There are three stories here. They all have their own trajectory, but in a brief span in 1963, they intersected, to bounce away from each other and not rejoin in any way until 2009.
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Ellen's story: As she tells it now, she grew up in Wyoming, an only child whose father fought with American troops in World War II. After several years overseas, he wrote back to his wife that he had fallen in love with a French woman, and would not return to the U.S. after the war was over. His American wife was a strong woman with a saving sense of humor. So she set about making a life for her and her young daughter in Wyoming, spurning the advances of cowboys who felt a divorcee needed a man.
Ellen grew up enjoying music, thinking at one point that she wanted to be an opera singer. She says that once she entered high school she discovered booze and boys, and decided "maybe jazz singer would be better." She never did study music, or follow it as a career, but the seed of the musical life had been planted within her. At seventeen, she married and moved to Denver. Soon thereafter, she gave birth to a girl.
But another seed had been planted in Wyoming, one that would bear dark fruits. She began to drink more and more, and by the time she was twenty, she was divorced, estranged from her daughter, and completely lost down an alcoholic abyss. It is possible she may have lost one child during this time. But she will say that she regards those years of her life as lost ones, with vast expanses not in her memory.
In 1963, she discovered she was pregnant again. Whatever the reason, this time was different. Something clicked within her, and she vowed to sober up and give birth to a healthy child. She also realized, in a burst of sanity that was rare for her life at that time, that she would have to give up the child for adoption to a family that could raise it and provide for it. After the birth, she moved to New York, where she lived and worked in Manhattan and Rhode Island for many years before remarrying and moving back to Wyoming. She has been sober for 47 years and counting.
At the same time, a couple from Wichita, Kansas was contemplating adoption. They were nearing their 30's, and determined (for reasons that are now unknown) that they would not be able to conceive a child of their own. Theirs had been a reasonably picture-postcard marriage to that point, although signs of strain were evident. But they were happy in their new home in Denver. All they needed to complete the picture was a baby, something that could only be provided through adoption.
So Ellen Brooks gave birth to a baby boy that one month later, on November 22, 1963, was adopted by Jack and Joan DeWitt. Joan often told her boy that the significance of that date for her was powerful and two-fold: it was not only the day that he entered their lives, it was the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She often told him that she felt that Kennedy's arrested promise was somehow fulfilled in him. (He usually rolled his eyes whenever she told him that later in life.)
Their happy family life was not all that happy. Jack and Joan fought, a lot. And only four short years later, after a move to California, they split up. Jack tried to stay, but eventually moved back to Kansas. Joan raised the boy, and did a remarkably good job, considering.
Considering. She was a single mother trying to eke out an existence for two in an era that was not kind to such women or their children. She never held a job for too long; the longest the boy can remember is 8 years. She struggled with bouts of emotionalism that, in retrospect, were probably symptoms of bi-polar disorder. He remembers one fight where she threw a pan at him, missing. She never remembered the fight. She fought incessantly with her parents and, perhaps most of all, her only sister. The sisters shared a love-hate relationship that persisted without relent up to the day she died. The boy grew up, and spent much of his adult life learning to find himself amidst the wreckage of all of it, and yet somehow he did.
He married, perhaps not wisely. He was successful to a point as a musician. The seeds that had been planted by Ellen Brooks had flowered, and those flowers saved him. For it was in music that he found himself, found his voice, found his calling. In 2005, his marriage ended, but it was really the beginning of a path of self-discovery that unearthed in short order: sexuality, career, love, maturity, and finally - a family history.
Joan died on September 29, 2008, after a series of strokes. Jack had died in Raytown, Missouri in 1985. The boy, now a man, was with her at the last, only flying home when there was no more time to stay. He was not with her when she died. The following May, the man and his girlfriend flew back to Colorado to scatter her ashes in the Rockies. Her final resting place is atop a small hill overlooking a stream, with a view of the snow-capped peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park beyond.
Just two months after that trip, the man received an e-mail stating that the State of Colorado had passed a law saying that anyone born before 1969 could now receive their original birth certificate. He got it, and with an hour of research on the internet, found Ellen Brooks, now Ellen Green.
When he called, her first question was "are you happy?"
* * * * *
I am writing all of this because - perhaps obviously - I am that boy. And now, almost 47 years later, I am sitting in Denver, Colorado. Today I traveled this city's streets and wondered how they looked different in 1963. Tomorrow, my wife and I will drive to Casper, Wyoming to see Ellen (Brooks) Green. It will be my second meeting with her, and the first time my wife and her will meet.
This all seems like it is someone else's story. I couldn't be the guy who was given up at adoption, and found his birth mother 46 years later, the guy who took his adoptive mother's ashes back to Colorado only to speak for the first time with his birth mother three months later, after searching with her for only an hour. I can't be the guy who is sitting in a hotel room in Parker, CO who has spent his whole life digging for some connection with someone to find it in a woman he's only met once living in a state he has never stepped foot in. But I am.
Surely this is an "Oprah" episode. The man who is writing this is sitting there on her couch, and Oprah prods him with moving questions until tears well up in his eyes, and then she introduces his mother who they have just found and "wait, there's more!" out comes his half sister, a sister he never even knew he had. Surely this will be someone else's happy ending?
What this all means, in the end, is going to take more years to sort out. I didn't know what I would feel when I picked up the phone to call her a year ago, nor when I drove to meet her the first time. I'm not sure I know after the fact. The emotions have bounced between extremes: excitement, apprehension, relief, sadness, joy. But none of them have lasted very long. When one emotion appears, another follows in short order.
I guess there's two things I can say for sure; one is that this is surreal. Imagine that you have one set of realities that last for 46 years. And even though you know it isn't the entire story, imagine discovering a second reality after all that time changes your perception of what "reality" is. I thought this trip would take away some of that surreality, but the truth is there is almost more now.
Reality is what we perceive it to be, nothing more. All I can ask of my mind is to continue to expand perceptions and change what is possible. I hope that by the time I leave this dimension, I will at the very least have an larger view of what is real and true than I do today. And if I do, I will have three people to thank (amongst many others) for it: Betty Joan DeWitt, Jack DeWitt, and Ellen Green.
The second thing I can say for sure? Through all of the ups and downs that my life has held, it has been a very good life. To answer Ellen's question, "yes, I am happy."
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