in the sort of woo-woo way I thought about things after he died. The picture is a little out of focus, which added to my fantasy that it was somehow linked to the mysterious. But mostly it was the look in his eyes.
What you see in his face in this picture is love. Humor. Peace. Affection. He looks like he has come to rest in himself. And although this photo was taken decades ago, there’s something timeless and alive about it.
It makes me think that love goes on, that maybe the past and present and future are all happening simultaneously, that what I wanted to be true could be true — that maybe there is no death.
And it makes me realize that although in many ways I have forgotten about Jim, I never really let go of him.
I didn’t say any of this to Tiffiny when she came to my house. And of course, there isn’t room for anything like that when we text each other, as we do every few days. We talk about our weekends, the weather, what she baked.
I feel like I should say that after meeting Tiffiny I did the hard work of letting Jim go. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But the truth is, I don’t want to let him go. I recognize that he is gone, but that’s not the same as letting him go. And now with Tiffiny here, my newfound spirit daughter who holds his DNA in hers, his eyes in her eyes, he is more present than ever, for both of us.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Mary Allen, a writer and writing coach in Iowa City, is the author of the memoir “The Rooms of Heaven” and a just-completed novel set in the afterlife.
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