「故事·听力」I Found My Dead Grandpa On Facebook. They Lied To Me!

I Found My Dead Grandpa On Facebook. They Lied To Me!

This is Lily, and this is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to her. She found out that one of her family's stories was a huge lie.

Lily has a really big family. Decades ago, her great grandfather came to the United States from Romania. Keeping family ties is kind of a national trait for them, but the main thing is that everybody loves each other a lot. Now they all live near each other in the same town, and get together for every holiday or just whenever they feel like it.

So between all of her aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas, there are very few people that Lily hasn't met. Some of them died young, one of her uncles moved to Europe and stayed there with his family (they did talk on the phone once), but all the others are nearby and they see each other almost every other week.

The only blind spot in Lily’s family tree is her dad’s father – her grandpa. And her family was not all that willing to talk about him. The one thing that she remembers always hearing was that he died in the war, but no one would even say which war that was.

But Lily didn’t take much interest in this until her first year of high school. It was early November, and Veteran's Day was coming up. Their history teacher invited them to talk about the war experiences of their families. And Lily thought to herself that she’d love to talk about her grandpa whom she’d never met.

When she got home and asked her dad, he got all annoyed and refused to talk. He said that stuff like that was personal and that she shouldn’t talk about it in class. That didn’t make much sense to her. And she saw the look on her dad’s face when he was saying it. Something wasn’t right.

So she went to ask some of her other relatives what had happened to him.

When Lily wouldn’t let them change the subject, all of them said basically the same thing, but the details were different. Aunt Angie said he was in the infantry, grandpa George said he was in aviation, while her grandma Anne said that she couldn’t remember. But what was more striking was that they didn’t even mention the same war. Two of them said it was Vietnam, while grandma Anne said it was Korea, which was not even, like, mathematically possible. And when she pointed out their contradictions, they said something like: “It was a long time ago, it’s hard to remember.”

No, wait a minute. Nothing was ever hard to remember when it came to her family’s history! Something. Was. Not. Right. And she was determined that she was going to figure out what.

So she started her own research. She looked through lots and lots of veteran's lists from Vietnam and Korea. All she had was his last name. And she found nothing.

She then made a couple of phone calls to some local memorial foundations. They looked through their archives and didn’t find any mention of him either. That was where she got even more excited. What if her grandpa was still ALIVE? And if that's true, then why did he live apart from the family?

After nights of googling, she was so desperate that she switched to searching on Facebook (obviously, that wasn't the most logical thing to do), but everyone she found with this surname was either one of her family members that she already knew or someone who just couldn’t be her missing grandpa – unless he had an anime profile pic.

Of course, she didn’t tell her parents or anyone else what she was doing. And nobody asked, thinking she had been satisfied with the answers they gave her.

A couple of weeks after Lily started her research, she was at the table at another family gathering. They were discussing some of their distant relatives that lived in Romania, and a thought struck her. What if she searched for their original last name, the one they had had before the family got it Americanized? 

She ran to her room, trying not to attract too much attention, and googled it. Most of the results were irrelevant, but one of the things she found was a Facebook page of a man in his 70s, who looked almost exactly like her dad. Wow. And his name was Alex.

She started to write a message to him. But what are you supposed to write in a situation like this? “Hey there, I’m your granddaughter from the family that cut all their ties with you?” That didn’t sound good.

Both profile pics he had were of him in front of his house, and she recognized the area. It was the other side of town; her friend Kelly lived there, so she’d been to that area a couple of times.

Of course, she was scared to go, but she was too excited not to. The next day, Lily left school early and got on the bus. Finding the house was harder than she thought, but she eventually did. It was small, simple, and pretty old.