Before and After

by Judy Christie

  Their birth mother is elderly and is suffering from dementia by the time they visit. “I really didn’t feel anything. To me, she was just a lady sitting in a rocking chair,” Bess says. “I had a mother. I was sort of angry that we didn’t get to know each other. It was very strange.”

  Susan, who was placed for adoption at three weeks old, is more emotional during the visit.

  “We’re your grown-up babies,” Bess says, trying to connect to the woman in the chair.

  For a sad moment, Elsie Clara seems to come out of her fog. “Oh, my babies,” she moans. “I used to line up five little chairs in a row.”

  That is all the emotion they will get from her.

  At a gas station in rural Tennessee, Bess also meets a half brother, who was married and had a child by the time she was born. “He got out of his car, and tears were streaming down his face.”

  “I knew you were out there, but I didn’t have any way to find you,” he tells her.

  A lovable character, he has since died, but Bess tells me an animated story about a pig roast he hosted the second time she and Susan visited. Her voice is full of amusement and tenderness when she says, “She and I slept in the same bed, like we were kids.”

  At breakfast the morning after the pig roast, everyone teased one another. “You joke around like you’re kids,” a family member said.

  The family welcomed her with love. “They are wonderful, wonderful people. They’re wonderful,” she says. Then sadness enters Bess’s voice. She and her sister stay in touch, though finances keep them from visiting often. “She needs me now, but I can’t afford to go to her…She’s like part of my heart. It would have been wonderful if we had known each other all these years.”

  Jim

  ON THE DAY OF THE bolt-from-the-blue call from Bess, Jim Andrews is forty years old, the same age his parents were when they adopted him. Bess happens to reach him because he is down with a nasty bug and taking only his second sick day in twenty years.

  Now retired in Arkansas, he recalls that moment: “ ‘I’m your sister,’ a woman said. I thought it was a joke.”

  Born on March 1, 1940, he considers himself one of the lucky ones, adoptees who went to good homes. Like several men I interviewed, he is not all that interested in talking about the past. “When Bess called, I didn’t know if I wanted to meet her,” he admits.

  But in Washington, D.C., on business, he decides to fly to New York to see her. “That was a fiasco,” he says. News cameras show up, and he is rattled and steps into a restroom to compose himself. “That wasn’t what I wanted.”

  Despite that, their meeting turns into a nice occasion, including time with one of Bess’s daughters, Jim’s new niece. A short time later, he happens to be in Nashville on Thanksgiving and has dinner with Bess and their sister, Susan. “We had a nice visit,” Jim says. The women tell him they want to go see their birth mother, who lives a couple of hours away. “No, no, no. I don’t want any part of that,” he says. He has never gone to the town where his birth mother lived, and he has no interest in doing so now.

  Adopted by wonderful people, Alice and Morris Andrews, a dentist and his wife living in northern Mississippi, Jim eventually learns that his birth certificate is totally false, with no information about his birth parents. His adoptive father was a relative of Tann’s, and his story is typical Tann. “She must have been a distant cousin,” Jim speculates. “I don’t know, but there is some distant family relationship there…My dad called up Georgia Tann and said, ‘We’re looking for a baby boy. When one comes through the door, give us a holler and we’ll come to Memphis.’ ”

  Jim as a toddler. “We think they were selling us to Georgia Tann,” he says.

  Although he is reticent to talk about his adoption, Jim is thankful. “I was extremely fortunate to be adopted by them,” he says. “The Tennessee Children’s Home Society was good to me.”

  At age eleven, he was told he was adopted. “It meant nothing to me. I just loved my family so much and had such a great family relationship. It didn’t faze me.”

  Yet like nearly all adoptees, he had moments of wondering.

  “Maybe as I got older, I’d be sitting in an airport and watching and wonder if I was related to someone walking by,” he confides. But those were fleeting thoughts. “I never sat down and agonized about it.” He wouldn’t have thought of searching for family. “I knew it would hurt my mother…My family is my mom and dad,” he says. “The other people gave me away. They didn’t want me.”

  And yet, after reading Before We Were Yours, he contacts Lisa, and during her Arkansas tour, he visits one of her book events to say hello and tells her a few details of his life.

  A story of siblings lost and found begins to sort itself out…slowly.

  Glenn

  THE BABY GIVEN AWAY AT a West Tennessee drugstore grows up lonely, an only child in Ohio with the Gibsons. Dorothy, a homemaker, and Bill, an American Baptist preacher, dote on him in their own way, although Bill is often gone.

  Young Glenn. “Some of it we will never know…I just sit and cry that they had so many wasted years,” says Glenn’s daughter.

  At some level, he knows that something about his life is…off.

  He is sixteen and at his grandmother’s funeral when he picks up a family Bible and flips through it. In the handwritten family history is a small notation.

  Adopted.

  He confronts his parents. “You were never supposed to see that,” they say. “We are never going to talk about it.”

  Glenn is shocked, hurt, and confused. And more than a little angry. As their only child, he feels isolated and uncertain. He graduates from high school and joins the Air Force at the tail end of the Korean War. In the years that follow, he tries to ask his parents about his adoption, but neither of them is willing to tell him the story. The message he gets is Please don’t ask.

  Glenn marries the woman who has now been his wife for fifty-nine years, and from the beginning he talks to her about his hidden past. He spends thirty years in a good career as a time-study engineer for an International Harvester plant—and decades wondering, constantly wondering. Through his long marriage and long career and the raising of his own children, he is more than just curious about where he came from. He needs to know.

  He has always longed for siblings.

  His daughter, Victoria Watson, tries talking with her grandmother about the adoption, but Dorothy will divulge nothing. “If she was going to tell anyone, she would have told me,” Victoria says.

  When Glenn’s adoptive parents die, in the 1980s, he tells Victoria that if she wants to look for his family, she can. “We didn’t know a ton,” she says.

  First, she tries the Internet. “I got absolutely nowhere,” she recalls.

  Then she writes the state of Tennessee and is excited when the piece of mail comes. It only produces more disappointment. “We didn’t really get anywhere. We just thought, ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t meant to be.’ ”

  Then a friend finds their own family members on Ancestry.com, and Victoria is encouraged and mentions it to Glenn. “He was a little skeptical,” she says. But she convinces him to try checking his DNA anyway. A woman who turns out to be Glenn’s cousin responds, and Victoria finally has a name to follow.

  The cousin is happy to connect with someone, and Victoria is talking with her when another first cousin match pops up on her computer, giving her goose bumps. “We had given up hope at this late date,” she says.

  By the time the mystery is completely solved, Glenn’s wish will be granted in abundance. He has three full siblings and four half siblings.

  But the final bits of the puzzle will be pieced together by an unlikely source.

  Josh

  BESS BRAGS WITH A GRANDMOTHER’S delight about how smart and well-rounded her
grandson Josh is. Age eighteen when I catch up with him, Josh likes to play the guitar and the piano and to ride his dirt bike. He also enjoys doing things outdoors with Bess, who lives an hour away.

  The pair’s strong connection goes back to Josh’s babyhood. When he and I connect for a phone interview, he describes his grandmother in warm terms: “She is friendly, has a great sense of humor, and makes people happy.” In a sweet twist, the words are very close to those Bess’s adoptive mother used when describing Bess in letters to Georgia Tann.

  Family means everything to Bess, a trait she has passed on to Josh. Married once for fourteen years, she is long divorced and has three grown daughters, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

  When he is sixteen, Josh decides he wants to solve his family’s mysteries. Interested in math and science, he asks for an Ancestry.com DNA kit for Christmas. “I really wanted to find out where all my ancestors came from,” he says.

  His mother, Bess’s daughter Emily, waits until spring to order the kit. “He wanted it for Christmas,” she says. “I kept pushing it off until it was on sale.”

  If she had only known.

  “It came, and it was really simple,” Josh tells me. “You just spit in a tube.” A month or two later, he gets the results—including a match with a man in Ohio.

  “At first I was like, That’s probably a mistake.” But then he gets a message through Ancestry.com from a woman who explains that the DNA match from Ohio is her father, an adoptee. “My dad doesn’t know anyone in his family, basically,” she tells him. “I’m looking for my father’s birth family.”

  “Oh, wow,” he replies. “My grandmother is looking for her brother.”

  The chills escalate.

  The news excites Emily, a school secretary in her forties. “Right away I thought of my mom,” she says. “Oh my gosh, there’s someone out there.” From childhood she has known that her mother, Bess, was adopted and felt she was missing something in her life. When Emily and her sisters squabbled as girls, Bess would say, “You should be happy you have sisters.”

  The woman who has emailed Josh is Glenn’s daughter, Victoria. Within a couple of days, Bess reaches out to her, saying, “I think your father is my brother who I’ve been looking for, for over thirty-five years.”

  Victoria calls her father, cautious. She’s tried to verify all the details before sharing this with him, to make sure everything is on a good path for her dad, whom she describes as “a very tender teddy bear kind of soul.” And he is skeptical about the news. The ups and downs of searching and the longing in his heart have been hard on him.

  “Dad,” Victoria says, “this is DNA.”

  It takes him a while to process the revelation, and then he calls Bess, reassured now that she is his long-lost sister. “He had big tears in his eyes,” Victoria recalls. “He couldn’t believe he was actually speaking with her.”

  An outgoing woman, Bess is beyond delighted that life has brought her together with her brothers and a sister. Even before she knew about Glenn, Bess had wondered if there might be another sibling out there.

  Now she knows.

  During our interview, Josh takes time away from celebrating his eighteenth birthday to describe his interest in genealogy, which led to the discovery that has so enriched his grandmother’s life. He chats happily about it as though he is talking about any of his other teen hobbies. An honors student, he is soon to be a freshman in college, where he’ll pursue a premed course of study. The family is having a birthday barbecue, and his grandmother is on her way over. Nearly two years have passed since Josh found her brother for her. They have reunited, and in a matter of weeks, Josh will meet his great-uncle Glenn in person.

  He is happy with how the DNA connection worked out. “That was really cool,” he says. As for the effect of Bess’s adoption on him, he’s not concerned. “I’ve just thought of it like I’m a combination of everyone in my family.”

  Glenn sends Josh a collection of fine silver as a gesture of gratitude. “This is a token of my appreciation for you having your DNA put on Ancestry.com,” he writes. “Without that I probably would never have found my brother and sisters.”

  Emily knows that something special happened with her son’s detective work. “It’s so weird, but there was something that kept telling Josh to do the DNA,” she says. “Wow. Look what he did. He made a whole new story.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN GLENN AND BESS finally reunite in person in Nashville, along with their sister, Susan, the moment is dramatic. They hug and weep and touch one another. They have much in common—they like to garden, love animals. They use a lot of the same phrases and have the same mannerisms. “Is it a coincidence or did they pick this up in utero?” Glenn’s daughter wonders.

  Bess is ecstatic. “Glenn walked in the door, and, oh my gosh, it was a wonderful, wonderful reunion. I said, ‘Come here, you old buzzard.’ I’d never said that to anyone. Then I pinched his cheek.”

  She soaks in the special words. Brother. Sister. “Those words…I always wanted to say, ‘my brother, my sister.’ It just felt so absolutely wonderful to say.’’

  As they get to know one another, they long for all the years they missed. “It’s happy and sad,” Bess says. Her daughter Emily agrees: “I’m just thankful they’re in my life now.” Finding his siblings has put into place a missing part of Glenn’s heart. The not knowing was awful. “It filled something for him,” Victoria says.

  He talks to his sisters on the phone, and they visit in person when they can. On a trip to Tennessee, the three travel to their birth-family home in a small community. A half sister and two half brothers have already passed on, but they are able to meet one of those half siblings’ sons, their nephew.

  “They’re still cotton farmers,” Victoria says. “We’ve met all of them.”

  The siblings are now spread from Arkansas to Ohio to New York to Tennessee, and Bess wishes they all lived closer to one another. Emotionally, though, they are remarkably tight, as if to make up for the lost years, their bond evident in how each one speaks of having these new siblings.

  Reunions unfold over the years, but they have not yet had one big gathering. Brother Jim is not quite ready for that. He tells me he feels as though he might be disrespecting his adoptive parents if they have a big family reunion, although he is slowly reaching out to his siblings individually. After some hesitation, he and his wife make a trip to see Glenn and his family. The dining room table is beautifully set, and Victoria cooks a pot roast. They take pictures and talk about fishing. Both Jim and Glenn express pleasure about having met.

  “I would have loved to have lived in a family of kids and been poor,” Glenn says. Such is his affection for his siblings. “It would have been worth anything to be with them.”

  The thrill of his visit with Jim, on the heels of a trip to see his sister Bess, though, is almost too much for Glenn, who makes a trip to the emergency room the next day, worried that he is having a heart attack. All turns out well. Stress and fatigue—and pure happiness—from the stunning reunions apparently overwhelmed him.

  Victoria, who calls me on the way to the hospital to see her father, rejoices that the brothers and sisters know one another now. “I believe it was a gift that God pulled off…My dad would like to see his siblings as much as possible before they pass,” she says. “I just sit and cry that they had so many wasted years.”

  Young Josh, whose interest in DNA changed lives in a way he could not have imagined, encourages people to search for their relatives: “If they have any doubts about it, just go for it…You might just find someone.”

  TENACITY AND TIME

  Piecing together stories of siblings who struggled for decades to find one another brings to my mind those movies where the hero absolutely, positively refuses to give up. A similarly heroic l
evel of determination, I now realize, drives family member after family member as they seek out connections.

  Through their words and their actions, they show that nothing is more important than family—and, just like in the movies, they know the clock is ticking.

  These adoptees inspire me to mail a favorite book to my oldest brother, to spend a few extra days at home in Louisiana for the holidays, to make a goofy birthday video for my great-niece, and to text a cousin. Don’t put it off, these voices warn me.

  Adoptee Glenn, in his eighties, provides a visceral reminder of this lesson. When I first reach out to him, he is too sad to talk and asks his daughter, Victoria, to speak with me instead. His half brother Al, whom he had located only a few months before in a small town in Tennessee, has recently died. “It’s kind of bittersweet for my dad,” Victoria explains. “He’s just found them, and then his brother dies. He’s missed out on so many years of having siblings.”

  Her father made a hurried trip from Ohio for one last visit with Al, who was quite ill by the time Glenn arrived. They shared a tender goodbye.

  Al looked at Glenn. “That’s my brother?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Al’s wife confirmed. “That is your brother.”

  Glenn moved closer to him. “We didn’t get to play as children,” he said, “but we can play in heaven.”

  He made it there in time for that one last conversation. One last promise. A little more time with someone he loved and a chance to say the things that mattered. So many of those who passed through Tann’s hands never had that chance.

  Glenn has precious memories because Victoria didn’t give up. Because Bess wouldn’t take no for an answer. Because young Josh was curious. And each one acted out of love.