Rudy Owens and his paternal birth aunt, 2007
Last week I learned two of my three paternal biological aunts passed away, along with another aunt, who had married the younger brother of my adoptive father.
That means I counted three family losses of elderly family members in one week. It also meant I had to run through a lot of mixed feelings about the meaning these deaths as an adoptee.
I never met one of my two deceased paternal aunts. She, like her sister, apparently died peacefully in her 80s. However, I am fairly certain she had known about me since 1989, when I first found my biological father. Since that fateful meeting, neither she nor her immediately family made a single effort to contact me, and she died without ever speaking to me or communicating with me. Though I knew her name, and determined from online records where she lived, I decided not to reach out to her.
That same day I learned of this aunt’s death, further internet searching revealed I also had lost another of the two sisters, the one I had met. Both had passed away in 2013, and there was never any communication about these deaths that reached me from any family member or contact. That means half a decade had passed since my paternal aunts had died and at least two members of this clan who knew how to reach me did not bother to inform me. For an adoptee, I call that situational utterly normal.
I had met one of the aunts, and along with her daughter, my paternal cousin, in 2007 at their home in a Midwest state. I wrote about that meeting and its meaning in my memoir on the adoption experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It was a memorable day for all of us, but in the end, even in the years after we met, I was still the official bastard, the filius nullius, or no one’s son.
Illegitimate offspring are not counted in the record
I read the official obituaries of both women online and made copies for my files of the strangers who are my kin. Like most obituaries, the columns listed all of the surviving kin, including the surviving sister, offspring (alive and dead), grandchildren, and more. But I, a member of this clan by blood and DNA, was not acknowledged. I am the whited-out person who is not “legitimate,” and thus not a part of the “official story.”
In my aunts’ deaths, I would remain forever “illegitimate” to this family, never to be acknowledged. This is not the case in the obituaries of my maternal grandparents. My name and family status were recognized in their obituaries. I was real kin in their eyes and hearts.
These outcomes for adoptees of my generation provide important lessons we learn after we find our kin, if we are lucky to do that with the system stacked against us to prevent most family reunions. In my case, my bastard status was confirmed, yet again, by the truths that these facts reveal about my place in the world and my meaning to my paternal kin and to others.
I can only guess, still, what my deceased and unknown aunt may have known of me, beyond the meeting I had with her sister in 2007. I do not know if my story ever reached the surviving relatives’ ears. I learned there are surviving grandkids of the aunt I did not meet. So, am I unknown, or am I still that dirty family secret that is hidden in the not-so-benevolent cloak of adoption secrecy that is meant to keep kin like us forever apart?
Another death in the families
At the end of the week, I also learned about the death of one of my adoptive aunts. She was married into my adoptive father’s kin, as the wife of my adoptive father’s youngest brother. We had barely known each other over the decades, except through regular holiday correspondences we kept up for decades. On that count, we connected.
Adoptees, like the IMF team in the Mission Impossible franchise, shown in this publicity still, will be disavowed in life, and their existence will mostly be erased from the official family records.
Along with her departed husband, who died last year, we had a lot of unspoken issues that we never talked about, particularly my adoptive father and his alcoholism and what that meant for him to be taking care of me and my adoptive sister part of the year when he had custodial rights. I describe these awkward skeletons in the closet in my memoir.
I last saw this aunt in 2015, when I was completing research for my book and revisiting places I had spent part of my childhood in West Virginia and Ohio. Those were perhaps the darkest days of my life. When I met my aunt and my uncle in 2015, they were frail and both suffering from health problems. I felt kindness to them and no ill feelings. In the end, we never spoke about my adoptive father’s terrible drug problems as an alcoholic and his tragic demise or my status as the adopted son. We let the sleeping elephants lie.
By week’s end, I felt exhausted. I was processing the loss of three family members. Yet, in the end, two of them were still strangers, and one was estranged by family ghosts. I felt loss and also I felt emotional distance.
This complicated emotional space that I have navigated my whole life is not new to many adoptees. One reason I wrote my book was to share how hard it is for non-adopted persons to understand this lifelong experience and journey. I explain this complex dance at length in my memoir.
In the end, when the records of our lives are written, the official record will still disavow the illegitimate offspring who were lost to the U.S. adoption system. We are like the IMF team in Mission Impossible, or some CIA team. In many ways we are very similar: We have dual identities, and because of discriminatory legal systems in most states, our records must remain top-secret documents that are never shared with the majority of those separated from their families after they were born.
It is a mission I never I had choice to accept or decline. It was my fate at birth.