by John Brooks
I’d looked at medication for Casey as a last resort, frightened of the potential side effects. Would things have turned out differently if we had introduced medication to her much earlier than seventeen?
“These kids are forever more vulnerable and reactive to stress, but they can learn to deal with it. Medication can help,” Brown said. “Attachment can be a piece of the puzzle, but it may not be the whole puzzle.”
There was another thing we did right—the cardinal rule I learned from Nancy Verrier—never threaten abandonment.
Not that we didn’t think about sending Casey off to rehab or reform school, as other parents had. But my consideration at the time was more practical than altruistic; reform schools are every bit as expensive as elite private colleges.
Perhaps if we had mastered just one of the parenting techniques I’d learned about, or used every opportunity to remind her how much she mattered, or responded to I’ll kill myself if . . . not with silence, but with an impassioned accounting of an empty world without her, we could have kept Casey alive.
This didn’t have to happen.
Ray Kinney told me that the effects of institutionalization never completely disappear. “These kids can learn to not let those wounds control their lives.”
Ultimately, Casey might have left home with better coping skills, a healthier self-image, and the confidence that she had two parents whom she could trust to be there whenever she needed them.
TWENTY-FIVE
I thought back to those smiling faces and tearful goodbyes from the caregivers in the white lab coats at the orphanage in Mrągowo, and wondered what lay beyond that cheerful visitation room, the only room we saw.
In my search for answers to Casey’s suicide, I’d Googled Polish orphanages. Perhaps there was more I could learn about the Dom Dziecka system and how it might have influenced the foundation of Casey’s personality and emotional architecture. After several searches I found a treasure trove of information.
Agape Trust is a nonprofit organization that supports young adults in Poland who were raised in the state orphanage system. I sent an e-mail inquiry to the site and within a week was in contact with the couple in charge: Vic, a South African, and his Polish wife, a social worker named—ironically—Joanna, Casey’s birth name.
Vic wrote that the Dom Dziecka orphanage system dated from the end of World War II when the country was left with an estimated one million war orphans. More than sixty years after the war, the system is far smaller, serving an estimated twenty-five thousand children, but the institutional structure still has a child-to-caregiver ratio as high as ten to one. The emotional needs of the children are often sacrificed in favor of basic care, in what amounts to a highly regimented, mass-care environment.
Staff members are discouraged from bonding with the children. It is considered to be unprofessional. But there are also practical considerations. Caregivers can be easily overwhelmed by so many children clamoring for their affection, leading to burnout. Their inability to respond effectively to the children’s needs can further traumatize their charges.
When they leave the Dom Dziecka system, the vast majority of these children—many having suffered emotional trauma before they’d entered—are unprepared for life with their adoptive families. One article revealed that more than 90 percent of Polish orphans might have some form of attachment disorder.
Casey had been dealt a number of devastating blows before we’d even met. From the delivery room she went directly to an incubator where she stayed for two months with little human contact. Then she was sent to an orphanage where she lived for a year, well cared for but emotionally starved. She may have spent much of her young life lying in her crib in a room with other infants, listening to them fussing and crying until it was time for a feeding or diaper change, and lights out. She lost her mother, her sister, and any possible genetic link. She had no close relationship with a caregiver, no sense of safety and trust in the world she had been born into. I wonder if her birth mother ever held her before saying goodbye forever?
As Vic wrote in one of our e-mail exchanges, echoing what I’d heard from others: “Considering the fact that Casey had been emotionally traumatized as an infant, her subsequent behavior under those circumstances was perfectly normal.”
Patricia, who wrote about the boy she adopted from southern Poland, said that he had been delivered to an orphanage at five months old. He stayed until he was two. Patricia had unusual access to the orphanage, and described a clean, production-line existence of ruthless efficiency. Caregivers were instructed to carry the children facing away from them to avoid attachment. Bath time reminded her of a car wash. Boys and girls—all under age five, lined up naked and crying—stepped into a tub where one caregiver soaped them up, one rinsed them down, one dried them off, and another dressed them in pajamas.
The mother of a boy from northeastern Bulgaria told me that she had adopted him at age three and a half from a shabby, Soviet-era orphanage that housed about 250 children. There was no outdoor play area, so the children often remained indoors. With coal for heating expensive and scarce, it wasn’t unusual for the younger children to be confined to their cribs in the winter. Their meals consisted of lukewarm teas, soups, watery juice drinks, canned fruits, and breads. Potty breaks amounted to sitting on chamber pots out in the open; diapers were nonexistent. This woman’s son is now in his early twenties, emotionally immature, prone to violent temper tantrums and depression. He has learning disabilities.
TWENTY-SIX
I finally had questions. Where could I find answers?
My first overture was to a group that promoted Polish adoptions and organized regular social events for adoptees and their families in the United States. With my e-mail exchange from Vic about the Dom Dziecka orphanage system fresh in my mind, I felt that this group would be understanding and helpful. But my inquiry elicited a somewhat defensive and off-putting response from the program director:
I have been doing adoptions from Poland for twenty-two years. Both of my children have come from the same orphanage as your daughter and neither of them have the problems that your daughter had.
She went on.
I have sent your request to speak to us about our adoption program to our lead attorney in Warsaw. She will discuss your request with the adoption authorities and give us guidance on how to proceed. Please hold off on contacting any more of our coordinators.
Several follow-up e-mails seeking clarification went unanswered.
Was I being told to back off? This wasn’t a witch hunt. I was a grieving father looking for answers.
My next contact was with an adoption group specializing in Eastern Europe and Russia. Their initial response was more muted but still tinged with suspicion.
While I understand your interest in gathering information, I cannot grant your request to speak to our adoptive families at this time. We have to protect the privacy of our membership. There are too many scams in the world today, and they often come via email. Information is simply too readily available for me to accept your email as legitimate.
I called and left voice mails at several adoption groups in the Bay Area but never heard from anyone. Perhaps they were busy or, as I was beginning to discover, they might not have wanted anything to do with me.
This was not the reception I was expecting.
As my search for answers to Casey’s life and death continued, I discovered a sad irony—every single person and institution in the adoption chain means no harm, but their actions are often harmful. They all want what they believe is best for the children. However, ultimately, it seems that everyone who comes in contact with these children somehow fails them:
• Adoption agencies don’t warn adoptive parents that institutionalized children may have severe behavioral problems, no matter how normal they seem or how quickly they catch up.
• Orphanage caregivers obey instructions to stay emotionally distant from the children.
• Adoptive parents, part
icularly those in foreign countries with limited fluency in the language and the legal system, don’t ask questions for fear they will lose the child.
• Friends and family are too quick to tell concerned parents what they want to hear, that the tantrums and lack of affection are normal, a stage.
• Mental health experts, partly out of ignorance but sometimes out of professional arrogance, misdiagnose, lecture, fail to connect, ignore the elephant in the room (adoption), and may leave the child feeling even worse about herself, maybe even blaming her for not cooperating.
• Government agencies often erect impenetrable walls between the child and the birth parents, believing that respect for privacy is better for all concerned.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe it isn’t everywhere. The adoption system is beginning to change. New therapies and parenting techniques are making their way into the mainstream. Dr. Marvin believes that these new ideas and practices can help mitigate the damage caused by separation and institutionalization, but they aren’t a cure-all. “It’s like being an alcoholic or suffering from a spinal cord injury or PTSD,” he said. “The parents’ job is to be the prosthetic to the child, to understand and accept that she’ll have a different developmental path than most kids. She’ll use that prosthetic to self-regulate.”
Change to the adoption system needs to start earlier than postplacement, by which point the damage has already been done. Ray Kinney notes that prospective parents are becoming better informed about the spectrum of risks their child might face. He consults with more parents before they adopt a child, and provides specific instructions on how to handle the child in the early days, emphasizing that the child had a life before her adoptive parents received her. “It makes a world of difference when you can get to the parents before they even get on the plane,” he said.
Vic wrote to me that Poland is transitioning from institutional orphanages to foster homes, where the children have a more predictable life and a closer connection with a dedicated caregiver. Open adoptions, where the birth parents have more control over their child’s future, have become more accepted by prospective parents, but only for domestic adoptions.
He wrote about the process they went through with a young mother-to-be. He and Joanna discussed with her the pros and cons of keeping the baby versus adoption, and they decided together that adoption was preferable. They constructed a profile of the type of family the mother wanted for her child and searched an online Polish adoption forum for a couple who seemed to match the mother’s profile.
Much like an open adoption in the United States, the mother and prospective parents met and got to know one another. They spent time together in the adoptive parents’ home before and after the child’s birth. The handover was done with minimal emotional trauma. The birth mother had a say in her child’s future home, and the child had the knowledge that she was not abandoned, but rather carefully placed with a family that would be able to give her the kind of life her mother wished for her.
For sixteen years, I’d fantasized about meeting Casey’s birth mother. Even though Casey claimed disinterest, I wanted to know what her mother looked like, observe her mannerisms, listen to the way she spoke, maybe meet Casey’s siblings. In what ways were they like her?
I wanted to know who produced this child who had brought us so much joy, but who had also tested every ounce of our patience. I wanted to ask why she gave Casey up instead of another of her children. And who was Casey’s birth father?
They could have taught us so many things about her daughter. Maybe knowing more would have made a difference.
EPILOGUE
In the summer of 2008, just months after Casey’s suicide, Erika and I joined an advocacy group fighting for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. We already knew that the bridge was a suicide destination for some people, but were stunned to hear that suicides from the Golden Gate dwarfed those from any other structure on Earth, more than 1,600 since it was built in 1937. Statistics have shown that suicides from the bridge ranged from thirty to forty-five annually since the mid-2000s. But those numbers double or triple if you count people who were rescued from the bridge. Despite these alarming statistics, public opinion in the Bay Area and that of many directors on the Bridge District Board had been decidedly against a suicide barrier for years.
In October 2008, after a long and contentious debate, the board voted fourteen to one in favor of installing a safety net on the bridge. But it was a hollow victory. There was no plan to fund the then-estimated $50 million project cost.
Nearly four years later, after intense lobbying from a coalition of families of bridge suicide victims, mental health professionals, and dedicated local politicians, Senators Barbara Boxer of California and James Inhofe of Oklahoma cosponsored a reauthorized, two-year Federal Transportation Bill that would provide a portion of the funding necessary for the suicide barrier. The bill was passed by the House and Senate in June 2012.
In June 2014, the Bridge District Board voted unanimously for a $76 million revised funding package from regional, state, and federal sources for the suicide barrier. Installation of the net is expected to commence sometime in 2016 with completion targeted for 2019. The persistence of the families of suicide victims remained key to moving this project forward.
Since Casey’s suicide, more than two hundred people have leaped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge. Every story is tragic, especially those of the younger victims.
For years, I blamed the bridge for Casey’s death. If only there had been a barrier. But it was just an easily accessible means to act out on a destructive impulse. The larger question was what brought her there in the first place—not once but twice? I’ll never know for certain—since Casey had never been properly evaluated or diagnosed—but the origins of her emotional problems can probably be traced to her infancy, and those problems were likely exacerbated by a steady stream of well-meaning but ill-informed people, from orphanage caregivers to therapists to us, her parents.
I’ve learned that the act of separating a mother from her baby is a traumatic experience for both. How could it not be? The process of adoption is far more complex and fraught with risk than we ever knew. In fact, some professionals dislike the tendency to overuse the terms attachment disorder and reactive attachment disorder as convenient labels for troubled adopted children. Because of the lack of reliable information at birth, many other issues can go undiagnosed—fetal alcohol syndrome, effects of drug addiction, and mental illnesses that could have been passed on by the biological parents.
While orphaned children, as a group, are at a higher risk for learning, emotional, and behavioral disorders than children raised by their birth family, not every adopted child suffers the effects of early deprivation. Many adapt to their new lives perfectly well and go on to live satisfying, productive lives in wonderfully loving adoptive families. Children can be amazingly resilient.
It wasn’t until my own mother died from a massive stroke in October 2012 that I had a taste of being orphaned; my father had passed away in 2005. For a moment after hearing of my mother’s death, I felt scared, lonely, and vulnerable. With my parents gone, who was going to take care of me? An irrational thought, of course, considering that I was a fifty-seven-year-old man. But imagine a terrified young child in the same circumstances. Even worse, what if her abandonment was not the result of death? Her parents were alive. They were out there somewhere, perhaps with other children of their own, while she was left behind. That was the reality into which my daughter was born.
Erika and I can’t have a do-over. We can’t have another Casey. But we hope that our story and lessons learned can help families and children, like ours, who are still alone and desperate for guidance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This story began as a 450-page saga about a grieving father until I met Adair Lara, a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, author of numerous books, and host of many memoir classes in the living room of her San Francisco Vi
ctorian home. She saw the story that I had completely missed—my search for answers to Casey’s suicide—opening up an entirely different journey into attachment disorders in children who had suffered early-life trauma. I owe her a debt of gratitude for her vision and literary guidance.
I am deeply indebted to the team at Scribner, who took this story to an entirely different level. Adene Corns discovered me at a reading at our local Fairfax, California, library, and Roz Lippel and the Scribner editorial and production team in New York shaped and packaged this into an awesomely professional work for any reader’s or bookseller’s shelves. Scribner believed in this story when everyone else did not. It’s exceptionally rare for a first-time author to make it into the publishing big leagues, but sometimes you get lucky.
Many thanks to the adoption and attachment professionals who gave in to my repeated e-mails and voice mails and agreed to speak with me—Dr. Robert Marvin, Ray Kinney, Dr. Gregory Keck, Nancy Newton Verrier, Heather Forbes, Jane Brown, and Amy Klatzkin. Through a fortuitous online encounter, Vic Magnet of Agape Trust in Paslek, Poland, gave me an unusually comprehensive view of Polish orphan care.
I will be eternally grateful to Casey’s friends, who’ve kept us going in the aftermath of her suicide. We’ve gathered together every year for fellowship, support, remembrance, and plain old fun, all of it in our own private ways. It’s the one day Erika and I truly look forward to.
