By Laura Marie Scoggins

It has been 15 years since I found out my birth mother died of breast cancer. My story had a lot of twists and turns until two years later I was able to walk into the office of Catholic Charities and obtain her true identity. How those events unfolded and why it took so long is a long story.

Search, reunion and even the post reunion years involve a lot of highs and lows. It’s like a roller coaster ride with many twists and turns.

The past two weeks have been bittersweet for me because on March 20 my birth state of Ohio became an open records state, and the following Monday on March 23 my adopted state of Indiana tabled the open legislation bill for possible amendments. Sometimes it seems like the roller coaster ride never ends.

Yesterday I sat glued to social media reading the posts of Ohio adoptees who started receiving their OBC’s in the mail. Tears of joy streamed down my face as I read their stories unfolding and marveled and the support and friendships that have developed in both the Ohio and Indiana adoptee communities. It’s pretty amazing. But it was in the midst of these experiences over the past few weeks that reality hit me hard.

My reunion is over and nothing is going to bring my mom and dad back. My father died in Vietnam when I was a baby, and my mother died of breast cancer three years before I found her.

The hard reality that hit me was the fact that I had never grieved their deaths.

I recently saw a quote about the paradox of adoption grief that said “I saw that the angry adoptee wasn’t angry because of the injustice of their personal life, they were angry at a grief that makes no sense to anyone else in the world.”

We aren’t expected to have grief in the first place and then when we express that grief it is misunderstood as anger and bitterness. It is a grief that is only understood by other adoptees. Then when our search leads to a grave there just are no words for that type of grief. How do you even begin to process such a thing?

Everyone else in our society is allowed to grieve when faced with a loss or tragedy. We are expected to pretend there never was a loss or tragedy.

An interesting coincidence is that in the midst of all of these events unfolding I was given the amazing honor of being on the book launch team for Susan B. Mead’s debut book Dance with Jesus: From Grief to Grace. Did I ever mention that I don’t believe in coincidence? It was nothing less than fate that I would be reading such a book to review on my blog at the same time events were unfolding in both my birth state and my adopted state. In fact I had not even planned to review the book on Surviving Adopted but only on my other blog. The timing was just too fitting not to review it here as well.

Susan says “In my darkest moments and deepest despair, I turned to the story of others who had walked a similar path and saw hope. If they could, surely I could…”

My story is totally different than Susan’s, but grief is grief and her words helped me more than I can say as well as seeing her resilient spirit of suffering so much grief in her life and how her life was restored.

Dance With Jesus: From Grief to Grace is a short yet powerful book of how Jesus came to Susan in the midst of her deepest despair and showed her love, compassion, and that it’s only through an intimate personal relationship with Him that we are healed and restored.

In our darkest moment of despair turning to the stories of others has an amazing healing power. It give us hope, strength and courage to see how another person overcame.

There is hope on the other side of grief. There is hope on the other side of adoption loss. While Susan’s book is not about adoption the hope she offers through her story applies to us as well.

Search, reunion, and the post reunion years are not only a roller coaster ride, but it is also like peeling back the layers of an onion. Open records legislation in both of my states peeled back one of those layers and exposed grief that I did not realize I was carrying around with me.

• The death of both my mom and dad.
• The fact that my reunion is over and I no longer have contact with my birth mother’s family.
• The fact that when I receive my envelope in the mail from Ohio it will contain my mother’s alias name she was given and not her true identity.
• The fact that as I am privy to witnessing the incredible joy of my fellow adoptees as their stories unfold there is no happy reunion waiting for me.

But then I read Susan’s words and as a Christian found incredible hope in her story, resilience and faith.

Dance With Jesus: From Grief to Grace is available today on Amazon.

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