That is a different kind of confirmation. Lorraine could tell him what she knew. She could not tell him what June had felt, or what Ethel May had thought across thirty-seven years of raising a grandchild as a son. Those interiors were gone.
The specific loss imposed by those two deaths is worth naming directly: the questions that would have been most important — the human, relational questions, the questions about experience and feeling and choice — were the questions that could no longer be asked. The documentary questions — who was biologically whose, when were decisions made, who knew — could still be pieced together from records and from people like Lorraine who were still living. But the questions about the experience of the people at the center of it were permanently closed.
Nicholson later expressed what has been described as a kind of gratitude that both women were already dead when he found out. Not because he did not want to know — he clearly did, and he sought confirmation rather than dismissing the reporter’s call — but because the conversation he would have had to have with them, if they had been alive, was a conversation with no available script. What do you say to the woman you called Mom when you learn she was your grandmother? What do you say to the woman you called sis when you learn she was your mother? What do those conversations sound like, and who comes out of them intact?
He did not have to find out. By 1974, those conversations were no longer possible. The facts were available, through the reporter and through Lorraine. The explanations were not.