Proof of Heaven

knew that wherever I had come from, I was their brother and they were
my sisters. I grew up in a family that not only loved me but also believed
in me and supported my dreams. Including the dream that seized me in
high school and never let go till I achieved it: to be a neurosurgeon like
my father.
I didn’t think about my adoption during my college and medical
school years—at least not on the surface. I did reach out to the Children’s
Home Society of North Carolina several times, inquiring whether or not
my mother had any interest in reuniting. But North Carolina had some of
the nation’s strictest laws to protect the anonymity of adoptees and their
birth parents, even if they desperately wanted to reconnect. After my late
twenties, I thought about the matter less and less. And once I met Holley
and we started our own family, the question drifted ever further away.
Or ever deeper inside.
In 1999, when he was twelve and we were still living in
Massachusetts, Eben IV got involved in a family heritage project at the
Charles River School where he was a sixth grader. He knew I’d been
adopted, and thus that he had direct relatives on the planet whom he
didn’t know personally, or even by name. The project sparked something
in him—a deep curiosity that he hadn’t, up to that point, known he had.
He asked me if we could seek out my birth parents. I told him that
over the years I’d occasionally looked into the matter myself, contacting
the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina and asking if they had
any news. If my biological mom or dad desired contact, the society would
know. But I had never heard anything back.
Not that it bothered me. “It’s perfectly natural in a circumstance like
this,” I’d told Eben. “It doesn’t mean my birth mom doesn’t love me, or
that she wouldn’t love you if she ever set eyes on you. But she doesn’t
want to, most likely because she feels like you and I have our own family
and she doesn’t want to get in the way of that.”
Eben wouldn’t let it go, though, so finally I thought I’d humor him and
wrote a social worker named Betty at the Children’s Home who’d helped
me with my requests before. A few weeks later, on a snowy Friday
afternoon in February 2000, Eben IV and I were driving from Boston up