The Difficult Miracle

A while ago, I wrote about the experience of finding out my birth father had died. As I said at the time, I didn't exactly know how to handle the situation.

What I didn't say at the time is that I tried to make the best of things by taking the opportunity to look up my birth-mother. I had her name - Laura - and I could have done this a while ago - it's just that after the official route to looking her up had closed, and after I'd gotten some satisfaction out of finding my birth-father instead, I had decided to let it be for the time being.

Death, however, has a way of casting a new light on things. In light of my birth-father's untimely death, it seemed time to take the further step of looking up Laura. And so I did, and I found her.

This is a very private matter for me and my family, so I'm not going to tell all here. But I do want to say a few words, because I've been incredibly blessed in so many ways, and if I can share some of the blessings that will be a good thing.

I was blessed once to be born at all. I was blessed again to have a birth-mother with the strength and conviction to offer me a better life, through adoption, than I likely would have had. I was blessed again - and it's a perpetual blessing - when my mom and dad picked me up at the Children's Aid in Ottawa and brought me to the shores of Georgian Bay, where they faithfully and lovingly raised me. They continue to love and guide me from their happy retirement home on the west coast, and none of this would be happening if not for them.

I was blessed again this spring, when I found Laura with a heartfelt letter, and got one back in return. And then two weeks ago came the difficult miracle: a ten-day real-life visit from Laura, a blessing upon many blessings.

I call it a difficult miracle because it's not an easy thing to do, meeting one another like that after 36 years. It was hard for me and it was hard for Laura, who was brave enough to take most of the risk by flying here from California. But we trusted each other, thanks to the communication we'd exchanged, and we did the work together. And so out of the difficulty came the miracle - the chance to meet and to get to know each other a little across the vast span of time and space.

There's lots more. It's a big deal for me. But this is what I'm ready to say in this space right now: that I have been blessed, and that I am grateful, and that I am a better person for all of this. And to the unknowable and indescribable forces that have directed my life, which I call "God" for lack of a better term, I say "thank you." Thank you for the gift of life, and for the continued learning and growing that has made my life so rich and meaningful.

I really appreciate it, more and more with each difficult and miraculous day.

Mourning a man I never knew

This is a picture of my biological father. He came into my life like the wind, and he left like a whisper. Now I'm mourning a man I never even knew.

In fact, I never even knew his name until a few years ago. I knew I was adopted, and I had a few paragraphs worth of information about my biological parents, and that was it. I had (and have) two great parents who raised me, so it wasn't that I lacked for love or family. But I lacked for information about my blood and my roots, and it was a big issue for me for most of my life.

In the summer of 2000, while at work at Discovery Channel, I got a call from Child Services, telling me that a search request for info about my origins had finally come up - eight years after I had placed it. Did I want them to proceed with the search? I said sure. I then had to choose one parent or the other for them to search for. I figured my biological mother would be more worried about me, so I picked her. My heart went crazy.

Three days later, they phoned back, again at work. They couldn't find her. I'll never forget that terrible sinking feeling - after all those years of waiting and wondering. Not to mention the hours of fruitless searching I had done myself, in the early days of the Internet. But they asked if I'd like to try again with a search for my father. I said yes.

It was only a day later when they called back. We found him, they said. We just put his name in Google, and there he was. He's a web guy, actually - that's why we found him so fast. We talked to him, and he's willing to talk to you. Are you up for it?

I was. And so after jumping through a few more official hoops, we emailed back and forth for a week or so, and finally, we spoke on the phone, maybe three times in all.

I can't even describe what that was like - intense, starkly honest, humorous and deep. Wild like the wind. Here was a man who had made most of the same mistakes I had, only far worse. Depression, drugs, divorce. Family problems. Anger management. Women. Through it all, a ruthless, relentless pursuit of who he felt he was. Who he needed to be. An artist. A seeker after spirit. A man. Not an easy man, or an admirable man perhaps, but man who was earnestly trying to write his own story. In his own blood, if need be.

I'll always appreciate his openness and his honesty in those difficult but exhilarating calls. Neither one of us was much for small talk, and we went right to the big stuff. What his life was like. Who my mother had been, in the details he could remember. How I wound up in an adoption agency in Ottawa. He hid nothing, as far as I could tell, although his stories sometimes conflicted.

I didn't hold anything back either. I was never angry with him about my having been given up for adoption, but I insisted that he honour my experience. It wasn't easy for me, handling the big hole in my life. He had a hard time understanding that. He said his own kids had it a lot worse than me. He was right, but that wasn't for him to say. I heard it from them.

He was a difficult acquaintance, potentially a dangerous friend for me. I was grateful to have had to wait 8 years for the search to come up; had I met him in my own wild years I might have followed his ways, and it might have done me in. As it was, I became convinced that I had somehow been living out his karma, rather than my own, for much of my time on this planet. Such was our shared darkness.

I was glad that we came in contact when I already knew that I'd had the best life possible under the circumstances. Once we had gotten to know one another, I also knew that I was terribly glad not to have been his son. Our greetings and our wisdom and our weird ways acknowledged and exchanged, we pretty much parted. I knew he was out there. He knew where I was. There's been no contact for a few years.

And then yesterday, in the most trivial way, I discovered that he was dead. I was at work, on the Web, looking for some information on the original (Polish) spelling of his last name, and wham! the first thing that came up was a memorial page. He died last March, aged 54.

I never knew him in life. I don't know him now in death. But I've seen the picture of his face on that memorial website, and I saw my own eyes looking back at me. In the space between us lies a grave, and over that grave hovers a feeling of sad wonderment that I must call "grief."