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A Yearning to Know Finding her Birth Mother — and seven siblings — after a twenty-three year search was a dream come true for adoptee
At 4 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 28, 1999, my wife, Deborah, laid eyes for the first time in 45 years on the woman who gave her birth. The setting was — well, let's call it casual: a Tim Horton’s in Hamilton, Ont. But it did nothing to detract from the drama of the moment or ease the tension of the situation. Deb and her birth mother, Inge Gogishvili (née Lembcke), recognized each other instantly. It wasn’t hard. “What took you so long?” Inge asked of the girl she had christened Nina Leila. “I thought I’d see you at my doorstep when you turned 16.” Then, with a nod in my direction, she added: “Didn’t have the courage to come alone, eh?” Deb handed Inge (pronounced Inga) the small bouquet of flowers that had, for a short while that bright morning, become the object of an obsessive quest, and then the two embraced. No tears, no breast-beating, no histrionics. Just heart-pounding drama. That rare kind where the blood drains from your face and your mouth is parched dry. Mother and daughter addressed each other as would two acquaintances who had lost touch. But the superficial offhandedness was belied by their eyes, which locked with laser-like intensity — and by the deep breaths each took at regular intervals. Inge’s nervousness was obvious from the long, rapid-fire and occasionally disjointed answers she gave in a strongly German-accented English. As for Deb, she had very nearly given up on her fondest wish: to see, hear and touch a human who possessed some natural link to her — a physical resemblance, a shared intuition, a mother in common, a similar taste in chocolates, books, men — any connection at all. The reunion was far from the end of the search. A lifelong quest doesn’t wrap up quite that neatly. Particularly stunning was the sudden discovery, for example, that Deb has seven siblings — Inge’s three sons and four other daughters. Such a brood was a dream come true for Deb, who has always idealized big families, blissfully ignoring the infighting, posturing, bad-mouthing, feuds, self-promotion, politicking, shifting alliances, exclusions, inclusions, relentless gossip and other tedious realities of large tribes. The shocking revelation of an instant clan could hardly be topped. Yet Inge did just that, in a casual comment on this August afternoon in Hamilton. Wanting to know more about her paternity, Deb asked her if one of the few Children's Aid Society information nuggets we’d been spoon-fed all these years had been true: that her birth father was a mysterious, moody Russian who’d decamped shortly after an affair with her mother. Not quite. Deb's father, Inge believes, is Dimitri Gogishvili, the man she’s been married to for 53 years, the father of their seven other children — the same man who cast Deb out of his house into foster care at 10 months of age, on March 5, 1954, after finding out through friends that Inge had been having an affair. It had been a brief liaison with one Antonio Capobianco, Inge said candidly. He was a lodger she’d known for a couple of years at the house she and Dimitri had moved to shortly after emigrating from Germany in 1951. But she always thought Deb was the product of her marriage. “Oh, sure, you’re our daughter,” she said with great assurance — though with no proof of paternity. “I told Dimitri, I argued with him, I pleaded with him,” Inge recalled. “Do you realize you may be casting your own daughter out of her family, your own flesh and blood?” To no avail. Inge was placed in an untenable position in that pre-feminist era by an ultimatum from Dimitri: get rid of Deb, or lose the rest of her family. There were then three other children. Not quite Sophie’s Choice, but a heart-rending decision nonetheless, one that would stay with Inge to this day. We would learn later that all Gogishvili siblings agree on one thing: their parents’ union was not a happy one. His iron-fisted discipline and irascibility seem to have made life rather difficult for the family. Inge, in fact, once left him for 10 years before working things out — to a degree. But she apparently loves Dimitri and, at 73, has just moved from their longtime home to a spacious apartment to care night and day for him, now 85 and in the throes of advanced Alzheimer’s. Capobianco, meanwhile, could still conceivably turn out to have been Deb’s biological father. He died recently, and we are in the process of trying to locate his sister, Concetta, who Inge said tried hard but in vain to adopt Deb. As it turns out, Deb lived the first half of her life with her adoptive parents within a few kilometres of her birth family in Hamilton — and on the same street her newly found sibling George has recently moved to. Deb had talked with Inge by phone before meeting her, so her warmth and openness did not come as a complete surprise. It was far from clear, however, what kind of reception Deb would get from these four sisters and three brothers: George, Charlie, Tamara, Michael, Mariam, Sophia and Natela. It seemed to us at that point that our luck was bound to run out, that the siblings, some middle-aged, would object to the upheaval and mayhem we were certain to inflict on their peaceful existence, and would resent the intrusion. Their heartfelt welcome was not just immediate, it was emotional, articulate, apologetic to Deb, blazingly sincere — and the most curious experience of our lives, bar none. That August night in Hamilton, after our kaffeeklatsch with Inge, we met her daughter Mariam, and Mariam’s husband, Chuck Cummins, at our hotel room. Deb was so flustered in anticipation that she locked herself out of the room, and the three of them were still talking in the hallway 10 minutes later. A planned brief get-together turned into an unforgettable three-hour non-stop talkathon, careening off into every direction at once. The same day, Sophia, a Gogishvili sister who'd moved with her husband, Doug Hurst, to Nelson, in B.C.'s Kootenay region, phoned Deb and the two had an intense conversation. Tamara called later, and the roller-coaster of emotions was off again. But of greater importance was the insight we were gaining into the kind of people she was getting involved with — the kind of people Deb was a part of. It would turn out to be the best part of the story. - - - For many people, a mother is as intimate a connection as can be, and Deb felt immense relief that Inge had been immediately receptive, warm and generous when the final chapter of her adoption story had begun to unfold three months before they met face to face. It was the barely believable culmination of a 23-year quest, an off-and-on search for Deb's birth family ever since she and I had met. Granted, it had been a mostly casual search, but never out of mind, and periodically flaring up into a full-blown, focused investigation. In general, I was more disposed than Deb to find her “biological antecedents,” in the cuddly phrase of Canadian social services. She alternated between enthusiasm and “down-mode,” not wanting to make contact with people who obviously wanted nothing to do with her, a classic ambivalent stance of adoptees. Renamed Deborah Ann by her adoptive parents, George and Audrey Nicholls, Deb feared the possible effects of a successful search on her, our marriage, her adoptive parents, our kids, my family, and her brother, also adopted and not related to her. She had placed her name several times with government registries in Ontario, a kind of bazaar that matches searching adoptees with birth relatives willing to be contacted by them. None had come forward, so she assumed none wanted to. Deb had seen the TV stories and read the news accounts of adoptees reuniting with their birth families after umpteen decades, which always reduced her to melancholy for a spell. Great TV footage and headlines, although clearly not her destiny. But wouldn’t it be incredible if we could just have one baby picture of Deb? The final leg of her truly odd journey was a flurry of extraordinary ironies, coincidences, great good fortune, help from total strangers and a few sad twists. The saddest by a long shot was the death of her beloved father (adoptive, although to Deb he was and always will be her dad, period) a few months before. He died on Dec. 20, 1998, the day he was to come to Montreal, his first Christmas stay chez nous since his own beloved wife died in 1991. A few years before her death, Audrey had inexplicably ceased speaking to Deb. It was a total mystery that George explained as the result of a personality change caused by her various medications — a highly dubious proposition since she remained close to Deb's brother, Paul. “I felt absolutely devastated and rejected a second time when my mother stopped speaking to me,” said Deb, “final proof of being undeserving of a mother's love.” Being cast aside again, this time as a reasoning adult, made for a protracted period of pain and sadness that lifted when her relationship with her dad, always loving, blossomed after Audrey's death. Audrey had been a dutiful and conscientious mom to Deb. She and George had done all the heavy lifting — school lunches, guitar and ballet lessons, vacations, birthday cakes, suffering thuggish-looking boyfriends. They had provided a stable, orderly and safe upbringing based on hard work, decent values and solid character. Many adoptees are not so lucky. But as a teenager, Deb's defiant and sometimes insulting, disrespectful behaviour toward her parents — a common enough adolescent trait accentuated by that feeling of “disconnectedness” keenly felt by most adoptees — was met by Audrey’s frequent rebukes about how she was “glad you’re not my real daughter.” Two worlds of hurt collided hard and often. The two seemed later to have reconciled, but Deb’s childhood had the effect of making her ultra-shy and reserved — identifying intimately with Anne of Green Gables. Author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s house was a compulsory visit during our P.E.I vacation. The fear of risking all that pain a third time was a large part of Deb’s ambivalence toward finding her birth family. I also recall a (still) good friend of ours berating me loudly during one of our “on-mode” periods, when the search was a central part of our lives. “You're insane,” he shouted. “You’re both happy, and this will only screw everything up for everyone,” he insisted, genuinely concerned and incredulous that Deb had filled out yet more forms, made yet more calls to adoption-disclosure agencies — an Orwellian name, considering what they really are — and once again renewed contacts with the Children's Aid Society of Hamilton-Wentworth Region, where she was registered. I wondered what he would have said had he known that that very afternoon in Hamilton, I’d done the obvious thing, once again, by looking in the phone book for that uncommon last name of Gogishvili. This time, though, I actually dialed the phone, my heart racing. I still have the piece of paper where I’d written down three or four numbers and called them one after the other. No one answered, and I confess to feeling hugely relieved. Forcing myself to call again an hour later, I got an answer at the second number. A gruff male voice. I froze, standing there, mouth literally agape. I could think of only one thing: Screw up the next few words, buddy boy, and you could blow your wife’s chances for life. What to say? “Hi, I’m married to someone I think you may have given up for adoption 35 years ago. How’re you doing? Can we come over? Oh, and listen, could we do a blood test?” I hung up and never did that again. It took a week to tell Deb I'd even called. I've since been told that it’s nearly impossible for an interested party to make contact in such circumstances — not to say dangerous, verging on foolhardy. Such bridge-building contacts are best left to professionals. Finding Deb’s medical history took on some urgency just before our daughter, Lisa Anne, was born on Dec. 31, 1981, followed by Chris on Sept. 5, 1985. Fairly complete medical records from my side of the family were balanced by a complete blank on Deb’s side. The significance of that void first became apparent when Deborah was pregnant with Lisa: her RH negative blood, which can lead to complications and for which she had to undergo a minor procedure, came as a total surprise to her. RH negative blood is easily detected in pregnant women and routinely dealt with. But the episode served notice that heredity, previously an abstract, remote concept for us, was a real and pressing issue: What else is lurking out there for three out of four of us? How significant could it be? When are we going to find out, and under what circumstances? She knew basic things: her birth name, that part of her family was Georgian — my parents would unfailingly note that Gogishvili was close to Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's real name — and the date of adoption. But even those tidbits in the file, it would turn out, were full of errors, as would be subsequent tantalizing “information” dispensed by Children’s Aid with an eye-drop every few years, and only when insistently demanded. The standoff continued, with the social-service agencies holding all the cards, never tipping them. - - - Late in 1998, we bought our first home computer, connecting to the Internet shortly thereafter. Almost mechanically, with zero expectations, and feeling propelled by what she calls “a strange hand, a sense of fatalism I’d never felt before,” Deb, the Luddite of Luddites, found the online Canadian Adoptees’ Registry, a volunteer organization helping adoptees and birth relatives find each other, and Canadopt, an unrelated self-help group and chat line. “There was no hesitation this time, no procrastination. I sat down and filled out the form, almost in a trance,” said Deb, who detects a grand design behind all this. Not wanting to be underhanded, but even more afraid he would be hurt by it, she had told her father of her search a year earlier. She had mentioned the constant pull in two opposite directions that adoptees feel their entire lives. On one hand, the lucky ones like Deb feel gratitude and love for having been plucked out of bad, sometimes dire, situations by good people. On the other hand, most adoptees can't shake their innate curiosity about their bloodlines. ”It’s tied up with your identity, your sense of self-worth,” Deb said. “Even the most loving, caring, sensitive adoptive parents can’t answer a child’s questions that never go away.” “How come my ‘real parents’ gave me away? It’s basically a kid’s worst nightmare, excluding violence. Kind of like your family died but you continue to live in a new, revised edition. You’re never sure of your place anymore after that. Most kids sense the unease of their adoptive parents and feel hesitant about bringing up the subject at all.” Deb had been told about her adoption at age 4 or 5, when kids register little. The way she’d really learned about it always seemed vaguely callous; her 11-year-old brother was talking to a friend on the phone and yelled, “Is Debbie adopted, too?” to which their parents replied, “Of course.” The two had found some papers in drawers, papers that should surely have been locked away beyond the reach of youthful larceny. Deb’s 9-year-old world didn’t exactly unravel then. But that day remains etched in her memory. That's when The Feeling took hold for her: talk to most adoptees, and they’ll mention the pervasive feeling of disconnect permeating all aspects of their lives. All of a sudden, once you know you don’t know anything about yourself, you become a stranger in a strange land. The whole world becomes a rather forbidding place meant for the “in crowd” (everyone but you). Society may brand you “illegitimate” (as do some current Alberta government documents). And your only self-knowledge comes from bare-bones adoption documents engineered to mislead and throw searchers off the scent, all in the name of preserving the birth family's privacy. The need for an accurate medical history for adoptees and their children is often invoked as the impetus for their search for biological parents, as it was for Deb. But it goes far beyond that. The old saying about peering at strangers’ faces wondering if they’re kin is indeed true, a constant conscious and subconscious need to find earthly bonds that connect you to this life. Most people take this for granted — we’re familiar with our parents’ faces, our siblings’ character traits and family history — and rarely give it a thought. For adoptees, that’s always a tightrope act, balancing their natural need to find their roots against the hurt it’s bound to cause the adoptive parents. George Nicholls was, on the whole, supportive of Deb's quest. He’d felt great and sudden loss himself, and said to us several times matter-of-factly that “if I’d had my druthers, I would have gone with Audrey when she died. I wish I had.” He was the opposite of a maudlin man and meant that literally. His abiding love for his wife had been the focus of his life. Yet he had found Kay a couple of years later, a terrific woman also in her 70s who gave him a second shot at love and life. He had sounded out Deb in various ways, wondering what she felt about the whole thing — was he being disloyal or unfatherly, in some way? Deb gave her hearty approval, even before meeting Kay. His tragedy did make it easier for George to grasp Deb’s search, but she still sensed a certain uneasiness, even mystification, on his part. After registering online with Canadopt on April 29, 1999, Deb promptly forgot about it. Routine replies from the Children's Aid Society often took a year or more. On May 3, four days later, she received an E-mail that started innocently enough. “Hi Deborah, I was wondering if you had any more info on your birth mother? I would like to know her age, religion, and anything else you can tell me,” wrote Gail Hadley, the vice-president of Canadian Adoptees Registry. The next sentence knocked the wind out of Deb: “I believe I may have found the right family, but need more info to be sure.” Gail Hadley had indeed “found the right family” — on her own time, using her own wits and resources, with no fees or strings attached, and despite an E-mail I shot back asking her please not to toy with us. Working solo, she had found the answer to Deb’s two-decade-old quest in four days. Ninety-six hours. It took a couple more months to verify the identity of the family. At one point, Gail seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth and Deb’s worst fears seemed to be materializing: it had all been too good and too easy to be true. But Gail had simply been busy with other hopefuls. She called Deb on July 14 with a simple message: Inge’s waiting for your call. An hour later, my wife picked me up at our summer pool club. As soon as we got in the car, she said: “I talked to my mother today.” Since her mother had died eight years earlier, I assumed she was referring to another imaginary conversation she’d had to try to make sense of their relationship's bitter ending. “No, I mean Inge,” she said. The news was breathtaking. Better still, Inge wanted to meet Deb. Six weeks later, in August, she did, at Tim Horton’s. - - - After that August visit, during which Deb had met Inge and her middle daughter Mariam and her husband, as well as talked to two other daughters, Tamara and Sophia, the five women kept in contact via E-mail and phone calls. Over the next few months, Mariam worked to arrange a reunion for the end of January with anyone in the Gogishvili family willing to meet Deb. It was held five weeks ago. When we checked into a Hamilton hotel on a Friday at 7:30 p.m., Deb was visibly nervous. She dumped most of her clothes from her suitcase into drawers, an alarming departure from her usual near-obsessive item-by-item unpacking, refolding and arranging. Within a few minutes, she was on the phone to Inge, and it immediately became obvious something was wrong. She was bent over double, cupping the phone, repeating, “Oh, no,” “Oh, my.” Inge had been to the doctor earlier that day. Something small and hard had been found in her thigh just before Christmas. She wasn’t sure what it was, but the word cancer kept cropping up. “My first reaction was ‘Oh, God, not again. This can’t be happening,’” said Deb. “My (adoptive) mom had died the day before I was to visit her at the cottage, after years of estrangement.” Then her dad died just before another planned visit. It seemed a jinx. And Inge was no stranger to illness, having suffered an aneurysm at 44 and various ailments since then. “But then I relaxed a bit. Mariam, Sophia and Tamara had all mentioned her ongoing roller-coaster health problems. They said that Inge always overcame physical challenges, and was incredibly strong-willed.” Deb was hoping Inge was dramatizing, a phenomenon not unknown in her daughter. Inge, she’d found out, was not above telling small fibs, like saying she’d started to smoke only 10 years earlier. Her kids laughed, saying she’d smoked all her life. In an odd way, it made Deb feel good — her mother was concerned about how Deb saw her, and was trying to put her best foot forward, an endearing, unwitting expression that she cared. But this was no fib. Inge didn’t make it to the reunion the next night, having been unable to sleep. Everyone else did. On the drive to Mariam’s house, Deb had to breathe deeply or she would have fainted. As Mariam opened the door, Deb was seized with what can only be called an otherworldly experience. Her brother George was visible through the French door, and for a fleeting instant she actually felt she was George looking at his newly found sister entering his life. Just for a split second. We'd had contacts with Charlie by E-mail, but not with the other Gogishvili men, and Mariam wasn’t clear on whether they would be there. If they didn't want to meet us, we could find no reason in the world to blame them. All six Hamilton siblings came. It was a magical evening. In the midst of all this, Sophia called from B.C., making it a full house. Chuck and Mariam showed us through their picture-perfect home, and talk centred on photos on their den wall. It turned out Mariam had been a classmate of Hugh Reid, the minister at Ryerson United Church, the longtime church of George and Audrey Nicholls. We were well acquainted with Reid, since he had officiated at Deb’s father's 80th birthday party in June 1997, and at his funeral 14 months ago. George Gogishvili was quiet that evening, battling a cold, but Deb was thankful he had made the effort to come. Michael, who she had thought was the most reluctant, was the most emotional, a tough nut like his father on the outside but described by one of his sisters as a “real sweet guy, a total mushball inside.” The next morning after brunch, he cried and hugged Deb, and called her that night in Montreal to repeat his words of welcome to the family. Tamara quipped to Deb that “I could really have used your help with the cooking and cleaning 35 years ago.” Although said in jest, it underscored the hard work she, especially, as the eldest daughter, had had to put in to help her working mother run the household. Not for the first time, Deb felt that she might well have borne the brunt of Dimitri’s explosive temper had he and Inge kept her, and that she had been lucky to have been picked by George and Audrey. Then Mariam and Tamara handed Deb a treasure: an original red-and-white 1950s Bell-Tone photo-folder with three pictures. They were all of 4-month-old Nina Leila in the summer of 1953, with Inge, George and Tamara. They were immediately set aside for safekeeping. But Deb had no intention of looking at them that night anyway. The emotion would have brought the rollicking evening to an abrupt halt. She felt a real and profound elation but was in danger of becoming overwhelmed. She needed to get away to tally up the revelations, gossip, inside scoops, family lore, and the sheer volume of information and insight she'd taken in over the past four hours. It was ironic that after all the searching, we were finally there, in the middle of The Reunion, and at that moment needed to get away for a while. “My God,” Deb said as we left the house. “What have I done right in my life to have earned this?” We repaired to a restaurant, and basked in the profoundly satisfying experience of recounting and analyzing the events. Our conversation eventually dwindled to long silences, punctuated by occasional observations. Deb drifted off to sleep that night literally with a smile on her face. These were our kind of relatives: children-loving, hard-working, broad-minded, unpretentious, articulate, sensitive, caring people. But the most attractive thing about them collectively, by far, was their words of inclusion — their conviction that Deb had been shortchanged somehow, and that they had been robbed of a sister. Crying on the phone from B.C., Sophia had said to Deb: “I can’t help thinking you should have been there all these years. You’re our sister. You’re family.” That’s still making Deb jelly-kneed. The only girl in her family for her whole life now loves nothing better than starting a conversation with “I was talking to my sister just now, and ...” - - - Deb had been bowled over during her first visit in August when Mariam told her of a plot she, Sophia and Tamara had hatched at dinner one night at a Hamilton restaurant. They'd decided to hire a private investigator to find this Nina they’d all heard about. It was the exact time, we worked out later, that Deb registered with Canadopt and CAR. It turned out Deb’s existence had become an open secret in the family after Mariam visited Germany in the 1970s and saw a picture of her mother holding an unidentified and unaccounted-for kid. Being the inquisitive sort, she pestered everyone about the identity of the mystery baby, and asked pointed questions on her return home. Dimitri’s equally pointed answer: the kid had died. But Inge told a couple of the children the truth, and references to “Nina” became commonplace — in Dimitri's absence. Such discoveries can turn to disaster, upsetting offspring’s sense of familial order, not to mention the distasteful discovery that their mother actually had a sex life. In fact, Inge had given birth to another daughter, Elke, in Hamburg before her marriage to Dimitri. Dimitri had embraced Elke as his own, but she had grown up with Inge’s parents in Germany. A reunion in Canada in the 1970s with Elke had turned sour for most of the siblings, who vividly remember her vocal bitterness at having been left behind when Inge and Dimitri emigrated. “There was a good reason for that,” said Inge. Dimitri was a Soviet citizen, captured by the Germans and held in a prisoner-of-war camp for at least two years. Knowing that his years as a PoW in Germany on behalf of Mother Russia stood him a good chance of being shot by the Stalinist regime if he returned to his native Georgia, he elected to emigrate to Canada with Inge instead. But he had renounced his Soviet citizenship, like many in his situation, and had become in effect stateless. German authorities, Inge explained, refused to allow a stateless person to emigrate with a German citizen — Elke — who was not his child. With all this turmoil in their past, there was no overarching moral reason for Inge and Dimitri's children to adopt Deb back. But they did. One sensitive topic still loomed large, at least for me: the Nazi thing. Just before meeting Inge for the first time, I’d mentioned my vague discomfort casually to Deb, earning a stinging rebuke. But it would have been pointless to ignore the topic, like the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room everyone pretends is not there. Inge told us that her two brothers, Willi and Ludwig Lembcke, had both served in the German army during World War II. It would be criminal, of course, to visit the sins of the father upon the children. But I must confess it gave me a chill to think my wife’s uncles, removed though they might be, were Nazi soldiers. Thankfully, they were regular army conscripts in the Wehrmacht, rather than Waffen SS, Gestapo or other “special unit” troops. The regular German army did some wretched things too, but at least its mandate for the most part was to do what all armies do — kill the opposing army or be killed by them. The brothers had both fought in Russia and were killed within a week of each other — Willi on April 12, 1944, and Ludwig on April 19, Deb’s birthday. Inge’s father, a Hamburg train postmaster whom Charlie had known as a toddler, was “a nasty piece of work, a real Nazi,” he recalls. Inge, predictably, remembers her father differently: “He was a good father. I loved him.” On three separate occasions, she recalled going nearly mad with grief at being told at 17 years of age that both her brothers had been killed. Their pictures hang in her new bedroom. But we thought it reflected rather well on Inge and her independence of spirit that she would have married a Soviet PoW, a citizen of the country that had killed her two brothers. Her father never forgave her for it, according to Charlie. Inge laughed that off, though. The returning German soldiers “just weren’t my type,” she said. She met the recently released Dimitri in a movie lineup in Hamburg in 1947 and fell in love. But even in the New World, he lived in the old order. Like many PoWs, he spent much of the rest of his life traumatized, feeling guilty about surviving — and making sure his family knew it and felt it. Strange as it may sound after all our discoveries, it seems too easy to paint a totally black portrait of Dimitri. Who can walk a mile in the shoes of someone raised in the Kafkaesque, bloodthirsty era of Stalin? - - - The morning after the big reunion, visiting Inge at her new flat, Deb got her first and only glimpse of a sleeping Dimitri, knocked out cold by his medicine. It was the most meaningful, beautiful visit yet. All of her life, Deb has imagined being told she was loved, wanted and valued by her mother. Inge, more relaxed than on previous occasions, did just that without being prodded, and added details vividly etched in her memory. Unable to sit still, she re-enacted the scene when Deb was given away to her first foster home, stretching out her arms and crying real tears to describe how the terrified 10-month-old had tried to cling to her mother. Inge was subsequently ordered by the foster family to stop visiting, which was understandably upsetting to Deb — and the foster parents. After at least one more foster home, she was taken in by the Nichollses. Now, 45 years later, Inge was saying things that, after the hurt of having been a human bundle peddled from one place to the next, were balm to Deb’s soul: how she had never stopped loving or thinking of Deb; how her other daughters understood why she started weeping days before April 19 every year — Deb's birthday and the date of one brother’s death; how she’d wondered about all aspects of Deb's life — school marks, health, friends, hobbies, but especially hoping her adoptive parents were good to her. Deb responded as she had before to Inge: it is her profound conviction that Inge had been called upon to be the strong one, that she had made the right decision for everyone — her other children, her marriage, and Deb — and had been the glue keeping a fractious couple together for the sake of her children. Destiny, or call. [ARTICLES] |