© CNNValerie Spruill
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?
It's a question that Spruill said she has been grappling with since she first learned the truth in 2004, six years after her husband Percy Spruill died.
"I don't know if he ever knew or not. That conversation didn't come up," she said. "I think if he did know, there is no way he could have told me."
She confirmed that her husband was indeed her father through a DNA test, hair taken from one of his brushes.
The aftermath of the secret was devastating emotionally -- and physically, Spruill suffered two strokes and was diagnosed with diabetes.
All of it, she believes was brought on by learning the family secret.