The Restart, Moving Forward

The Journey

I don’t think it really sunk in that we were actually going through a grieving process until that first picture arrived in email from Jennifer Eddy. Until that moment the image of Lara had only lived in our imagination. One of the hardest things to let go of was the life we had built around her. There were never any facts to go along with the growing up yet we had stories we would tell to ourselves especially when I would spend countless hours searching. Everything was simply how we had hoped it would have been. We really expected to find her married, successful and with a growing family. When I found that not only was my fantasy impossible but that there was no history after her 9th Christmas it was soul shattering. Even with all the riches in family and health I have, I will never be the same person. That very large part of me that is sitting unfinished is in the hands of another and appears to be out of reach. In order to even start being sad I had to let go of her imaginary life and end it in her childhood.
I grasped wildly at each little tidbit that her childhood friends would send me. They were tiny snippets, little comments, but it was incredible how much each one meant to me. To hear that she loved snapdragons or that she liked to hang upside down from monkey bars was monumental in building a new understanding of a child that for the first time in my life I had seen an image of her face, saw the house she had grown up in, the street she played on, her friends and her adoptive family. Even seeing what her friends looked like now gave a vision of what she may have looked like today and what her career may have been.
I guess it takes a vivid or perhaps an obsessive imagination to take a grade 3 class picture along with a Google street view of the School building she attended and come up with a vision of the school yard filled with students and seeing Lara on the swing laughing along with her friends. But it happens. I pass by her picture, the one I took hours of Photoshop tweaking to restore, many times a day and have many of such visions. I know none of them are true but at the same time it is my privilege to create them. How else can I have her childhood memory?
I feel incredibly guilty now when I can’t recall names or events around my children’s friends. What if someone like me was collecting memories and I didn’t have them. It is probably not something that will happen but I need to be more prepared.
The most devastating part of the discovery chapter of my search was Lara’s adoptive family. Even though Lara’s legacy is the Bereaved Families of Ontario and its mandate of providing support for those grieving the loss of a loved one we were rejected by them. My first contact with Lara’s adoptive mother was listening to a CBC radio show where she and the co-founders of BFO were talking candidly about their children and the events surrounding their deaths and the process of grieving. I felt a great deal of compassion towards her and felt assured that she would be one to share. She had certainly shared with others in the past, why not the one who gave Lara to her.
I still to his day do not understand fully how adamantly they stick by their secrecy. It is like everything they preach is solely for others and not for them. It could certainly happen again that someone will knock on their door looking to meet their adoptive son. I can only hope there will be more compassion shown than given to me.
It turns out that Lara was cremated and her ashes were interned in what the cemetery termed a “common cremation plot”. I suppose I thought that if she was interned in a cemetery that there would be a nice marker or something unique. It was disappointment at first to learn about the commonality of her resting place but after reflection it became less important. My beliefs tell me that her energy or spirit or whatever term you call it, is very much on earth. We will cross paths and I am sure we will realize it happened. I will certainly visit the cemetery this summer, say what is in my heart, and leave with that one step closer to having her at home with me. Some would understand, others wouldn’t.
The pages that follow in this website are what was the nth edition of websites devoted to searching for Lara. From 1968 till 2011 I didn’t even have a name to search by. I had gathered dates, locations and a vast amount of clinical information that in a search really meant little. I often joked that most people looking for something would have an idea which haystack to look for the needle in, I didn’t even have a haystack. I registered on every adoption search registry, joined parent finders, immersed myself in the quest to have the government open adoption records and in the process made some incredible friends who all shared their stories with me. I was on CBC twice, in the Ottawa Citizen and even on the Rick Dees radio show as a dedication. The culmination of all of what i have is in Lara’s Book. Link is to the right in the menu.
I tried, never gave up hope and in my journey helped a few people fulfil their dreams.
When the adoption records finally opened and I had a name the haystack was obvious and it proved to be a small one. I had real info and could search. Unfortunately my searches all came back to the same place. A memorial in the BFO newsletter. I wrote more than once to the organization and was always brushed aside or put on virtual hold. I did not know at the time that they were protecting their founder, Lara’s adoptive mother.
Not being able to get past that roadblock I decided to hire a Toronto detective. I left out the roadblock information when we talked to see if he would end up at the same place. He did, but along with the radio broadcast of the founding mothers and an obituary. The direction of my search had changed.
Al was amazing, he sent me in the right direction to learn more. I learned of Lara’s adoptive family, her school and neighborhood. I met her childhood friends and classmates. I met the parents of some of her friends who shed a whole new perspective on Lara the child. I learned of Lara’s illness and the treatments and subsequently her date of passing. I relished each little nuance of her friend’s memories and slowly build a real image of the child that is Lara.
I still have a few things I want to do and I will do them over time. Actually there are a lot but I need to focus on just the few. I would like to meet some of her friends. I am looking to talk with her grade 3 teacher. I need to visit Mount Pleasant Cemetery. And most importantly I cannot give up hope that Lara’s adoptive family will someday share her story

Lara’s portrait, a work in progress