When my birth dad Roger called me last week, I knew that something important had happened. We don’t talk regularly, so when we do, it matters.
He called to tell me that his big brother had died.
Uncle Jack was 78 years old. He died peacefully in his sleep after living with cancer for a while. A man of deep faith, he was always kind, loving, and encouraging to everyone around him. He leaves behind six children and eleven beloved grandchildren.
I didn’t know him well. But I know that Roger and his wife Paula, and all eight of my siblings, loved him deeply. And two years ago, they lost their younger brother, my Uncle Tom. Which means that Roger is now, as he put it to me on the phone, “the last one standing.”
I don’t know what to do with that.
Grief is funny that way.
It arrives and just sits there, waiting for you to figure out where to put it.
I know I’m sad for Roger. I’m sad for Paula. I’m sad for my cousins—Jack’s six kids, some of whom I’ve only met once or twice. I know what it’s like to lose your dad. Not Roger, I mean my Daddy. Ronald. The man who adopted me and raised me as his own.
I was a daddy’s girl, through and through. And I was devastated when he died at the young age of 62. I was only 24. Barely an adult. We never got to have the relationship I imagined we’d have. The one where I was fully-grown and we’d sit across from each other as equals, maybe over coffee, and really talk. I still have so many questions for him.
But I’ve had that with Roger. I found him five years after Ronald died, and I felt like I’d been given the most extraordinary gift—a second chance at the unconditional love that only a father can offer.
He already had eight children. But he proudly proclaimed me as his ninth when introducing me to friends and family.
(Even though I was first. Details, details.)
So, this week I will travel to Tennessee. I will sit in church with Roger and Paula and my eight siblings as we celebrate the life of a man I didn’t know well, but who, by all accounts, was loving and was loved.
And I know it’s weird to say, but I’ll be secretly grateful to be there. With my family. As part of the family who is giving Uncle Jack a loving send-off.
I adore my smart and kind brothers and sisters, all good parents and good citizens of the world. I cherish time with Roger, because I don’t get enough of it. I soak up every conversation with my cousins, learning more about their lives and who they are.
There is something about being in a room full of people who share your blood (people you came to later in life, people you’re still getting to know) that is hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it. It’s a particular kind of joy. A little breathless. A little tender around the edges.
And I imagine I’ll sit in that church pew in Tennessee, at the same chapel where some of my siblings got married, surrounded by people who share my biology but not my whole story, and I’ll feel the thing I’ve come to recognize as the gift of belonging to more than one world.
That’s what reunion does. It doesn’t simplify your life, it expands it.
Maybe you know this feeling too—not necessarily through adoption, but through the particular complexity of a blended family—a stepparent who showed up and stayed, marrying into someone’s huge family, people you found later in life that you didn’t know were your genetic relatives.
How ever you connected with your people, there’s something universal about the experience of belonging to more than one world. Of holding multiple families, multiple griefs, multiple loyalties, all at once, all as real as each other. It gives you more people to love, which means more people to lose, which means more funerals to attend and more grief to hold alongside people who are, somehow, also yours.
If you’re navigating carrying the both/and of life’s complicated relationships and you’d like support through coaching, let’s talk.