September 11, 2006
An auspicious anniversary.
A day to remember.
A day after which we must carry on.
And so it was for me.
Sep 11, 2006 is a day I will always remember, for its joy and its devastation.
And for its lesson—that life is fragile and while we must try to live life fully and in the moment, we cannot change its course, but must learn to accept, appreciate and keep moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other.
We had been in China for a few days, exploring the brilliance of Beijing. The oppressive heat was forgotten in the over air-conditioned five star hotel in which we stayed. Two worlds seem to exist in Beijing. The high-tech, fast-paced, Western influenced opulent world of sleek hotels, indoor waterfalls, expensive clothing, fancy food and brilliant smiles on those inhabiting that world versus the world of hot, dusty, nameless streets, where people in vast numbers lived in crowded spaces, impoverished, struggling, without a single modern convenience, subsisting on almost nothing but tradition.
My personal world was soon to mirror that fragmented, confusing dichotomous world.
On the evening of September 10th, we arrived in the city of Hefei, where we were to meet the daughters we had dreamed about, cried about, wondered about, obsessed about and could no longer live without.
There were seven families with whom I was to share this life-altering experience. Seven completely different configurations, people who, but for the shared desire to adopt, would probably never have connected. And yet, our connection could not have been any more intimate given the circumstances. Our hearts shared a dream of adding a Chinese daughter to each of our families. What would happen in the next few days as our dream was finally realized was ours alone, binding us together forever.
Although I was part of this group, I was completely alone at the same time.
It was the morning of September 11, 2006, the day I was to meet my daughter. I was in a modest, sparse hotel, in a room with two beds that were more like cots. The room was devoid of love, warmth, coziness, and color, and I thought that perhaps the color and warmth would magically appear when we brought our daughters “home” for the first time, after the court proceeding that day.
But nothing in life happens the way we plan it.
As I was getting ready to go to meet my daughter at the government building a bus ride away, my cell phone rang. It caught me completely off guard since I had not used the phone once since arriving in China.
My brother Mark was on the other line. In typical Mark fashion, he gave me the news. Swiftly, clearly and unarguably. “John is dead”. “What?” The details were murky but the truth unwavering.
My baby brother. He had turned 41 the day I left for China and I had planned on bringing him a beautiful niece for a gift.
I have no recollection of the words that Mark used to explain how he died or that my parents were not coping well. I have no idea how I was able to continue to get ready to get on the bus and go to the adoption proceeding I had been waiting to attend for three years. I only remember riding on the bus, looking out the window on to the dusty streets of Hefei, crying and feeling like my heart was breaking one of the happiest days of my life.
My mind was numb from the contradictory thoughts and sensations. The joy and anticipation were as real as the sadness and desperation I felt.
I recalled the images of Beijing from a few days earlier—rich/poor, new/old, forward,/backward, complicated/simple, foreign/familiar. My own world had, in a moment, become equally confusing. On the day I was finally to adopt my daughter, my baby brother died. Birth/death. Sadness/glee. Celebration/condolences. A beginning/an end.
I was in two worlds. I was in a foreign land, away from my family who needed me, but where my daughter had been born and lived for 18 months and where today, I was to become her mom.
She needed me too.
She was gripping a cracker when I first saw her. Tightly.
As if her life depended on it. A Chinese woman was holding her close. There was something warm and loving about the woman. I kind of loved and hated her at the same time.
I walked towards my daughter and took her from the woman. I was shaking and crying. So was my baby. I held her body to me. She was stiff and wouldn’t let go of the cracker.
I wanted to see her smile or feel her body soften. But my daughter wouldn’t smile. Maybe she knew about my brother, her Uncle John, after whom she would be given an English name. He would have taken her fishing and introduced her to the Grateful Dead.
In my arms, she felt unfamiliar, but I knew her well. And, as familiar as my baby brother had been to me, there was much about him and his life that I would never know either.
I looked into my daughter’s face and she looked at me. Her eyebrows were furled up in a kind of scowl. She had the same look on her face as in the picture the government had sent me. My brain was saying one thing to me and my heart another. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I just stared at this little girl. I could tell that she was skeptical and smart. She didn’t give in to my love. She stayed separate from me. She let me hold her and feed her but that was it. It was going to take more to get her to smile and trust. What does it take to make someone smile? To earn someone’s trust?
Everything felt surreal.
In a moment, I had lost a brother and in another moment, I had been given an exquisite 18-month-old daughter. As I missed the first year and a half of my daughter’s life, I would miss the rest of my brother’s life.
When I held my daughter at first, she cried hysterically. I wondered if it would get easier. Thoughts of my brother clouded my brain. First, as a perfect beautiful, blond toddler, around my daughter’s age, and then as the troubled young man struggling to deal with the demons within him. Sometimes life just doesn’t get easier.
I thought about nature and nurture—the fact that my brother had been born to the most wonderful parents in the world, had been given love, security, education, companionship, every resource imaginable and whose life had been filled with such darkness and pain. He would never get another shot at being happy or fulfilled. I wondered about my daughter’s beginning. How she had been left in a basket because she happened to be a girl. How she might have spent her life in an orphanage, without a family, and that it was she who was getting another shot at happiness and security.
I thought of how much I wanted to give her, how much love I had for her, how much I wanted to ward off all that was scary and replace it with all the nurturing possible. But in that first moment, my daughter didn’t know me. How did she feel? Was she scared?
I held my daughter a little tighter. She was still gripping the cracker. I was gripping her. It was time to say goodbye to the nannies that had been there for our daughters for the first chapter of their lives.
The nannies began waving goodbye and crying. Some were inconsolable. My daughter’s nanny ran to us and tried to take my daughter from me, to hug her one last time. My own silent shrieking was equally violent as I cried out to my baby brother one last time.
The nanny kept calling her by her Chinese name, Jia. Jia, Jia, Jia. I thought I was going to die. It was loud and hot and confusing. And the more she called her name, the more the sound, J- I- A, sounded like John. The nanny almost pulled my daughter from me and for the first time, my beautiful baby girl turned her head towards me, and with both arms, she reached for me. And beyond me, for John. And the tumultuous, sparring emotions within me found their common ground—unconditional love.