Courtesy CNN.com:
By Chelsea J. Carter, CNN
(CNN) -- It was a dark secret. The kind that destroys lives, devastates families and decimates faith.
Nobody shared it with Valerie Spruill while her husband was alive. For years after his death, she heard bits of the story. It was something about an absentee father, something about her husband.
None of it made sense, she said. That's not until her uncle finally told her what no one else had: She had unknowingly married the father she never knew.
"It is devastating. It can destroy you," Spruill told CNN late Thursday by telephone. "It almost did."
Spruill, 60, of Doylestown, Ohio, went public with her story this month, first published in the Akron Beacon Journal, with the hopes that it would help others facing what seem like insurmountable problems.
It's a story that has gone viral, attracting attention as faraway as Australia and India where the questions are always the same, she says: How could that happen?
MORE
By Chelsea J. Carter, CNN
(CNN) -- It was a dark secret. The kind that destroys lives, devastates families and decimates faith.
Nobody shared it with Valerie Spruill while her husband was alive. For years after his death, she heard bits of the story. It was something about an absentee father, something about her husband.
None of it made sense, she said. That's not until her uncle finally told her what no one else had: She had unknowingly married the father she never knew.
"It is devastating. It can destroy you," Spruill told CNN late Thursday by telephone. "It almost did."
Spruill, 60, of Doylestown, Ohio, went public with her story this month, first published in the Akron Beacon Journal, with the hopes that it would help others facing what seem like insurmountable problems.
It's a story that has gone viral, attracting attention as faraway as Australia and India where the questions are always the same, she says: How could that happen?
MORE