Dying for Change

As I watched the cab vanish, I went to my Grandmother Stetten's house (Ken's Mom).  I remember little about the next few hours.  There were two calls from the hospital.  The first related to us that the situation was serious and I should get to the hospital as soon as possible.  After that call, we phoned Ken to have him pick me up.  The second was just as Ken arrived.  My Mom had died.

Few things in life are more tragic than losing the person who you believe loves you most.  Although my relationship with my mother was not an intimate one, it was still the best I had.  There were nights I had prayed to a God I didn't believe in that she would die.  I thought my life would be so much better without her telling me what to do.  But the moment my wish had been granted, I realized an emptiness I'd never known before.  The memorial service was surreal.  I sang "I Get by With a Little Help from my Friends" by the Beatles.  Ironically, I'm not sure I had any real friends at the time.

Custody went to Ken, who had since remarried a young woman named Mary and had a young son named Jason.  To say the least, I was an enormous inconvenience.  My bedroom was in an addition attached to the living room.  I lived halfway between Purcellville and Lovettsville, VA in a place aptly called Wheatland.  During the blur of time that I lived there, I finished the 8th grade at Blue Ridge Middle School.  That winter was the largest snowstorm I had ever seen.  It was on February 19th & 20th and dropped nearly two feet of snow where I lived.  I saved the front page of The Washington Post from that storm for many years.  That is the only clear memory I have from that school year.  We were out for a week.

That spring our "family" traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico where my Grandmother Stetten had moved.  We traveled by car, and fittingly, I was stuck in the back of a Volvo station wagon for the entire cross-country trip.  I remember very clearly feeling as though I was not a part of this family, and there was no changing that.  So it was really no big surprise to me that when the family announced they were going to be moving to New Mexico before the end of the school year, I wasn't going to be going with them.  I would stay behind so I could "finish out the school year."  Yeah.

When they left, I moved in with a family who lived on a farm fairly near my school.  Suddenly my routine involved getting up at about 5:30 in the morning to feed chickens and horses.  There was something that seemed wholesome about this family, which is probably why I fit in like a square peg in a round hole.  I did think the daughter who was about my age was very attractive.  Which is probably why I didn't end up living there very long.  The two clearest memories I have during my time living there was listening to the Beatles over and over again, and having my first experience with Tarot cards and a Ouija board.  I remember being told my life card was "Death."  Not the most encouraging sign, to be sure.

At some point during this period of time, Ken Stetten called the Pierce Warwick Adoption Agency.  This was the agency that processed my adoption.  He apparently asked if there was any way to give me back, or to somehow alleviate his responsibility to me.  The woman who took the call was named Ginger Swisher.  About seven years before this she had received another all about me from my biological mother.  She had asked that a note be put in my file indicating she would like me to be able to find her.  She also asked that a name be put on my record -- James Michael.  This was my father's name, and the name of the man she intended to marry.  Although closed adoptions like mine are supposed to be kept strictly confidential, Ginger gave Ken contact information for my biological mother.  I, of course, knew nothing about any of this at the time.

Meanwhile, that fall I started high school at Loudon Valley High.  I stayed there for a couple months, and then was moved -- but not to New Mexico.  I ended up moving to Leesburg with a single mother and her two kids.  She had a boy and a girl.  I don't remember anything about the boy, but I remember the girl was nearly as old as I was and still regularly wet the bed.  The woman who lived there had different men come home with her.  I remember living with headphones on, filling my head with Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall album.  I transferred to Loudon County High School, the archrival of the school I had just attended.  But I hardly cared, since I never stayed in the same place long enough to develop any loyalties -- to schools or people.  It was my fifth school in two years, and the big change was still to come.

If you've ever experienced a day when you just knew something weird was going to happen, you know the feeling I had the first day of spring in 1980.  I was 13 years old in the 9th grade, and all day long I felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone.  So I really wasn't all that terribly surprised when I walked into the place where I lived and saw my Grandmother Stetten sitting there with a young dark haired woman.  My grandmother Stetten had moved back to Virginia at some point, but it was very unusual for her to be in Leesburg.  I asked her, "Grandma, how did you get here?"  She answered, "This lovely young lady brought me here."  We exchanged small talk for a few moments, and then my grandmother got up and left the room.  At that point I turned to the lady and asked, "So, who are you lovely young lady?"  She responded, "Are you ready for this?"  Having no idea what I was agreeing to, I said, "Sure!"

"I'm your mother."

I stared at her, my mind whirling to try to figure out if she was telling the truth.  She spoke again, and simply said, "Well?"  I responded, "I'm in shock."  When she said, "I'm in shock too," it only made sense to say, "Let's be in shock together!"

We stood and looked at one another, and after offering her a handshake, we instead exchanged a somewhat awkward embrace.  Was I supposed to be hugging this woman that I had never met before ten minutes ago?  Should I love her since she may well be my biological mother?  Could I call her "Mom" when the woman I'd known as Mom for my childhood had died?  I wish I could say I recall the rest of this encounter with the same clarity I have for that brief part of exchange.  But we did talk for a while longer, and eventually they left.

Over the next couple months, plans were made for me to finish school early and move in with Virginia, my bio-mom, my birth mother.  I didn't know what that was going to be like, but I figured anything had to be an upgrade from my current living situation.  In May, I moved in with her.  I discovered she was married to a Greek man named Panayiotis Gouskos.  She had previously been married to another man (Michael Bugg), but never married my father.  I found out then that my father Jimmy Isenberg died when I was five years old of a drug overdose.  He had been addicted to heroin, but actually overdosed on methadone, a drug they gave him to help him break his heroin addiction.

I lived in a side room attached to the living room.  We lived in the basement of a house that belonged to Virginia's father.  She also had a baby daughter, my half-sister Carrie.  When I moved in, I felt more loved and accepted here than I had for a long time.  But there were still many tensions, and the longer I was there, the more obvious they were.  Still, I was grateful for the provision, and for getting to know the family I would have had all along, had things gone differently.  When they left to go to Greece for a month during the summer, I got that familiar feeling when they chose to leave me behind.  But it gave me the opportunity to meet my father's family, and to have a far more life-changing experience in (of all places), Huntington, West Virginia.