Jack Brennan Perspectives

I met with “Ted” yesterday; told him what I wanted to do; he told me he wanted it too. As a matter of fact, he told me that he was “going to ask me to adopt him.” Oh yeah?  And when was that going to occur, pray tell?  “When the time was right,” he proudly said.

I told him that if he were to be my grandson, then he needed to stop calling me Jack and begin calling me “grandpa” immediately. He did so, although he told me that it “felt funny.” But within the next hour, “grandpa” rolled off his tongue, like I’d been his grandfather forever.

When I brought him back from the visit to his unit, I updated the staff person about what was going on. She – very good move – asked me, in front of him, if that meant that when Ted was acting up, she could tell him that she was going to tell his grandfather. I said absolutely. But, I continued, “I better not find out that you are causing trouble with my grandson.” Guess whose eyes lit up and who got a huge smile on his face?  He gave me, and I gave him, a big hug and I left.

I received a report today that “Ted” has been walking around since yesterday smiling and acting as though the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.  Uh huh.

That’s just wonderful. It actually made my day when I heard it.

And then I stopped – and asked myself the question I’ve been asking for nearly forty years:

Why should any kid have to walk around with that kind of weight on his shoulders in the first damn place?  Every kid has a God-given right to be loved, and claimed forever, by some adult.

Don’t they?

Jack

I finished a good book last month by a man older than me who was in prison in Angola (Louisiana) for 44 years.  Angola has had a rep for decades as being among the nation’s worst prisons, and I was intrigued that this man – Wilbert Rideau – had survived there for so long.  The name of the book is “In The Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance.” I’m always, also and of course, intrigued by the notion of “Deliverance.”

At one point, Rideau was taken under the wing of a warden named Phelps.  Rideau later referred to Phelps as the “big brother and even the father figure I never really had.” Phelps was a good man and taught Rideau much.  But one thing that he taught him has gotten it’s grip on me for a few weeks now. Warden Phelps told him, in some context where action was required: “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so.” Both Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington acted for me, when each was the “only person in a position to do so.”  And in so doing they gave me a life that I’d have never imagined for myself.

Our theme this past year at Family Focus has been a biblical quote from Holocaust survivor, author, and witness, Elie Wiesel: “Thou shalt not stand idly by.”  I believe that. I believe that each of us has a responsibility to act, for instance, when we see evil taking place before us. But the interpretation of evil covers a big subjective ground. The warden makes things much more personal, much more specific, and therefore, much more demanding.  I’d have liked to have met him (he died a few years back – at my age.)

The warden’s words have been haunting me. And haunting me.  And haunting me still again.

Because of Ted (see way earlier posts).

We have not been able to find a family for Ted, try though we have.  Ted apparently told his social worker that he wanted me to adopt him and the powers that be asked me if that was my intention. I laughed. Ted turned eleven this year; I’ll be sixty one in two months. My kids are mostly in their forties or heading there pretty quick. I have five local grandchildren within a year of Ted’s age, and the rest range from a few months old to twenty three. No, I’m not adopting anybody.  I am, as they say, too old.

And then the warden’s words come back to me: “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so.”  No one had stepped forward for this boy. No one had even responded to our outreach on him.  I already have one grandson living with me, though he’s now twenty two. I started thinking. Why not take Ted, not as my son, but as my grandson?  He’d be surrounded by uncles who’d more or less themselves been in his position of abandonment; and he’d have cousins his age. Being a grandfather has been a heck of a lot easier for me than being a father.  Legally, of course, it wouldn’t fly, but anything reasonable can generally be worked out one way or another.

Damn warden. Damn book.

Am I the only person “in a position to do so”?  No. Others could, but they aren’t stepping forward. And I have the history with Ted in trying to get his adoptive parents to keep him in their family.  And then experiencing with him his horror when they walked away. I have the room in the house (well, I’d have to build a new bedroom – the eighth!); I most certainly have the experience raising kids like Ted.  And I was given what I needed when I was only six years older than him, by two of the best folks I’ve ever met.  How could I not offer it to Ted?

What I don’t have, probably, is a long future. The Brennans don’t have a great record in getting much past 70, and my mother’s family is worse. But by the time I turn 70, Ted would be almost 21.  The measure isn’t whether this is a good idea or not.  It’s not. I can think of plenty of better ones. The measure is whether or not this is a realistic idea – and for Ted, I can’t think of any others that aren’t wishful thinking. The truth is that his future, if I don’t do this, is group care of some sort with not a single legal relative anywhere. A true legal orphan. And that’s no future.

So I go full circle. My life as a parent began four decades ago with meeting Ricky, another eleven year old who had nobody real to parent him and that led me ultimately to what has been a wonderful life for me.  I guess there is some justice to finishing that life with parenting another eleven year old.

Was this what I was looking for for my sixties? My sixties???   No.  No way. No way at all. Absolutely not.  Not even in my wildest and most scary dreams.  But John Lennon probably put it best: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Yep.

And this was not in the plans.

Jack

Trying to create this new training for families looking to adopt kids whom they don’t know from the foster care system is forcing me to do some deep, and occasionally frustrating, thinking.  These kids have not only been multiply rejected by individuals (mother’s family, father’s family, their foster parents etc.) but they have been betrayed by our culture.  The purpose of the foster care system is to get the kids back home, but these kids, through no fault of their own, aren’t going back home.  The backup system is to get the kids adopted by their foster parents, who know them.  But these kids, again through no fault of their own, are not being adopted by their foster parents. The final plan is to get them adopted through agencies like mine (here goes: Family Focus Adoption Services).  But that takes money that is simply not there.  I could tell stories for a year’s worth of blog posts just of the kids I personally know about over the years who’ve lost adoptive families simply because there was no money available to do the work it would take to bring the child and the available family together – and then, of course, have them succeed.

So, we have to scrounge, and scrounge we do.  We beg for money, we cut pay, we skip paydays, we do work gratis.  It is never enough.  But the real heartbreak comes when we do make a match between a child and a family and don’t have the resources to do the work that would keep them together.

Many years ago, a woman came to us for a unique request. The agency which had responsibility for the child her family had been matched with wouldn’t pay our fees. So the woman came to us and asked us to teach her everything we knew and she would do the work herself. We did, she did, and the adoption succeeded.  We see her every once in a while and the boy she made her son is now long an adult.

That then is our latest plan: change our training, intensify it, teach the families as much as we can about what we know so that they need less outside services.  Easier said than done.  Because the real training isn’t about how to raise our kids; it’s about learning about your self so that, among other things, you can understand how to love our kids. And that is a killer to get into a training curriculum.  Especially one that one wants to keep interesting.

Over the years, one thing that I have learned in trainings is that I hate “role plays.”  I find them general, impersonal, artificial and forced.  And I know that many of my colleagues also hate them. So we won’t use them.  What we will teach instead is something I call “imaginary scenarios.”

When I took my first three kids, in 1978, I also moved sixty miles away from my job. I had to get a local job and I had a hell of a time finding one. A friend, who was a social worker, had told me that my best long term bet to do what I wanted to do  (change the world, of course, like a good sixties kid) was to go get my Masters’ in Social Work and my Masters’ in Business Administration.   So I headed that way. I registered in Marist for the MBA and in Adelphi at the same time for the MSW.  This, despite having three kids at home (8, 10, and 12) and (finally) a full time local job, and a second part time job.

I hated school. It’s never been my thing. I always found it too restricting, too limiting. But I went – for a few months.  Then one morning, I woke up and said to myself, “What is going to happen if I do all this for the next two years; then I graduate, let’s say, on a Friday; and then I wake up dead (imaginary, remember) on Saturday.  I am going to be berserk furious that I spent the last two years of my life doing what I hated (going to school.) And with that, I quit school and never looked back.

And so, what I began calling “imaginary scenarios” became a foundation of my thinking. (After all, one doesn’t “wake up dead.”)  Of course – thirty three years later –  now that I have no money and a current salary that is less then 2/3 of Luis’, I am recognizing that I might have acted precipitously.  Maybe.

Anyway, using “imaginary scenarios” as a thinking tool to figure out what I really want, think, believe, and – especially – feel, has been very powerful for me over the years. It also allows me to put myself in another’s shoes.  Much more effective, because much more real, and always more personal, then role playing.   It is among the first things we plan on teaching to our families.

Jack

Although I haven’t read it yet, I laughed when I saw that there is an article in this morning’s Times, with the headline: “Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth.” Many is the time that I have witnessed folks, always smart, using their logic as a weapon, but believing that it was revealing truth to them.

On my job (at Family Focus Adoption Services – damn commercials) we are in the process of changing all our training for new adoptive parents. It is shaping up as a wonderful training and I expect that it will be very helpful to the new parents and very protective for the children that are placed with them.  Our focus is on truth as it is experienced by both the multiply rejected children and the novice adopters. But such truth comes out of experience and not out of academia or science. As a matter of fact such truth may even be factually false.

For example, there is no such thing as “sunrise” or “sunset.”  Despite the fact that the newscasts and newspapers all give us the times for such every single day, they don’t really exist.  And we all know it. In reality, the sun does not rise, nor does it set. But in our experience it does both.  And it is our experience – our perspective – that matters in our day-to-day life.  The fact that the earth is hurtling through space at incredible speeds is scientific truth, but not experiential truth. None of us are holding on for dear life as the earth races through space.

It is experiential truth that we use to make our regular day to day decisions. And it is experiential truth that will determine whether or not people are willing to commit to these multiply rejected kids and whether or not they keep to those commitments. All the Erik Erikson information on the stages of child development or the Elizabeth Kubler Ross work on the stages of grief and loss – true though they may be – will not help much when one is confronted by a child who lies all the time, and about the stupidest things.

But learning that it is never the behavior, but rather the meaning that we attribute to the behavior, that consistently trips all of us up in our relationships is an experiential truth – whatever its validity scientifically – that gets us looking and thinking.  And gives us the hope of getting past our anger and frustration at the lying.  Experiential truth ultimately is what motivates us to change.

When we change our perspectives, which is the hope of the new training – and of this blog obviously – we change our experience, actually our recognition, of truth.  When our perspective deepens, we deepen that recognition of truth. Reason and logic can be tools towards that end, but no matter what either tells us, in the end experience is what we mostly go by.

When Luis was younger, the new day to him did not begin at midnight, a concept far too abstract for him. Rather, it began when he woke up in the morning.  If he woke up in the middle of the night, that was not the new day for him. It wasn’t his waking up that determined his new day, it was the sun being up.  Logically wrong. Experientially right. And midnight on New Year’s Eve did not compute for him.  He went to bed, instead.

Shakepeare had Hamlet put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Our job in the new training is to show our families some of those “more things.”  Even if those things would not pass muster in the scientific or academic worlds. Or more likely: within our materialistic and consumer culture.

Jack

For those who are not reading the comments, whether at the blog site, or through the “Comments RSS,”  I was asked last week, in response to my last posting, what the difference was between “bearing witness” and “simply observing something.”  It’s a thoughtful question, and I responded too quickly and on the run.  I have since been giving the question a lot of thought.

Observing something – what witnesses do in court, for instance – is to report on what one experienced with the senses.  I saw something; heard something; tasted something; smelled something; touched something.  In each situation, the “something” was outside of myself, and had some sort of objective measurability.  The witness, if they are simply reporting on what was observed, can than walk away with no further thought to the experience, as though they were, let’s say, a camera.  (Factoring out, of course, the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses.)  There is no necessary personal connection to the event to which they give witness.

But to bear witness requires a personal connection, a perspective from the inside of the witness. My cousin Michael stood up in the Church and said, in effect: “From my perspective as his son, this is who my father was.”  And because he was my uncle’s son, we listened. Likewise, Bernard Layfayette, Jr., was one of the actual freedom riders. He was there.  He can talk from the inside about what we (as a society) witnessed only from the outside.  So when he speaks of his experience, we listen.

But while these two guys were articulate in their bearing witness to their respective experiences, it is not articulateness that is required in order to bear witness.  It is experience.

And which of us does not have experience?  A beaten battered baby bears witness to the abuse he or she suffered, even if the baby is dead. Bearing witness connects – if it connects, if we allow it to connect – to the decency within us. And then we find ourselves saying “yes” both to the witness bearer and to the decency to which they bear witness.  No baby – and if we connect, we’d all agree – deserves the abuse that the body of that battered baby bears witness to.

Each of us, because of our experience of each of us, bears witness to each of us. That is our power, and that is our responsibility.  [And it is really not complicated. In the end, for instance, it underlies why our parents taught us that if we have nothing good to say about someone, then we should say nothing.]  If we didn’t automatically bear witness to each other, then it wouldn’t matter what we say, not say, do or not do.  But we each know better: it matters.  And oftentimes it matters more, sometimes far more, than we realize.

How much bearing witness matters to those kids who have no parents to bear witness to their singular importance can be too easily measured by counting those homeless, those prisoners, and those mentally ill, who grew up in, and then aged out of, foster care. The numbers are terrible.

Doesn’t every human being need a parent, or at least an adult, to stand up for them; to bear witness to them that they matter?  An adult who puts himself or herself on the line for the child?  An adult who insists that the needs of the child must come first?

I believe that. I was also given that experience: by both Aunt Rita and by Msgr. Huntington. It’s why I am such a believer in adoption for people, like Ted (see earlier posts), who have no parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents – any adult – who believe in their own responsibility to stand up for him; an adult who chooses to bear witness to Ted’s value. How on earth do we as a society allow any one of our children to grow up in essential abandonment like that?

If I’m right, then whether we like it or not, we bear witness every day. And – if I’m right – and our witness is always to what we believe is decent, then we can find out a lot about ourselves by looking at what we stand up for.  But – again, if I’m right – we can find out a lot about ourselves also by looking at what we don’t, and/or won’t, stand up for.

If I’m right.

Jack

I am trying to clean off my desk; I mean truly clean off my desk.  So I decided to take today and not get distracted and really make that happen.  But then while eating breakfast,  I read an Op-Ed article (1) by one of the original freedom riders, Bernard Lafayette, Jr. talking about his experience of the witness of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Witness.

Last Friday, my cousin Michael, gave a wonderful eulogy (2) for his father which connected with so many of us at the funeral as Michael witnessed for us his experiences of my uncle.  It was Michael’s witness that made the eulogy so real and thus got inside of us.

Again, witness.

And for a few weeks now, I have been thinking about a particular form of witness that is powerful, common, and more or less invisible. So the heck with the desk…..

I call them “witness statements.” They are statements that land in deep places within us. Not because they are so incredibly true – they may in fact be completely untrue – but because of whom they come from.  This week’s episode on “The Criminal Minds” spinoff was about a girl who wore a whole head mask because her father had convinced her that her face had become too disfigured to look at (as a result of him burning her years earlier.) In point of fact, her face had healed fine. But she believed him – she believed a complete and obvious untruth – because he was her father.

We give credibility to those whom we are surrounded by, especially when we believe that they care about us.  What they say then, apparently, does not get screened by our truth/error filter that we might ordinarily use. What just popped up in my head are the airport screeners. Once we are past them, there is no longer any searching for or fear of, say, weapons.  Everyone we are surrounded by, at that point, has been screened for safety.  We can trust them.

This deep power to witness, then, which belongs to each of us within our own worlds puts a tremendous responsibility upon us to take great care to identify truthfully what we are witnessing.  Not what we are feeling – the great American be-all and end-all – within us, but what we are seeing within the other. That means also that we have to develop our ability to see.  That ability to see – go back to the op-ed article and to the eulogy – is pretty much the sine qua non of being able to witness to truth.

I realized that with Ted (see earlier posts) my job is first to get past his screening so that I become a witness in his head; so that what I say lands deeply within him. And then I need to witness to that which I see, about his wholeness, his blamelessness, and his essential goodness in an attempt to overweigh (word?) the witness messages he has been left with by his abandoning, betraying “parents.”  And then I need to witness to his personal importance to me to overweigh the witness messages all kids in residential treatment get just by being in residential treatment, being dealt with only by assigned staff. That last walks a line that I too often fall over, as I did e.g., when I met Ricky and then ended up with so many kids. So, as a professional, I do not really cut it [and my salary – 😦 – witnesses to that.]  But, to leave a person – any person – with no personal witness that (s)he matters for their own sake, is, from my perspective, to leave a person with neither food nor water.

Nay, and far worse, it is to leave them without oxygen.

Jack

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I don’t know why you can simply click on the link to the Times, but not on the link to Facebook. But, no matter what, these are the addresses.  I tested them.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/opinion/20Lafayette.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

2. http://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-brennan/my-dads-eulogy/10150249891388420

I ended last week, as many people my age spend far too much time doing, going to a wake and funeral.  My Uncle Mike was only seven years older than me and because of that we never thought of him as our uncle, but rather a cousin, I guess.  At the wake, of course, were relatives from our side of the family, and also from his wife’s side. Mike was married for forty five years.  Even though our numbers are diminishing, there were still at least twenty people there who have been some part of my life for going on, if not over, fifty years. My parents’ generation had that experience, as did my grandparents’. I witnessed it.  It is – to me – normal.

But nearly thirty nine years ago, I walked into Children’s Village for the first time on my job as a child care worker and met an eleven year old kid, for whom that experience would have been unfathomable.  Ricky, whose words to me that night would impact, even determine, the course of my entire life from that day to this, might as well have had no one. I promised myself that first day I met him that I would change things for that boy, and I did. I ended up adopting him and all four of his brothers.

Yet, here I am this morning, on my way to take to Mickey D’s for lunch another eleven year old who has no one – not even siblings. Forty years later and I am still dealing with the same problem. For those reading the blog regularly, this would be the boy I refer to as Ted.  I have been searching for a new family for Ted with no luck thus far.

But what really gets to my gut, both with Ricky and with Ted, is that had I been looking for a family for either boy ten years prior to me meeting them, we [Family Focus] would have had families clamoring at our door.  In a week, literally, for a child just over a year old, once we put out the word (and that’s without Facebook) we would have had – easily – over one hundred families. A child a year younger than that, meaning new-born? Over a thousand. Easily.

But for the same exact children, only now with ten years experience of grief under their belts, there is next to nobody, oftentimes literally nobody. I know all the arguments: they are damaged, or even broken, they are too difficult, or they can’t be molded, and so on and so forth.

A few hours ago marked the forty fifth anniversary of my Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank, coming into my bedroom to wake me up and inform me of my mother’s death.  Less than twenty months later, my brother, my sister, and myself, were living with that aunt and uncle. Thursday and Friday, their now-long-adult-kids were with me, my brother, and my sister, at (Uncle) Mike’s wake and funeral.

Did my aunt and uncle, I wonder, argue that we were too damaged, too broken, too difficult, or unmoldable, before they made the life changing decision (for all of us) that they made?  I doubt it.  We needed protection; they responded.  When, only five years later, I saw that Ricky needed protection, I responded.  What on earth does age of the child needing protection have to do with it?

Why aren’t those thousands of families available for the newborns, or the hundreds available for the one year old – or even just one adult – coming to me asking to be allowed to respond to Ted?

I am in the field nearly forty years; I am sixty years old. And I don’t get it.

After all these years, I still don’t get it.

Jack

Some time ago, a prisoner I met went to some effort to explain to me that the media stories about male prisoners being raped were greatly exaggerated and things had changed in prisons very much since the days of “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.”  Some time later, way after that initial discussion, he admitted to me that he had been raped while in prison.

Recently, a former foster child, adopted as a teen, and now an adult, told me that he rarely told people about his foster placement history, because they would automatically believe that he was “damaged.”

I guess both guys were telling me the same thing: that assumptions would be made about them, and they would be stigmatized, simply because of their respective at one time statuses (is that a word?).  Their issue wasn’t about the truth of what had happened to them. It was instead about their right to privacy and their right to protection from those assumptions. But it was bigger than that, I think.

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the many different ways that our kids are stigmatized, and the consequences.  In every situation, it appears to come to the same thing.  They are viewed as “lesser” because of whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Rachel Lloyd (see last post) had a wonderful response to her girls about the girls’ own beliefs that they had been “damaged.” Rachel told them that they had developed normally in abnormal circumstances.  I think that is exactly right.

I think that it is also right about our kids.  They are not damaged in their personhood.  They have developed normal reactions and responses to the abnormal circumstances of their lives.  That means that any one of us, in the same circumstances, would have developed as they have.  The object, the purpose, of their development, like the development of each of us, has been to protect their psyches. They are not – media to the contrary – broken. But broken is what they believe they are.

All the therapeutic interventions in the world will not get them past that. On the contrary, such might well reinforce their belief by the very fact of “needing” therapeutic intervention.  What they must have to begin to believe that they are not broken, is an experience of being part of a “we.”  They need a person – often, but not exclusively, a parent – to meet them where they are, not to demand that they meet us where we are. A person who says to them: I am no better than you, no matter our respective circumstances and no matter how it appears or feels otherwise. To say to them that: “as people, we are exactly equal.” Meeting us where we are allows a person to become part of “us.”  Meeting them where they are allows a person to become part of a “we.”

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, and the author of “I and Thou,” says it much better than I ever could.  I have little doubt that what I have written is not clear enough. And I know that I need to work on making it clearer and explaining it much better.  Still, I am certain of the truth of it because of my own experience of living – and parenting.

The day that I knew that my brain-injured son, Luis, would be fine even when I was gone, was the day he came home from work and told me that some guy at work had given him grief.  I asked Luis how he responded, and he told me that he had said to the guy, “What makes you think that you are so much better than me?”  Luis had come to believe, in his very gut, that, as a person, he is the equal of anyone.

Because he is.

I am watching out for the implications of every message I hear, especially by every helping person I see, about those of us who are from worse circumstances than typical, being broken people. And I am going to start yelling – and yelling very loudly – no.

The starting point of any “we” has to be the recognition of, and assenting to, this:  There but for the grace of God, go I.

Jack

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the NY Times, has written often about the commercial sexual exploitation of children, both domestic and international. I have quoted him for the title of this post. Last Monday, he wrote his latest column on the subject of human trafficking and the sex industry. This time he recommended “a terrific new book called ‘Girls Like Us,’ by Rachel Lloyd.”

The beauty of the Kindle app is that one can download about 5% of a book to see if the book is worth buying.  I did that, read what I downloaded, and immediately bought the book. I finished it over the weekend and I was knocked over by it, or more specifically, by Rachel Lloyd.  Again and again, as I read the book I was taken aback by the parallels between what she had written and what I have heard from our kids over the years.  The authenticity was more evidence of my belief that if something is true, it is true no matter what angle you come at it from, no matter what approach you take.

It is a pleasure for an old guy like me to be able to go to Google and find out so much immediate information about an author; an ability unimagined for most of my life.  Rachel has received a number of well-deserved awards, and I also found a clip of her on YouTube, testifying before Congress. She has done the world, and her obviously much loved girls a tremendous service with a program in NYC named GEMS that she founded. But with this book, she has done a different service for the far bigger community. Especially those of us dealing with other abandoned people who are too often blamed for their own abandonment.

On a personal note, I was delighted to read what she said about the johns who are “buying” these young people. For many years, I have asked the question “who are their customers?” After all, for anyone to make a living from prostitution, there have to be many many many more customers than there are women (and men) in the “life.” But one rarely hears about the johns, and certainly they don’t identify themselves to their families, co-workers, friends, or pastors in anywhere near the numbers that there must be. It is all a very secret and hidden life, apparently.

Rachel does a great job of identifying who the johns are; who the pimps are; but most importantly, who the victims are.  And she does a phenomenal job of pointing out how the victims are taught -trained, she says; conditioned, I would say – to buy into their own victimization.

[Commercial: It is a point of pride with my agency (Family Focus Adoption Services) that we have devised some very important ways of teaching our kids how to opt out of their victimization. Additionally, we have set up structures that prevent our kids from being victimized by anyone – including themselves – except, perhaps, by accident.  That self victimization is probably the worst consequence of abandonment for all the abandoned.  As we did with another author of another great book – Ashley Rhodes Courter and her “Three Little Words” – I hope to get permission to reach out to Rachel to see if she’d be willing to join our honorary board of directors at FFAS.]

My thanks to Nicholas Kristof, who writes, “Lloyd guides us through this world in an unsentimental way that rings pitch perfect with my own reporting.”  Uh huh: Pitch perfect with his reporting; pitch perfect with our adoption work. Once again, no matter what direction you take, no matter how you approach it, truth is truth.

Hmm….

Rachel Lloyd: thank you, thank you, thank you.  For your book; for your work; but mostly, for your witness: It is never the fault of the lost for being lost.

Jack

Two weeks from this evening, and the same day of the week this year as back then, will mark exactly forty five years since I last saw my mother. She, with my father, went out that evening to a party. On the way home late that night (so technically the next day) my father crashed the car into a concrete bridge abutment on the Long Island Expressway. He was severely injured, but my mother was killed.  I was then, and remain now, a religious believer. I didn’t blame my father for her death – it was God who allowed it – but I did hold him (and her) accountable. The family story was that he fell asleep. Likely that is so. But I was fifteen and I was there and I knew that he was drunk when he left the house that evening – I can’t imagine he sobered up at the party. It was a different era, but he still should not have been driving, and my mother should have not gotten into the car with him.

One night, months later, long after his discharge from weeks in the hospital, my father was sitting in our living room drinking with his cousin. I was directly above in my bedroom. He must have said something that piqued my curiosity because I got out of bed and went to the top of the staircase to hear him.  And what I heard stunned me.  All these decades of experience later and I am still stunned.

What he said – this first time I’d ever heard him speak of my mother’s death – was that it was “Norman’s fault” that my mother was dead. My father was a cop and Norman was an old boss of his. Norman had transferred my father to protect him either because my father had done something wrong or because Norman believed he had.  At the new precinct, they threw this party and my father was invited. That’s the party he was driving home from when he crashed the car. So – voila – if Norman hadn’t transferred him, he wouldn’t have been at the party, and my mother would be alive.

I was stunned because it was all true.  Every step in his logical progression had followed directly upon the earlier one. From Norman’s decision we went directly to my mother’s death.

So, I took my father’s logic and went further: had my grandparents never met, my father would never have been born and – voila – my mother would be alive.  Actually, had my great grandparents never come over from Ireland, my grandparents wouldn’t have been born either and – voila – my mother would be alive. I sat in that hallway and I kept going with these true statements. I ended up all the way back at Adam and Eve. My mother was probably dead because of that damn apple.

But my father’s drinking? Apparently, it didn’t play a part even worth mentioning.  Norman, if not Adam and Eve, was more responsible for my mother’s death then my father’s drinking was.

I was stunned by my father’s sincerity. I learned a lot that night – about blame, and fault, and sincerity, and denial and responsibility. But I learned one lesson I never dreamed then that I’d be blogging about now: things can be true, and yet completely and totally irrelevant.  As a matter of fact, there are many things that are true, that are irrelevant.

The chronological sequence of events that directly followed upon each other did not lead to my mother’s death, even though they did. Years later, I connected immediately to the phrase when I first heard it that the “facts were getting in the way of the truth.” Facts can, and too often do, masquerade as truth.

Facts – like my father’s that night – can be irrelevant. Truth, I’ve experienced, is always relevant. The truth is that my mother should not have gotten in the car; and my father should not have been driving.  The actions of Norman, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and Adam and Eve, are all totally irrelevant to what happened that late night forty five years ago, no matter how factual.

“True, but irrelevant.”  An unintentional gift from my father that has saved me from confusion, or brought me back from confusion, more times than I can remember over the course of my life.

Jack