by Diane Burke
My new church family knew I was grieving over the loss of my husband. They sent cards. Some of the members dropped by now and then for unannounced visits just to say hi and see if I needed anything. But on the whole, hours would stretch into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, and the reality that I would be facing the rest of my life alone began to set deep into my bones.
I don’t handle alone well.
I had been the oldest of seven children. The youngest ones had always been my shadow. I left that home for one of my own and spent almost two decades raising children. I also cared for two mother-in-laws at various times in my life until they passed. In 1999 my sister and I moved my parents to Florida. We helped care for my mother until her death in 2003 and my father’s death in 2005. My sister moved out of state after my father’s death. Bill was the only person I had left in my life on a daily basis and now, in 2007, he was gone, too.
I remember after my divorce from Danny and my remarriage to Bill, and long after I’d worked to put myself through college, having a conversation with my mother. In the course of that conversation, she’d told me that she’d always thought that I was a strong person, that I was a survivor, one of the few compliments she had bestowed on me in our years together. She was right. I had survived a multitude of tough breaks and bad choices. But being alone, I wasn’t strong anymore.
My depression had no end in sight.
Three months had passed since Bill’s death and it was the Christmas season. The day I decided to take my life I had made plans. I was going to put my dogs in a kennel. I was going to pack a bag, drive to the beach at dusk when the beach would be empty and the lifeguard gone, lay things out on the deserted sand so it would look like an accident, and then swim into the ocean. I love the ocean and couldn’t think of a better way to die. I intended to swim as far and for as long as I possibly could so that even if I panicked and changed my mind, I wouldn’t have the strength or the energy to swim back.
I sat down at my computer to type my youngest son, David, a letter. I knew my death would be the most difficult for him. He was so invested in healing our relationship, in seeing that I found my way to God. I wanted to make sure he understood there was nothing he could have done to stop me. I strongly felt I needed to explain to him how much I was suffering and how desperately I needed to stop this pain. I’d lived with pain, disappointment, betrayal, and loss my entire life and had been strong enough to survive. But now I was facing the daunting task of living with myself and I hated myself too much to do that.
Depressed, suicidal people are selfish. They don’t think of anyone at the time but themselves. They can’t see further than their pain and they don’t have the energy to search for an alternative solution to their situation or sometimes even the energy to ask for help. They just want the pain to end and they don’t care how it does. I was one of those people.
When I sat down at my computer, I checked my email. It’s something I do automatically and I didn’t give it any conscious thought. Until I saw the long list of emails waiting for me.
I didn’t recognize any of the email addresses but I was intrigued and opened them. What happened next took my breath away.
The emails had come from people all over the country. I specifically remember places like North Carolina, Texas, and even one from Washington state, places I had never been. Not one name was familiar. I had never met even one of these people and to this day I still haven’t.
But they saved my life.
They were all writers who had heard about the loss of my husband back in September on the various loops online that we all frequent and now that the holidays were here and they knew I was facing my first holiday season as a widow, I must have been on their mind.
And each and every email had a common thread. They read:
“God spoke to my heart and told me to contact you in this hour of pain …”
“It came upon my heart to contact you and let you know in this difficult time that you are not alone.”
“Holiday seasons are always the worst. My prayers are with you on this first Christmas without your husband. I will keep you in my prayers.”
“You are not alone. When you feel beaten and so down that there is no where to go, look up.”
And the emails continued. More than a dozen of them. Encouraging me. Uplifting me. Reminding me that I was not alone and that God was beside me every step of the way through this dark and difficult time in my life.
It worked.
I distinctly remember sitting at my computer, tears flowing down my face, sighing heavily and speaking out loud.
“Okay, God. We’ll try it your way. I can’t handle my life anymore. This ship is sinking. So I’m going to move over and let you take the wheel. Help me, Lord. Please, please help me.”
I’m not going to lie and say that everything instantly improved or that I never shed another tear or that I never had another depressing day.
But every day after that one was better than the one before.
Steve
In 2005, I moved my family from New Jersey to the South in pursuit of a lucrative job opportunity. It was a major decision and one I would regret multiple times over the years, despite it working out well for all of us.
I moved my wife away from her large and close-knit extended family. I moved my children away from their older brother and sister, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their maternal grandparents, their friends, and their school.
I’m grateful for the job. It has provided me with a good living that, in turn, has allowed me to live in a bigger house and provide a better quality of life for my family than I ever would have been able to afford if I had remained in New Jersey. It is providing me with a lucrative pension so my wife, Barb, and I can have a financially safe and comfortable retirement. None of it came without cost. But isn’t that what life is? Compromise? It all comes down to give and take and how much of each you can live with.
My adoptive parents sold their business, moved to the same state, and bought a house a short commute from our home. My wife flew back to New Jersey several times a year to visit her family and, occasionally, they came to us. My children adjusted to their new schools, their new lives, and made new friends.
Everything should have been ideal.
But it wasn’t.
I never could shake the feeling that I had made a major mistake in moving away from New Jersey. I grew depressed and moody and complained on many occasions that I thought we should pack up and move back.
Barbara, besides being my wife, the mother of my children, and the love of my life, is also my anchor. She understands me better than any other human being on Earth and loves me deeply despite my flaws and short-comings. She is the voice of reason when I tune out the world and am not thinking reasonably myself.
Every time I complained about the move, she’d put on her anchor cap. She’d point out to me that no matter how much we might like to return to New Jersey, it wouldn’t be a realistic move. We could never provide the same lifestyle back there that we were giving our children here. She also, being more spiritual than me, would point out that everything in life happens for a reason.
“Steve,” she said. “I don’t know why we’re here. We may never know or understand why we’re here. But I believe that God put us here for a reason and in the end it will all work out for the good.”
Little did I know at the time that just a couple of years later I would discover just how right my wife had been. If I had remained in New Jersey and never moved, then my relationship with my original mother when I met her would have been markedly different. We would have seen one another once or twice a year at best instead of the frequency we see each other now simply because of finances and distance. Yeah, everything happens for a reason. I just didn’t know it at the time.
In the meantime, I lived my life. I went to work, took care of the house, raised my kids, spent time with my family. But I wasn’t completely happy. I had an emptiness inside that I
kept thinking was connected to the New Jersey move. I let it affect my mood. It got so bad that my wife and kids began buying me t-shirts with a variety of sayings but the gist of it all was that the wearer was a grumpy person.
I wish it wasn’t true about me but, looking back, I have to admit it was. My family put up with a lot from me for a very long time. For years, I blamed my unhappiness on working in the catering business, a business I hated and felt trapped in. Then I blamed the move to another state. I took my family from the only place I’d ever called home and the only people I’d ever known as family and I saw that as the culprit.
As true as these excuses might be, I never acknowledged that it was possible there might be an additional cause. I never admitted aloud to anyone, and truthfully not even to myself, that there was something missing deep inside me. A sense of identity. A sense of belonging. A knowledge of who I was and where I belonged in this world. That missing piece hurt. It hurt like a wound that wouldn’t heal and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
So, yeah, I guess I deserved the grumpy shirts.
A few years after our move, I think it was about 2008 or 2009, I’m not sure which, I was sitting in the living room with my family watching television when a new show came on. It was called The Locator. The show didn’t last very long on the airwaves but even in its short lifespan it had made an indelible impact on me.
The show was hosted by a man whose mother had been adopted. He set out to help her find her biological family and did. Then, he decided to host a show and try to do the same thing for other families.
One night I was watching one of the episodes about an adoptee that was being reunited for the first time with his biological family. As I watched, I saw a room full of blood relatives gather together to meet and greet him.
Of course, I knew the situation was staged for television and geared to create the highest emotional response for the ratings. Logically, I understood how things like that work.
But when the adoptee walked into the room, when he saw his biological family for the first time, when he was greeted and hugged and welcomed by a room full of strangers, but strangers that belonged to him, his blood, his relatives, his clan—it was like I had been hit by a brick. Watching that episode was the first time that any real raw emotion I had been keeping inside, either voluntarily or involuntarily, came out.
Tears burned my eyes. Emotions I had never even realized existed inside of me sprang to the surface with such force I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand the power and force of these emotions, just that this show had somehow shaken me to my core. Not wanting to embarrass myself in front of my children by crying, I got up and walked into the kitchen.
My wife quickly followed.
I couldn’t really understand at that moment why I was feeling the way I did.
My wife put her hand on my shoulder.
I looked at her and saw tears in her eyes, too.
“It’s time, Steve.” She smiled at me. “You need to find your mother.”
Chapter
9
Diane
Life changed forever for me those final days of 2007.
I began attending Crossroads Calvary Chapel on a regular basis and learned and grew in my faith from the inspirational bible teachings of Pastor David Sharp.
My son, David, became a loving pest as he pushed and pressured me to get back into my writing and to begin attending my romance chapter meetings again.
My son, Dan, married and the father of three wonderful boys, helped open a tech business with a friend and was doing well. They actually did some events like The Oprah Show and once did the tech work at Radio City Music Hall.
In 2008, I entered the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense contest for unpublished authors. I was one of five finalists. My son, David, encouraged me to go to the RWA conference where the award would be announced. It was being held in San Francisco. I had never traveled alone before. I was nervous and, at first, reluctant. But with a gentle push from both my son and my writing peers in the Volusia chapter, I boarded a plane and headed for San Francisco.
I had a wonderful time. I quickly discovered that there are no strangers at a RWA conference, only romance writers who are open to quickly becoming friends. I met my future critique partner and friend, Kit Wilkinson, there. I met two women from Canada who I still correspond with today. I never had to sit at an empty table and I never ate a meal alone.
I rode a trolley car for the first time in my life. I took a boat ride out to Alcatraz prison and I sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Oh yes, and I took first place in the short inspirational category romance division of the Daphne du Maurier contest.
Steve
In 2008, I began to seriously think about searching for my mother. I told myself it was for health reasons. I knew my wife still wanted the information she had asked me for when we had first married so she could be proactive in ensuring our sons’ health.
I told myself that that was reason enough to search.
But deep down inside, I knew the truth.
I needed answers. Who was I? Where did I come from? Did I have other family members out there? Why was I given away? Had my mother ever wanted me? Would she want to know me now?
A popular website on the internet is ancestry.com. Many people have used their services and traced back their family histories. Some people I know were able to go all the way back to the 1500s and discover a branch of their family tree were pirates.
Fun. Entertaining. Informative.
But for me, vitally important. Something as simple as this was a monumental task I would never be able to do. I couldn’t even begin because I didn’t know the simplest information, like my real name.
I knew I would never be satisfied until I had the answer to the biggest question anybody has—who am I?
So I searched.
At first, I looked up the show The Locator. They ask tons of questions and want a significant amount of information before they agree to take on your case. Of course, I could understand their thinking. They were a television show, not a detective agency. They didn’t have the time or resources to do a full-blown search and only took on the cases where their success rate in finding the people would be high.
I couldn’t even tell them my birth name. I wouldn’t be an easy search. I had hit my first of many dead ends.
Next, I used the Internet to search for a good private detective. It didn’t take long for me to discover that most private detectives wanted much more money than I could afford to pay. Also, because I had such limited information, the search would be long, very expensive, and most likely unsuccessful.
Over the years, my adoptive parents gave me the little bit of information they had from the adoption agency in case I ever wanted to search. I knew if I decided to search that it would be in no way a negative reflection on them. I loved them. They were my parents. But I needed answers to help me understand who I really was.
What information my parents had given me was unfortunately very little. I knew my date of birth, the city I was born in, and the name of the agency that had arranged the adoption. Suddenly searching for my mother looked more like mission impossible than an achievable goal.
Since the only thing I had was the name of the adoption agency, I decided to start there. I looked up their website and read everything I could find. In small print in a drop down menu on the bottom of their page, a heading caught my eye. It read: Adoptees Trying To Find Birth Parents. I clicked on it and actually read through a whole series of papers. I discovered that they did, indeed, try and search for your parents if you wanted to look for them.
So I filled out the application and submitted it.
A few days, maybe a week later, I received a phone call. Since I no longer lived in New Jersey and I couldn’t go in and talk with the social worker in person, I was asked if I would take part in an interview over the phone. It took about a half hour or so.
T
he biggest question the social worker, Pat, had for me was if I was prepared to handle whatever the search turned up. She told me that not every situation turned out to be a suburban house with a white picket fence and a dog in the yard and people just dancing around waiting to meet you.
She described multiple negative scenarios. Often drugs could be involved and it was possible that my parents could turn out to be criminals. Maybe they’d turn out to be hostile, not happy about my reappearance in their lives and I’d be facing a world of hurt and rejection. Many times there are negative family situations that may have led to it. She stressed that there are a million reasons why I may have been given up for adoption and that, unfortunately, the odds were pretty good that I might not like what I find.
Pat also reminded me it was possible my mother never told anybody about me or the adoption, including her husband if she had gone on with her life and married. I had to admit that that was one of my biggest fears. What if nobody was told and I came back into the picture? The last thing I wanted to do was break up a marriage or damage a family.
Those were the things that really concerned me. I would have rather not had any information and never found my mother if I knew that all I was going to do was cause a total collapse of her family structure or negatively disrupt her life. That was never my intention.
In hindsight, I now know that whenever you do make contact with the other person, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were—negativity or change, at the very least, is going to happen. If the search is successful, you’re going to open up the floodgates of years gone by for that other person. In my case, flash forward to today, I could have never known then that it would have opened up so many wounds for my mother.
Those are the things I feel responsible for because I’m the one who did the searching—those are the things that I have to live with and learn to deal with.
But it is what it is. That’s how it all started.
I finished the interview. I assured the social worker I could handle whatever came. I sent her the check and she started her search.