My only brother tragically died young but left a legacy – although I didn’t know I had a niece for 32 years

It was 25 years ago this month that I got the worst phone call of my life. My aunt Margaret, who was like a grandmother to me, was sobbing when she rang to tell me that Chris, my only immediate sibling, had died suddenly and unexpectedly in hospital following what we thought was a routine exploratory operation to find out why he was losing breath to the point of unconsciousness.

Despite being a non-smoker and an otherwise fit and healthy type, his skin looked grey and he had aged considerably when I saw him a few months earlier. I even joked that his clean living wasn’t doing him any favours, never realising that would be the last time I would see him.

He was just 36 and had only been married a few months when he succumbed to what the subsequent post-mortem examination revealed was an extremely rare congenital condition that attacked his lungs and would eventually destroy his other organs. There was no cure.

And while he died a cruel and premature death at the prime of his life, I considered it a blessing at the time that he didn’t orphan any children. We had both endured the heartache of losing a parent after our mother Jean died of cancer, aged just 54, when we were still teenagers.

Chris’s death, less than 20 years later, was tragic and took me a long time to accept. And while I, like aunt Margaret, never regretted not having children of my own, it did sadden me to realise that I would never have a niece or nephew and, ultimately, I would be the end of the line of my immediate family.

Or so I thought.

Fast forward to last November, when I was scrolling through my work emails and an unfamiliar name popped up under the heading ‘unusual question’.

I didn’t pay much attention at first, since it’s not unusual for journalists to get random emails out of the blue. But this one sent a shiver down my spine.

The writer, from my native Canada, asked if I was related to Christopher Ian Bray. I was immediately suspicious, thinking it was a sick joke or some kind of online phishing scam. After I responded with a wary email asking why, she replied: “I am looking for family history on my father. His obituary read that he had a sister named Allison Bray and at the time of his death she was in Winnipeg.”

I almost collapsed. I had lived in Winnipeg, Canada before I moved to Ireland at the start of the new millennium to begin a new life.

My head was swimming. Like myself, Chris was ambivalent about having children and never even mentioned wanting to start a family, so the thought that he had fathered a child, let alone out of wedlock, never even occurred to me.

But when she emailed an old photo of him from the late 1980s, when he was dating her mother while on a military training course at a Canadian Forces base in Ontario, I knew it had the ring of truth.

This was way before people used email routinely, let alone social media, and as far as I know, there are no photos of him anywhere out there in cyberspace.

She then sent photos of herself as an adult and a child and the family resemblance was eerie. I compared baby pictures of her with those of my brother at the same age and they looked almost identical. I also noticed she has the same eyebrows that both my brother and myself inherited from my mother.

I barely slept that night. The thought that my late brother had left a daughter as his legacy had me equally shocked and delighted, knowing a part of him is still alive and that I might have a niece after all.

Still, I wasn’t proud of the fact that he had walked away from his pregnant girlfriend and left her to raise Kateri, now a 32-year-old woman, on her own, even though he was young and perhaps just chose to bury his head in the sand. And as far as I know, perhaps he went to his grave not knowing he had a child.

Still, I was sceptical. While I’m not rich, it’s not unheard of for scam artists to target people over the internet. So I was wary, despite her being adamant about not looking for money. But once the shock wore off, we arranged a telephone chat a couple of days later and spoke for hours like we were old friends.

While I have no problem chatting to total strangers – it’s my job, after all – my first impression was that she was either an incredibly convincing con woman or someone who was genuinely interested in getting to know her father’s history and side of the family. If nothing else, I reasoned, she wanted to learn about the family’s medical history, should she have children or for her own health reasons.

I chose to believe the latter and after subsequent phone chats and email exchanges, I was convinced she was genuine.

But was she really my niece?

I arranged for us to take a DNA test, insisting that I send out the swabs to prevent them from being doctored. She had no problem with this, another good sign.

I sent the sample out in November but due to Covid mail delays, it didn’t arrive in Canada until the day before what would have been Chris’s birthday in late January.

We decided to celebrate his birthday doing our swabs. In the meantime, we exchanged more photos, including a recent one of her taken in Canada and one of me at the Winnipeg Folk Festival when I was around the same age.

I sent them on to friends and they were shocked to see how much we look alike. One friend said he even thought she was me.

We’re both tall, we both have the same hair, long legs and arms and piano-player fingers, as well as other physical traits and similar interests. Like my aunt Margaret and myself, we had an uncanny intuitive connection between us that I jokingly call my ‘Braydar’.

We were on tenterhooks for months. Then the results came back stating a 97.7pc probability of a match.

We are now looking forward to meeting up in Canada once we can travel freely again. If all goes well, I hope to have the same close relationship with Kateri as I had with my aunt Margaret, who lived to be almost 100.

But unaware to me or anyone else in my family at the time, Kateri had been seeking out her father for a long time.

She was actually able to track me down thanks to a photo of me in the Irish Independent, accompanying a story I had written about car insurance hikes.

“I had always known that I had a dad out there somewhere,” she said.

“I had a picture, stories from my mom, a name and a birthday. It was not much but it was something. A large part of me hoped that it would just be a matter of clicking a button or asking around and all of a sudden I would have the missing pieces to my life. The answers to the questions that no one else could answer.”

She starting searching online in 2018 for clues but came up blank.

“I started to think again about the list of possibilities that I had come up with the year before,” she said. “After a lot of self-reassurance that even if the ‘worst’ happened I would be OK, it was worth it to take a shot. Even if he had an entire life that he did not want to share with me, I will know my answers.”

She eventually found an online reference to his obituary.

“My heart sank as I read the words because even though it is only a glimpse into the life that he lived, I had learned enough from stories from my mom to know that this was him. My dad passed away when I was seven and I never got to know him or learn if he wanted to know me,” she said.

“Part of me was a little relieved knowing now that there was nothing I could have done at an earlier age to try and build a relationship with Chris, to find Dad. A part of me was disappointed for the same reasons and more.

“I still felt incomplete. I had thought that knowing I would never be able to speak to him would have given me a sense of peace, acceptance or understanding.

“I could not have been further from the truth. I grieved. Although that might sound silly since I never knew him, I did. I had to mourn the loss of decades of hopes, the loss of a dream. Worst of all, I had to relive learning that not only had I never had a dad, but I never would.”

Then the pandemic hit and changed everything.

“Chris came up in conversation a lot during the summer of 2020, full of reminders of what is important to you and what you have to lose and miss out on if you do not follow your heart.”

Kateri eventually came across the photo of me in the Irish Independent and “could not let go of the feeling that you were my connection”.

She was spurred on to investigate further.

“I got up the courage the next morning at work after more self-reassurance, telling myself the worst that would happen is that I hit another dead end.

“My pieces are falling in place and my questions and hopes are no longer lost. I have found something more than just a part of me. Thanks to a picture, a name and a birthday.”

But the story doesn’t end there.

When Kateri began her intrepid search, little did she know that she would not only track down an aunt in Ireland, but an uncle in the UK.

That uncle is my half-brother, Stewart, from my father’s previous marriage before he emigrated to Canada from England after the second world war.

While I will never know why my father kept his son a secret from us kids for so long, I was determined to meet him after Chris died and arranged a visit while I was backpacking around Europe.

He rang me in Canada to say he’d be delighted to meet. Then the following day, a year to the day after Chris’s death, my father Ian died so my first phone call to Stewart was to break the bad news.

But we still met. It was like seeing a ghost when he met me at the train station in Kent, looking like my father did 20 years earlier.

But I’m happy to say we have now made up for lost time and Stewart, his wife, Alison (whose name she recently learned was spelled the same as mine on her birth certificate – another weird twist), their son and daughter have welcomed me into the fold. They are just as over the moon to have a new addition to the family as I am.

As the saying goes, God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.

Irish Independent