Congratulations, it’s a boy. More specifically, a nephew.
His name is Tim Tobyne and he’s 50 and lives in Vermont. His mother, Sheila Tobyne, calls him Timmy, and his aunts and uncles call him a newly discovered miracle.
Some of those family members, the younger ones, didn’t know Timmy existed, while the older siblings never got to know him once their brother – Timmy’s father, a man named Phillip Desmarais – was killed during the Vietnam War.
Teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood and the chaos of war create confusing scenarios like this. One day you’re Desmarais, 18, barely out of Concord High School, barely aware of who you really are, and the next, you’re in a war, fighting and dying and never seeing your son, who’s born back here the same month you’re killed.
Meanwhile, the mother of your child, Sheila Tobyne, gives birth to that boy named Timmy, moves away and builds a life, for herself and her son. Timmy, of course, never sees his dad, and Sheila’s marriage later to a good man who adopts her son cushions the blow for Timmy when he hears about his late father.
And then time passes. Old war wounds fade. New families grow. Connections got lost.
The magnet for this discovery was my column in March detailing the 50th anniversary of Desmarais’s death. Sheila Tobyne’s sister, Sandra Cote, read the piece and just happened to live in Concord, making it easy to find Desmarais’s siblings – who also lived in the area – and alert Tobyne.
They all met in Penacook recently, at Sherry Bisson’s house. She’s the youngest of the seven Desmarais children, just 2 years old when her brother died in Vietnam. She knew nothing about Timmy until recently. Knew nothing at all.
That’s why Bisson wrote me a letter shortly after my first column, telling me, “After many weeks of conversations … we were able to meet Tim for the first time. It was both an emotional and a special day for all of us.”
“I was nervous and scared,” Timmy said by phone from his home in Lyndonville, Vt. “I should not have been, and after a half-hour it was like family, like I never left. We connected and kept talking.”
Timmy is barrel-chested, a commanding presence, with a big red birds-nest like goatee. Yet he laughed a lot on the phone, and his mother laughed a lot in person, in Cote’s kitchen in Concord. Sheila attended Rundlett Junior High and Concord High School. She quickly felt something for Phillip Desmarais, the handsome kid who worked at the deli counter at a local grocery store.
“I fell in love head over heels,” Sheila told me. “I was young, and it was my first love.”
She was 15; he was 17.
They went to the movies and Hampton Beach. They rode around in Desmarais’s 1957 Chevy convertible. She got pregnant in June of 1967 and Desmarais joined the Marines just a few months later, shortly after graduating from Concord High.
“He went and it was scary because I was pregnant,” Sheila said. “I spoke to Phil on the phone when he left. He had written letters to me. I wish I had saved them.”
I asked what her parents thought of her pregnancy. “What do you think?” Sheila answered with a laugh. “To have a young girl pregnant, my mother was devastated. My father took it a lot better. I was scared.”
She remained in Concord during most of her pregnancy. Desmarais’s younger siblings had no idea their brother would soon be a father, but the older kids knew, including Linda Lassonde of Tilton, who’s now 70 and was a year ahead of Phillip in school.
“(Sheila) used to come to the house on the porch and I would be out there with my mother sometimes,” Lassonde said by phone. “I didn’t know her well. I was happy because I thought they could get married.”
Before Timmy was born, Sheila moved back with family to her roots in Lancaster. She said she hoped to send a photo of Timmy to his dad, but that never happened.
Timmy was born on March 5, 1968; Desmarais died 23 days later, hit by mortar fragments. He was 19. “Not enough time to get the photo out,” Sheila said.
And then, a vacuum of sorts. There were connections to Concord on both sides, but after the death of Desmarais and the move by Sheila 100 miles away, two families that had lost someone dear lost each other.
Sheila’s current husband adopted Timmy and Sheila’s other two children through another marriage, and that’s led to a strong family unit. That made it easier for Timmy to accept the reality that his biological father had been killed in Vietnam.
Timmy has a book about the Marines with a picture of his father tucked inside, sent to Sheila from Desmarais. “I remember crying at the time,” Timmy said.
He’s a former machinist who now drives a forklift for a dairy company. He’s married with a son. His mother lives 30 miles away. Other relatives, it turns out, live here.
Bisson emerged as the epicenter for this new connection. As Sheila noted, “Sherry’s the glue.”
She and her husband hosted a barbecue in May at their home in Penacook. Timmy met aunts and uncles and cousins he never knew he had. Some thought he looked like his father. Some thought he looked like one of his uncles. Some thought his son resembled Desmarais’s Marine photo.
All thought it was a big day. A special day. They plan to do it again soon.
“To be able to actually see a part of my brother was a feeling I can never put to paper,” Bisson wrote to me. “And for his son to see photos of my brother and look through the scrapbook to help complete a piece that he never knew was incredible.”