Rudy Owens took this photograph of his birth mother in 2009; what do you see and why are you looking at it now?
The entire time I have communicated about my history as an adoptee and the widespread denial of basic human and legal rights to all adoptees, I held a line.
That demarcation point, for me, represented a conscious act of power and an act of defiance.
Until today, April 27, 2024, I have never publicly published a photograph of my closest biological family relative that showed their face.
Here it is. Are you amused? Do you care?
On a few occasions I published very old pictures of my biological grandparents, on my maternal and paternal family sides. These are so buried in my archive, they are likely impossible to find. These photos are also old, and they are more like museum artifacts than documentation of blood lineage.
But now I have arrived at a new destination, because the Angel of Death arrived late this week.
In fact, I started writing this essay when my birth mother* was among the living, a day before her passing. Now she is among the dead, having died in a Michigan hospital this week after a long declining trajectory to death’s final clutches.
I’ve talked about her declining health and what that meant to me publicly already, including in an interview on March 20 with the Michigan Radio show Stateside.
I secured that interview as part of my broader advocacy efforts directed to Michigan lawmakers and advocates there to change Michigan’s harmful adoption secrecy laws that deny adult adoptees born there unobstructed access to their vital records, family health history, and knowledge of kin relations.
Efforts to restore legal rights to tens of thousands of adoptees born in Michigan, spearheaded by a Michigan adoptee rights coalition in fall 2023 and finally winter 2024, completely fizzled in the face of opposition from adoption promoters, which now includes the odd bedfellows such as the Catholic Church’s political subsidiary in Michigan and the ACLU of Michigan. (I was not part in this coalition effort, except by submitted testimony and sharing stories about the legislation and helping set up the two interviews on Michigan radio, for myself and group promoting the bills.)
My birth mother’s condition held the fire to my feet during all of this. The looming death reminded me of the importance of justice denied to countless thousands of adoptees and their families, by law. How many other families out there were experiencing similar losses of family members, like mine?
By announcing my birth mother’s poor health status on a state radio news magazine show, I was already in the “arena.”
Then the Angel of Death made its final move by announcing “check mate” against the person who brought me into this world in the mid-1960s at one of the largest U.S. adoption mills ever created. The call came, naturally, in the early morning hours on April 26, 2024.
My kin and I do not exist for your perverse entertainment pleasure
I have never published photos of my closest biological relatives, like my birth mother, in order to deny gawkers and voyeurs the cheap thrill they take in amusing themselves by looking at adoptees who are denied rights and turned into circus monkeys.
This is a never-ending spectacle, now decades old, and constantly evolving for public entertainment. It has one goal: amuse the mob.
The pattern in news stories, social media posts, and even reality TV shows exploiting adoptees is to stimulate a brain-triggered chemical rush of pleasure watching a person robbed of basic legal and human rights “react” when they finally find relatives. This comes, however, after systemic and years-long harm. This spectacle is ultimately supported by states, medical professions, the public health system, social workers, churches, politicians, media corporations, DNA testing companies, and others.
Did you enjoy your ogling at harm?
So with death’s arrival on my closest biological kin, I am sharing the photo so many lick their lips to see.
However, you will not get the easy jolt of amusement, like the roaring mob seeking red meat and pleasure in the arena grounds.
If you are here to get a cheap thrill, you probably need to ask yourself why you take pleasure in systemic discrimination? Why does the thrill of adoptees’ often decades-long severance from biological family turn you on?
Meanwhile, more kin of adoptees and adoptees themselves are dying, like my birth mother.
Because of indifference by the public and the absence of any political allies from all political spectrums and from so-called “progressive” advocacy groups, nothing ever seems to change.
Death certainly has not changed its certain arrival that comes to all with time.
And folks from my generation especially, the boom adoption years, are running out of time. In the end, death will come, but rights apparently may not.
Nothing for adoptees changes with death
My Finnish biological family relatives shared these loving statements shortly after I told them our shared family member, my birth mother, had died earlier in the day.
My experiences this past week also highlighted what I already knew. Even in the ritual of death, adoptees will find that nothing really changes, except maybe that our reality gets stranger.
Most adoptees will never know what became of their kin, because laws deny them knowledge of their families of origin, eg, their blood relatives who share their DNA.
They are denied closure that comes with the rituals of death shared globally by all people across all time.
At the more personal level, for those like me who were able to find their kin, despite massive and costly barriers, many adoptees will learn again exactly who they are.
They are biological kin to their birth families. They also are forever stigmatized as illegitimate, and never worthy of human consideration in many family circles.
In my story, when my birth mother died, a group of people who were communicating about my birth mother’s status in the final days exchanged notes of condolences and thanks.
Not one of those on the communications channel I was on in the final couple of weeks ever publicly acknowledged the reality that a next of kin, the son, was losing a mother—and then lost a mother. Of course, there were all exhausted the end had come, and not all of them knew me personally. But they all knew I was my birth mother’s son and present “in the room.”
By contrast, my newly found Finnish relatives reacted with love and affection when I told them they had just lost a blood relative, my birth mother.
I met my Finnish kin in person for the first time in September 2023, and I visited them again in February 2024.
They all knew my story about my adoption. I had told them one reason I wanted to meet them was because time was running out for my birth mother, and it made the importance of blood family ties all the more real.
Within an hour of hearing the news, I received a stream of affectionate responses acknowledging the loss of my birth mother. My adoptee status did not matter to them. They saw this loss as what it was: a son losing their (birth) mother.
With their kindness I found some comfort. With them I had shared my birth mother’s photos I won’t share in the Colosseum, because they are my family by blood kinship. It felt good to have these ties not be gawked at but acknowledged with warmth.
*I use this term, and if you want to know why, you can buy my book. I have used this since I was a kid, and I have no plans to change it because it is an accurate statement to reflect facts.