Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife (7 page)

Very early on, so far back I don’t even remember when it was, Mom and Dad had told me that I was adopted (or “chosen,”
as they put it, because, they assured me, they’d known I was their child from the moment they saw me). They were not my biological birth parents, but they loved me dearly, as if I were their own flesh and blood. I grew up knowing that I’d been adopted in April 1954, at the age of four months, and that my biological mother had been sixteen years old—a sophomore in high school—unwed when she gave birth to me in 1953. Her boyfriend, a senior with no immediate prospects for being able to support a child, had agreed to give me up as well, though neither had wanted to. The knowledge of all this came so early that it was simply a part of who I was, as accepted and unquestioned as the jet black color of my hair and the fact that I liked hamburgers and disliked cauliflower. I loved my adoptive parents just as much as I would have if they had been true blood relations, and they clearly felt the same about me.

My older sister, Jean, had also been adopted, but five months after they adopted me, my mother was able to conceive herself. She delivered a baby girl—my sister Betsy—and five years later, Phyllis, our youngest sister, was born. We were full siblings for all intents and purposes. I knew that wherever I had come from, I was their brother and they were my sisters. I grew up in a family that not only loved me but also believed in me and supported my dreams. Including the dream that seized me in high school and never let go till I achieved it: to be a neurosurgeon like my father.

I didn’t think about my adoption during my college and medical school years—at least not on the surface. I did reach out to the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina several times, inquiring whether or not my mother had any interest in reuniting. But North Carolina had some of the nation’s strictest
laws to protect the anonymity of adoptees and their birth parents, even if they desperately wanted to reconnect. After my late twenties, I thought about the matter less and less. And once I met Holley and we started our own family, the question drifted ever further away.

Or ever deeper inside.

In 1999, when he was twelve and we were still living in Massachusetts, Eben IV got involved in a family heritage project at the Charles River School where he was a sixth grader. He knew I’d been adopted, and thus that he had direct relatives on the planet whom he didn’t know personally, or even by name. The project sparked something in him—a deep curiosity that he hadn’t, up to that point, known he had.

He asked me if we could seek out my birth parents. I told him that over the years I’d occasionally looked into the matter myself, contacting the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina and asking if they had any news. If my biological mom or dad desired contact, the society would know. But I had never heard anything back.

Not that it bothered me. “It’s perfectly natural in a circumstance like this,” I’d told Eben. “It doesn’t mean my birth mom doesn’t love me, or that she wouldn’t love you if she ever set eyes on you. But she doesn’t want to, most likely because she feels like you and I have our own family and she doesn’t want to get in the way of that.”

Eben wouldn’t let it go, though, so finally I thought I’d humor him and wrote a social worker named Betty at the Children’s Home who’d helped me with my requests before. A few weeks later, on a snowy Friday afternoon in February 2000, Eben IV and I were driving from Boston up to Maine for a weekend of skiing when I remembered I was due to give Betty a call to
check on her progress. I called her on my cell phone, and she answered.

“Well, in fact,” she said, “I
do
have some news. Are you sitting down?”

I was in fact sitting down, so I said as much, omitting that I was also driving my car through a blizzard.

“It turns out, Dr. Alexander, that your birth parents actually
got married
.”

My heart hammered in my chest, and the road in front of me suddenly turned unreal and far away. Though I’d known that my parents were sweethearts, I’d always assumed that once they’d given me up, their lives had taken separate directions. Instantly a picture appeared in my head. A picture of my birth parents, and of a home that they’d made somewhere. A home I had never known. A home where—I didn’t belong.

Betty interrupted my thoughts. “Dr. Alexander?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “I’m here.”

“There’s more.”

To Eben’s puzzlement, I pulled the car over to the side of the road and told her to go ahead.

“Your parents had three more children: Two sisters and a brother. I’ve been in touch with the older sister, and she told me your younger sister died two years ago. Your parents are still grieving their loss.”

“So that means . . . ?” I asked after a long pause, still numb, taking it all in without really being able to process any of it.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Alexander, but yes—it means she is refusing your request for contact.”

Eben shifted in the seat behind me, clearly aware that something of importance had just happened but stumped as to what it was.

“What is it, Dad?” he asked after I’d hung up.

“Nothing,” I said. “The agency still doesn’t know much, but they’re working on it. Maybe some time later. Maybe . . .”

But my voice trailed off. Outside, the storm was really picking up. I could only see about a hundred yards into the low white woods spreading out all around us. I put the car in gear, squinted carefully into the rearview mirror, and pulled back onto the road.

In an instant, my view of myself had been totally changed. After that phone call I was, of course, still everything I’d been before: still a scientist, still a doctor, still a father, still a husband. But I also felt, for the first time ever, like an orphan. Someone who had been given away. Someone less than fully, 100 percent wanted.

I had never, before that phone call, really thought of myself that way—as someone cut off from my source. I’d never defined myself in the context of something I had lost and could never regain. But suddenly it was the only thing about myself I could see.

Over the next few months an ocean of sadness opened up within me: a sadness that threatened to swamp, and sink, everything in my life I’d worked so hard to create up to that point.

This was only made worse by my inability to get to the bottom of what was causing the situation. I’d run into problems in myself before—shortcomings, as I’d seen them—and I’d corrected them. In med school and in my early days as a surgeon, for example, I’d been part of a culture where heavy drinking, under the right circumstances, was smiled upon. But in 1991 I began to notice that I was looking forward to my day off, and the drinks that went along with it, just a little too eagerly. I decided that it was time for me to stop drinking alcohol altogether. This was not easy by any stretch—I’d come to rely on the
release provided by those off hours more than I’d known—and I only made it through those early days of sobriety with my family’s support. So here was another problem, clearly with only me to blame for it. I had help to deal with it if I chose to ask. Why couldn’t I nip it in the bud? It just didn’t seem right that a piece of knowledge about my past—a piece I had no control over whatsoever—should be able to so completely derail me both emotionally and professionally.

So I struggled. And I watched in disbelief as my roles as doctor, father, and husband became ever more difficult to fulfill. Seeing that I was not my best self, Holley set us up for a course of couples counseling. Though she only partially understood what was causing it, she forgave me for falling into this ditch of despair and did whatever she could to pull me up out of it. My depression had ramifications in my work. My parents were, of course, aware of this change, and though I knew they too forgave it, it killed me that my career in academic neurosurgery was slumping—and all they could do was watch from the sidelines. Without my participation, my family was powerless to help me.

And finally, I watched as this new sadness exposed, then swept away, something else: my last, half-acknowledged hope that there was some personal element in the universe—some force beyond the scientific ones I’d spent years studying. In less clinical terms, it swept away my last belief that there might be a Being of some kind out there who truly loved and cared about me—and that my prayers might be heard, and even answered. After that phone call during the blizzard, the notion of a loving, personal God—my birthright, to some degree, as a churchgoing member of a culture that took that God with genuine seriousness—vanished completely.

Was there a force or intelligence watching out for all of us?
Who cared about humans in a truly loving way? It was a surprise to have to finally admit that in spite of all my medical training and experience, I was clearly still keenly, if secretly, interested in this question, just as I’d been much more interested in the question of my birth parents than I’d ever realized.

Unfortunately, the answer to the question of whether there was such a Being was the same as the answer to the question of whether my birth parents would once again open their lives and their hearts to me.

That answer was no.

F
or much of the next seven years my career, and my family life, continued to suffer. For a long time the people around me—even those closest to me—weren’t sure what was causing the problem. But gradually—through remarks I’d make almost in passing—Holley and my sisters put the pieces together.

Finally, on an early morning walk on a South Carolina beach during a family vacation in July 2007, Betsy and Phyllis brought up the topic. “Have you thought about writing another letter to your birth family?” Phyllis asked.

“Yes,” Betsy said. “Things might have changed by now, you never know.” Betsy had recently told us she was thinking of adopting a child herself, so I wasn’t totally surprised that the topic had come up. But all the same, my immediate response—mental rather than verbal—was:
Oh no, not again!
I remembered the immense chasm that had cracked open beneath me after the rejection I’d faced seven years earlier. But I knew Betsy and Phyllis’s hearts were in the right place. They knew I was suffering, they’d finally figured out why, and they wanted—rightly—for me to step up and try to fix the problem. They assured me that they would travel this road with me—that I wouldn’t be taking this journey alone, as I had done before. We were a team.

So in early August 2007, I wrote an anonymous letter to my birth sister, the keeper of the gate on the matter, and sent it to Betty at the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina to forward along:

Dear Sister,

I am interested in communicating with you, our brother and our parents. After a long talk with my adoptive family sisters and mother about this, their support and interest rekindled my wanting to know more about my biological family.

My two sons, ages 9 and 19, are interested in their heritage. The three of us and my wife would be grateful to you for any background information that you feel comfortable sharing. For me, questions come to mind about my birth parents regarding their lives in their younger years until now. What interests and personalities do you all have?

In that we are all growing older, my hopes are to meet them soon. Our arrangements can be in mutual agreement. Please know that I feel most respectful of the degree of privacy that they wish to maintain. I have had a wonderful adoptive family and appreciate my biological parents’ decision in their youth. My interest is genuine and receptive to any boundaries they feel are necessary.

Your consideration in this matter is deeply appreciated.

Most sincerely yours,
Your older Brother

A few weeks later I received a letter from the Children’s Home Society. It was from my birth sister.

“Yes, we would love to meet you,” she wrote. North Carolina state law forbade her from revealing any identifying information to me, but working around those parameters, she gave me my first real set of clues about the biological family I had never met.

When she reported that my birth father had been a naval
aviator in Vietnam, it just blew me away: no wonder I had always loved to jump out of airplanes and fly sailplanes. My birth dad was also, I was further stunned to learn, an astronaut trainee with NASA during the Apollo missions in the mid-1960s (I myself had considered training as a mission specialist on the space shuttle in 1983). My birth dad later worked as an airline pilot for Pan Am and Delta.

In October 2007, I finally met my biological parents, Ann and Richard, and my biological siblings, Kathy and David. Ann told me the full story of how, in 1953, she spent three months at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers, located next to Charlotte Memorial Hospital. All of the girls there had code names, and because she loved American history, my mother chose Virginia Dare—the name of the first baby born to English settlers in the New World. Most of the girls just called her Dare. At sixteen, she was the youngest girl there.

She told me that her daddy had been willing to do anything to help her when he learned of her “predicament.” He was willing to pick up and move the whole family if necessary. He had been unemployed for a while, and bringing a new baby into the home would be a great financial stress, not to mention all the other problems.

A close friend of his had even mentioned a doctor he knew of down in Dillon, South Carolina, who could “fix things.” But her mother wouldn’t hear of
that
.

Ann told me how she had looked up at the stars twinkling wildly in the gusty winds of a newly arrived cold front on that frigid December night in 1953—how she had walked across the empty streets under scattered low, racing clouds. She had
wanted this time to be alone, with just the moon and stars and her soon-to-be-born child—me.

“The crescent moon hung low in the west. Brilliant Jupiter was just rising, to watch over us all night. Richard loved science and astronomy, and he later told me that Jupiter was at opposition that night, and would not be as bright again for almost nine years. Over that time, much would happen in our lives, including the births of two more children.