I found four birth parents this past week. Every one of them is deceased.
It’s exciting but difficult to share with my client that I’ve identified and located their biological parent. It’s much more difficult when I must share with them that their parent is deceased. They will never have the chance to meet them, have a conversation with them, ask them questions, fill in holes, or find answers they’ve had their entire lives.
I have one client who had zero information about his biological parents. He came to me in the fall of 2019, seeking information. After nearly a year-and-a-half of searching and piecing bits of information together, I identified his birth mother and birth father last week. They both passed away about a dozen years ago.
When my client’s birth mother was diagnosed with cancer, she searched for the son she placed for adoption nearly 40 years earlier. She searched and searched but found dead ends at every lead. According to her sister, she wanted to explain things to him. But she died before she could find him.
He wouldn’t search for her until a decade after her death.
I wish so much that I could reverse the hands of time for my client. I wish I could put them together so they could have that conversation they both longed to have. But I can’t.
Nearly every client who hires me admits they wish they would have conducted a search many years earlier for their loved one. Some wait until their adoptive parents have passed away, for fear of hurting their feelings or making them feel like they weren’t enough. Others wait because they just can’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. Many go through much of their lives, undecided if they even want to conduct a search at all.
After reflecting on these recent cases especially, I decided that the best thing I could do is write this blog post, encouraging any adoptees or birth parents who read it to consider writing a letter to the family member they only briefly met at birth or didn’t meet at all.
There is nothing threatening in writing a letter. No one says you must send the letter to its intended recipient. There are a few benefits to writing a letter, as I see it.
First, it will likely end up being therapeutic for you. Writing out our thoughts has a way of healing us, helping us to move forward.
Second, if you pass away before you make the decision to conduct a search, your words will live far beyond your years. In the case of my recent client, what a treasure it would have been for him to receive a letter from his birth mother a dozen years after she passed away. Some of his questions could have been answered. She could have died, knowing she said everything she wanted to say to him if he ever came looking for her (which he did).
Third, you can control what you write in a letter. Sometimes, words have a tendency to fly out of our mouths before we have time to process them. As soon as they escape our lips, we regret we said them. They come across in a way that wasn’t intended. Written words are more thoughtful. If you write something that doesn’t sound quite right or if you change your mind on what to say, you can erase or delete it. No harm.
Fourth, letters are treasured. Letters have become far more uncommon than they once were. Before texting, email, phones, social media… people wrote letters. Some of my own most treasured possessions are letters tucked away in my attic. Letters from childhood friends, pen pals (yes, that used to be a thing), and family members. Letters and cards of encouragement during my battle with breast cancer in 2019. Letters my great grandmother wrote to me when I was a fourth-grader about her time in a one-room schoolhouse. Just last month, I dug out some letters my cousin wrote to me back in 2008 after he passed away unexpectedly around Christmas two months ago.
If you’ve ever contemplated searching, I would encourage it. Don’t wait. But if you decide now isn’t the time or doubt you ever will, you should consider writing a letter instead. It could make a world of difference in someone’s life years and years from now. You never know.