Listening For Cranes

 

Whether it’s someone we love who died or we’re looking for our birth parents, we are searching for something lost and hoping to find.

 

We are trying to give form to our shadows.

 

            With adoption, you’ve already lost growing up with your birth parents. Even if you have wonderful, considerate, and loving adoptive parents, you will wonder what this other life would have been like, and if who your birth parents are has influence your life in some unseen way. 

 

            With grief, in my case the death of my wife Evelyn, you lose part of the family you had, and you have to patch a new life together with what is left. You still have what they brought into your life, and this does not go away, but you have to figure out how to include them in your revamped life. 

 

            We’re trying to make our way through the darkness on a trail that goes through an unknown forest using an outdated map and a flashlight that keeps flickering out.

 

I’ve been reading Suzanne Ohlmann’s moving, poignant, and sometimes humorous book Shadow Migrationabout her search for her birth parents, and was struck by the commonalities. With both adoption and grief, we exist for a time in the still point between the trauma that has happened and the moment of turning, collecting what we can before moving on.

 

Suzanne does locate her birth mother, gains insights from their interactions, wishes for more, and fills in some of the gaps. But her birth father dies a year before she can find him. She hears only a few tantalizing stories from those who knew him, and is left wondering about the what ifs. She shares the hopes and frustrations of her search, and feelings of being abandoned by people who thought that she would have a better life without them. She is not sure they’re right. 

 

She also talks about traveling back to Nebraska where she was born and listening to the sandhill cranes that she discovered would have been singing that day, her work as a nurse, spending time in India helping the sick, the human limitations of religion, the importance of trusting your emotions, the presence of music in her life, and more. She is honest about sharing the struggles and events of her life that brought her to this point.

 

What we are searching for is the rest of ourself.

 

Suzanne and I talked a little about not knowing where we came from, and why this gnaws at us. In my family, so few stories were passed on about the ancestors who came before my grandparents that I don’t know who they were. This is more than idle curiosity because there are genetic predispositions that I’ve inherited. Are there any family traditions I should uphold? Did they achieve any accomplishments that I should be proud of? Apparently, they did not think the stories of their lives were important enough to be passed along, and this left a big blank space. I could research the genealogical sites and find out all their names and dates, the who-begat-whom, but this would not tell me the stories about their hearts or aspirations.

 

            The journey home only happens after we know where we began.

 

As much as we want to believe that we are rugged individuals who can stand on our own, we are able to stand because of the people who came before us, the people who birthed us, raised us, and those who guided us as we became adults. And while we don’t get everything we want from the people in our lives, we have to trust that they loved us as well as they could at the time. They still have our backs, even if they now exist in a different realm.

 

May we believe that the stories of our lives are important enough to share with others, and that we need to hear their stories of struggle and triumph.

 

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Until the end of the year, you can buy Suzanne’s book (as well as my book, Mountains of Light) from the Univ. of Nebraska Press at 50% off. Enter  6HLW22  in the promotion code field and click “Add Promotion Code.”  http://bit.ly/2z0g1hX