Impossible

You know that feeling you get when you’ve finally met your mother and she gives you the relevant details to help you find your father like his name Christopher Hyland and his date of birth 6^th or 8^th September 1940 and his place of birth Dublin and his occupation telephone engineer and you go to Dublin to start the search et voila! there he is in the Register of Births Christopher Hyland born Dublin 6^th September 1940 and you think well this is going to be pretty straightforward you fool but when you follow all the leads up over the next nine years and there’s no trace of him anywhere births marriages deaths internet GPO overseas employees list GPO pensions records UK telephone directories letters to all 180+ Hylands in the Dublin telephone directory letter to local paper church records contact with illegal access to National Insurance database revealing nothing so much as nothing nothing and yet more nothing so you go back to Dublin to start all over again because you must have missed something but after four increasingly frustrating days of further despair you have a Eureka! moment because what if his mother died in childbirth which leads you to checking Deaths for the 3^rd quarter of 1940 might produce a lead and you find the impossible the absolutely totally unbelievably impossible truth but there it is in black and white like an anvil leaping out of the page and smashing you simultaneously in the face the guts the heart but there it is and you read the recorded death the actual death on the 10^th September 1940 in Dublin four days after he was born on 6^th September 1940 in Dublin the death the death of your father Christopher Hyland aged 4 days old wait what actually no really I mean what and you can’t quite believe what you’ve just stumbled across as you deduce that your father whatever his name is appears to have done a Day of the Jackal identity theft number for he seems to have assumed the identity of a dead child for reasons which must surely be nefarious but you don’t quite abandon your search and some time later quite a long time later you realise that you’ve now been searching for twenty six years and all you have are some insane conspiracy theories about a man who assumed the identity of a dead child came to England to work on telephone exchanges was he IRA was he a spy and during your weekly therapy sessions you slowly work towards the realisation that you are going to have accept that you will never ever never ever ever never ever know who your father is because there is literally nowhere else to look well you know that feeling right it’s quite shit really isn’t it?