Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

11. An End to the Downward Spiral

For 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:

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.

“But at the time I just thought how beautiful and bright the King of Planets appeared, watching over us from above.”

As she entered the hospital foyer, a magical thought struck her. Girls generally stayed in the Crittenden Home for two weeks after they delivered their babies, then they’d go home and pick up their lives where they’d left off. If she really delivered that night, she and I might be home for Christmas—if they actually set her free at two weeks. What a perfect miracle that would be: to bring me home by Christmas Day.

“Dr. Crawford was fresh from another delivery, and he looked awfully tired,” Ann told me. He laid an ether-soaked gauze over her face to ease the pain, so she was only semiconscious when finally, at 2:42 A.M., with one last great push, she gave birth to her first child.

Ann told me that she wanted so much to hold and caress me, and that she would never forget hearing my cries until fatigue and that anesthetic finally won out.

Over the next four hours, first Mars, then Saturn, then Mercury, and finally brilliant Venus rose in the eastern sky to greet me into this world. Meanwhile, Ann slept more deeply than she had in months.

The nurse awakened her before sunrise.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” she said cheerfully, and presented me, swaddled in a sky-blue blanket, for her to admire.

“The nurses all agreed that you were the most beautiful baby in the whole nursery. I was bursting with pride.”

As much as Ann wanted to keep me, the cold reality that she couldn’t soon sank in. Richard had dreams of going to college, but those dreams would not keep me fed. Perhaps I felt Ann’s pain, because I stopped eating. At eleven days, I was hospitalized with the diagnosis that I was “failing to thrive,” and my first Christmas and the following nine days were spent in the hospital in Charlotte.

After I was admitted to the hospital, Ann took the two-hour bus ride north to her small hometown. She spent that Christmas with her parents, sisters, and friends, whom she had not seen in three months. All without me.

By the time I was eating again, my separate life was under way. Ann sensed that she was losing control and that they weren’t going to allow her to keep me. When she called the hospital just after New Year’s, she was told that I had been sent to the Children’s Home Society in Greensboro.

“Sent with a volunteer? How unfair!” she said.

I spent the next three months living in a baby dorm with several other infants whose mothers could not keep them. My crib was on the second floor of a bluish gray Victorian home that had been donated to the society. “It was a most pleasant place for your first home,” Ann told me with a laugh, “even though it was mainly a baby dorm.” Ann took the three-hour bus ride to visit half a dozen times over the next few months, trying desperately to come up with a plan that would succeed in keeping me with her. Once she came with her mother and another time with Richard (although the nurses made him view me through the window—they would not let him in the same room, and certainly not let him hold me).

But by late March 1954, it was clear that things weren’t going to go her way. She would have to give me up. She and her mother took the bus to Greensboro one last time.

“I had to hold you and look in your eyes and try to explain it all to you,” Ann told me. “I knew you would just giggle and coo, blow baby bubbles, and make pleasing sounds no matter what I said, but I felt I owed you an explanation. I held you closely one last time, kissed your ears, chest, and face, and caressed you gently. I remember inhaling deeply, loving that wonderful aroma of freshly bathed baby, as if it were yesterday.

“I called you by your birth name and said, ‘I love you so much, so much you’ll never know. And I’ll love you forever, until the day I die.’

“I said, ‘God, please let him know how much he is loved. That I love him, and always will.’ But I had no way of knowing if my prayer would be answered. Adoption arrangements in the 1950s were final and very secret. No turning back, no explanations. Sometimes birth dates were changed in the records just to hamper anyone’s efforts to uncover the truth about a baby’s origins. Leave nothing to trace. Agreements were protected by harsh state laws. The rule was to forget it ever happened and go on with the rest of your life. And, hopefully, learn from it.

“I kissed you one last time, then laid you gently in your crib. I wrapped you in your little blue blanket, took one last look into your blue eyes, then kissed my finger and touched it to your forehead.

“‘Goodbye, Richard Michael. I love you,’ were my last words to you, at least for half a century or so.”

Ann went on to tell me that after she and Richard were married and the rest of their children came along, she became more and more taken up with finding out what had become of me. In addition to being a naval aviator and an airline pilot, Richard was an attorney, and Ann figured that gave him license to uncover my adoptive identity. But Richard was too much of a gentleman to go back on the adoption agreement made in 1954, and he kept out of the matter. In the early 1970s, with the war in Vietnam still raging, Ann couldn’t get the date of my birth out of her head. I would turn nineteen in December 1972. Would I go over? If so, what would become of me there? Early on, my plan was to enlist in the marines to fly. My vision was 20/100, and the Air Force required 20/20 without correction. Word on the street was that the marines would take even those of us with 20/100 vision and teach us to fly. However, they then started winding down the Vietnam war effort, so I never enlisted. I headed off to med school instead. But Ann knew none of this. In the spring of 1973, they watched as surviving POWs from the “Hanoi Hilton” disembarked from the planes returning from North Vietnam. They were heartbroken when missing pilots they knew, more than half of Richard’s navy class, failed to emerge from the planes, and Ann got it in her head that I might have been killed over there myself.

Once in her mind the image refused to fade, and for years she was convinced that I’d died a grisly death in the rice paddies of Vietnam. She certainly would have been surprised to know that at that time I was just a few miles away from her in Chapel Hill!

In the summer of 2008, I met up with my biological father, his brother Bob, and his brother-in-law, also named Bob, at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. Brother Bob was a decorated hero in the navy during the Korean War and a test pilot at China Lake (the navy’s weapons test center in the California desert, where he perfected the Sidewinder missile system and flew F-104 Starfighters). Meanwhile Richard’s brother-in-law Bob set a speed record during Operation Sun Run in 1957, a circumglobal relay record in F-101 Voodoo jet fighters “outflying the sun” by circling the earth at an average speed of over 1,000 miles per hour.

It felt like Old Home Week for me.

Those meetings with my birth parents heralded the end of what I’ve come to think of as my Years of Not Knowing. Years that, I came at last to learn, had been characterized by the same terrible pain for my birthparents as they had been for me.

There was only one wound that wouldn’t heal: the loss, ten years earlier in 1998, of my biological sister Betsy (yes, the same name as one of the sisters in my adoptive family, and they both married Robs, but that’s another story). She’d had a big heart, everyone told me, and, when not working at the rape crisis center where she spent most of her time, she could usually be found feeding and caring for a menagerie of stray dogs and cats. “A real angel,” Ann called her. Kathy promised to send me a picture of her. Betsy had struggled with alcohol just as I had, and learning of her loss, fueled in part by those struggles, made me realize once again how fortunate I had been in resolving my own problem. I longed to meet Betsy, to comfort her—to tell her that wounds could heal, and that all would be okay.

Because, strangely enough, meeting my birth family was the first time in my life that I felt that things really were, somehow, okay. Family mattered, and I’d gotten mine—most of mine—back. This was my first real education in how profoundly knowledge of one’s origins can heal a person’s life in unexpected ways. Knowing where I came from, my biological origins, allowed me to see, and to accept, things in myself that I’d never dreamed I’d have been able to. Through meeting them, I was allowed to throw away, at last, the nagging suspicion that I’d carried around without even being aware of it: a suspicion that, wherever I had come from, biologically speaking, I had not been loved or cared about. Subconsciously, I had believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or even to exist. Discovering that I had been loved, since the very beginning, began to heal me in the most profound way imaginable. I felt a wholeness I had never known before.

It was not, however, the only discovery in this area that I would make. The other question that I thought had been answered in the car with Eben that day—the question of whether there really is a loving God out there—still held, and the answer in my mind was still no.

It wasn’t until I spent seven days in coma that I revisited that question. I discovered an entirely unexpected answer there as well…