Tag Archives: Kinship

In the end, too many adoptees will leave this world alone

Rudy Owens self-portrait with the latest health challenge on full view

My current health situation, that has only started and won’t get better for a long time, reminds me of my years intervening to support my adoptive mom (who I call “mom”) and my adoptive sister. Mom died in February 2020 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s, and my adoptive sister, who is in a nursing home, is not well.

Maybe I could have done more to help both of them. I still do what I can to help my adoptive sister. My stepdad did more than seven years of heroic caregiving for my mom, and I appreciate what he did. Now that I find myself with serious health challenges, it’s sobering to realize how no one should go through life without someone to watch their back, particularly at the end of life.

In my case, there is no one in my adoptive family or stepfamily of 41 years who would step in to help me, even if we lived in the same community. Right now, I’m sure my three stepsisters know I’m injured by talking to my stepdad, and yet none have even sent an email. We live scattered, far from each other. This is the reality for all of these relations. If I am injured worse than I am now, I am entirely on my own. I continue to plan my life and the next chapter of my life with this as a daily priority to address.

I also think about being adopted and what compassion and care mean for the millions denied their biological relations by this oppressive system rooted in law, religious bias, politics, economics, social practices that have exploited many groups and single moms, racist practices that remove children of color from their kin networks, and corruption that has brought hundreds of thousands of persons to the United States to meet a “market demand.”

We adoptees are robbed of our many, many kin—parents, siblings, half-siblings, cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, second aunts, second uncles, third cousins, third aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews, and countless more. All of these relations are also those who naturally and logically would be there to help us through life’s challenges. This is because the nature of our biological kinship, the root to our survival as a species from a socio-evolutionary perspective that is documented clearly in scientific research.

Rudy Owens and his recently found bio-kin in Finland, photographed in September 2024–we are family at the most elemental level and especially by blood kinship.

In my case, I am entirely on my own. No one is there to “watch my back.” It is a situation I have to deal with.

The one positive note from this sobering reality is I at least know I have biological kin in Finland—found in 2023—who genuinely care about me because we are kin. We are not all aligned politically. We are connected by biology, blood kinship, and genetics. At least I have this reservoir of knowledge to draw upon understanding how kinship works at a biological level in how we treat each other.

My blood kin in the United States, many who have died, live far from me. For those on my biological mother’s family, I am not connected with many. Some never even knew about me until recently, and our close “proximity” to each other as blood kin also creates tension that they cannot accept. The real barrier is my status as the bastard—the dark and dirty secret who had to be abandoned to this system of adoption to preserve society’s needs and to remove the dark stigma that illegitimacy has always represented globally to society all the way down to the individuals in families.

I cannot change anyone, and I cannot make anyone want to know me. What I can do now is make a plan to be ready for this final chapter.

I accept what adoption has done to my natural biologically-rooted safety net—because that is reality. Finland is very much on my mind as place to consider my last chapters. At least there, it is a society that cares for everyone, unlike our country that is unable to achieve lasting change for the better of us all.

Death finally takes my birth mother, did you come to gawk at the photo?

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.

SEE COMPLETE ESSAY ON THIS WEBPAGE.

What I learned about happiness in Finland, my ancestral homeland

Some photos from a family meal capture the warmth of connecting with family, a joy almost like summer, in Kurikka, Finland (February 2024).

Today I published a new story examining my ties to one of my ancestral home countries, Finland, and why it consistently scores at the top of the charts for social wellbeing.

I think the Finnish people must be tiring by now of the many articles that latch on to the country’s consistent ranking, six years in a row, as the world’s “happiest country.” That’s the analysis provided annually in a big and well-researched report on individual and national wellbeing generated by the United Nations.

As a Finnish-American who only last year found his biological kin/family in Finland, I have a strong interest in “cracking the code” to what has made this Nordic nation of about 5.6 million rise to such lofty heights. It is certainly not the weather. On my last fabulous trip there, in February 2024, I had a mix of rain and snow, and mostly clouds.

Mostly I feel lucky to be Suomalainen (Finnish), at least one-quarter by birth, and to have had a chance to learn more about Finland from people who call it home.

On my last trip, to Helsinki, Tampere, Seinäjoki, and Kurikka, I visited my newly found “distal” kin/family and stayed in their homes. Naturally, we shared the joy of taking saunas. That gave me great perspectives that have warmed me even more to the Finnish people and their country. Thanks for the great memories, Finland/ Kiitos upeista muistoista, Suomi!

A new tradition begins for ‘Rudy-setä’

In 2023, I immersed myself in my Finnish heritage and connected with my Finnish kin in Finland.

This marks the first Christmas in my life that I have contact with my biological relatives in Finland. This followed a wonderful trip I made in September 2023 to Finland, one of the ancestral countries of my birth mother.

We had only known each other in the month before I flew to Helsinki, after my search combined with good fortune and the kindness of a stranger helped re-connect familial bonds that had thrived decades between relatives in my birth state of Michigan and Finland.

I published a long-form story about that in November 2023. I highlighted our shared family history and how the inequitable system of U.S. adoption and discriminatory laws in Michigan still deny such connections to likely tens of thousands of adoptees relinquished in Michigan.

In Finland, to my amazing surprising, one of my biological family relatives shared with me a stack of letters and photos sent and shared by our shared relatives in Michigan—my maternal grandmother’s extended family. That stack of documents included letters stretching over decades and family photos that showed my Michigan family—including my birth mother as a young child!

Since coming home, my relatives in Finland and I have stayed in touch. We’ve done a few video calls and have shared messages through WhatsApp, which many tech-savvy Finns love to use. It’s an easy way to reach them. It encourages communications that make me feel much closer to this land of a quarter of my biological kin and their ancestors. My search for my past also opened up a world of discovery for me about Finland, a country voted six times in a row as the world’s happiest country.

Because of Finland’s amazing successes promoting human happiness and health, population health, and the “greater good” for its people, I have also have become more than smitten by my genealogical ties to Suomi, as Finland is pronounced and spelled in its delightfully distinct Finno-Ugric language.

I received a new name this year, courtesy of my Finnish nieces I met for the first time in September 2023.

Soon after I came back from Finland, I received a delightful family video shared with me by some of my relatives. They gathered together to wish me well, calling me “Uncle Rudy.” I earned this loving moniker because I have four distant nieces in this family (and I have another niece with another distant cousin, who I met as well). I loved it.

I felt something I had felt before—a biological kinship to younger children who all shared my genes. I was their “Uncle Rudy,” which in Finnish translates to “Rudy-setä.” I have now fully embraced this title, given to me by the young ones. It turned out to be the unexpected gift of 2023 that I could never have predicted when the year started.

This Christmas card was sent by one of my U.S. biological relatives to their Finnish relatives in 1947. My extended in family in Finland returned this card, to me, when I found and met them in Finland in September 2023.

As Christmas arrived this December, I shared a photo of a Christmas card a Finnish-American relative of mine shared with relatives in Finland in 1947, written in Finnish of course, as the U.S. relatives were bilingual. I wrote: “What an amazing thing to discover that holiday greetings were shared between family through the 1940s, and later. So I wanted to renew the old tradition, one of those Christmas cards sent from U.S. family in 1947, and perhaps start a new tradition.”

My relatives in Finland replied with similar holiday wishes, family photos, and shots of their homes decked out for the Christmas holiday. It was nice to have this connection, from halfway across the world, in a place filled with snow.

It is richly empowering to everyone to know they have kin and relatives, in the United States and also in countries around the world. All of the millions of adoptees in the United States, born there and abroad, have an inherent human right to share this connection to their kin and relatives, if that is a mutually shared wish.

I received wonderful Christmas wishes from Finland on Christmas Eve this year, from my Finnish relatives in Finland (hyvää joulua).

Earlier today, on Christmas, Dec. 25, 2023, I used the special occasion to advocated with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to support the restoration of basic human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees. The best way that the fellowship and good will of the holiday can be shared, through the passage of possible legislative reform in Michigan, is to make it possible that all of us can know who our kin are and to feel the bonds of fellowship with those with whom we share a collective biological kinship. This is called being human. We all have a right to this condition by birth.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all, especially to those who may still not know their kin, their past, and their truth because of laws like those still enforced and in place in my birth state, Michigan.

Meeting my kin in Finland and the truth of biological family

“This is the coolest thing that’s happened in a really long time. Welcome to family.”

Comments shared with Rudy Owens by his distant cousin shortly after meeting his Finnish family in Finland in September 2023

By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH

A sign commemorating fallen Finnish military who died in the wars with the USSR between 1939 and 1944, at the Museo Militaria, in Hämeenlinna, Finland

For years I have repeated a phrase that speaks an eternal truth known to many cultures, globally.

In the English language that wisdom is: “Blood is thicker than water.” In Finnish, they say, “Veri on vettä sakeampaa.” Other languages also explore this idea about the primacy of kinship, such as Mandarin. The Chinese expression translates to: “Family relationships are stronger than any others.”

It is an expression many of us know, almost by instinct.

Its meaning is universal. It reflects how we have evolved, through evolution and our common, shared history, grounded in our closest relations. It also defines how humans have and continue to relate to those closest to them, especially their biological family and blood kin.

For me, that truth became even more clear following my incredible 11-day trip in September 2023 to Finland, one of my ancestral home countries. In this Nordic nation, six years a row voted the world’s happiest country, I had this truth reaffirmed in unforgettable ways. I shared these life-affirming moments with the people I met and with whom we collectively share relatives dating back more than two centuries.

They are and always will be my “family.” They are and always will be my kin.

Ultimately, biological family connects all of us, no matter our age, race, country, or culture.

Family is universal. We all have family—biological family. It’s the common glue that binds us to others.

The acclaimed writer Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, succinctly described our collective humanity after the publication of his globally beloved family history of formally enslaved west Africans brought to America. “We are first many millions of families sharing this earth,” said Haley. “After the miracle of life itself, the greatest human common denominator is families.”

Rudy Owens in Helsinki, Finland, one of his ancestral countries of his biological relatives

Adoption secrecy hides my Finnish family story

As an adventure of discovery and learning, my trip to Finland in September 2023 exceeded my wildest expectations. In less than two weeks I drove more than 2,000 kilometers and met and befriended my distant Finnish relatives. I had not known they existed for certain less than a month earlier.

We created bonds, and they felt sturdy. I instantly felt I was standing on a solid foundation that had been missing for decades, to an ancestral land and a wider kin network. This footing was as solid as the granite rocks that cover the Finnish landscape.

More than six weeks after my wonderful meetings with my kin relatives in Finland, I am still struggling for words to describe the undeniable reality that the trip proved to me about blood kinship and life.

Among the most certain and provable facts before me are photos, showing my resemblance to my relatives, removed now by three generations.

The evidence that I am related to my Finnish kin is visible to anyone looking at our photos. The strongest similarity is my uncanny facial and even body similarities to a younger male distant cousin, who I did not meet. One of my other distant cousins, who is his sister, tells me, “The resemblance is uncanny.” In fact all the family members who have met me agree on this visual reality they can confirm with their eyes.

The other fact I can grasp with a firm grip is the shared joy we all felt by simply connecting. It felt organic and without effort.

But how should one describe soul-felt joy meeting one’s blood kin one has never met in more than a half-century? How should a person explain how he is greeted warmly as family, with a new nickname “Uncle Rudy” (“Rudy-setä” in Finnish) among the youngest newfound relatives?

More importantly, how do you tell people like disinterested media, public health officials, and lawmakers about this feeling, particularly when such kin ties have been denied to you by state law and the power of a state and its public health bureaucracy for decades?

Despite all of the positive experiences I can share about connecting with my kin, they don’t change that I am still denied the legal right to have these blood and family relations and knowledge of my identity and—in my case—Finnish ancestry by the full force of Michigan state law.

… GO HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY PUBLISHED ON MY WEBSITE.