Still pains deeply

"Oh dear, I'm afraid Shirley died about a year ago."  This was back in 1978.  I had finally located my birth mother after a year of hard-slogging research, only to find I had been too late.  My heart stopped, tears welled up in my eyes and I gulped furiously to stifle the sobs.  Why hadn't I started my search sooner? 

But I hadn't.  Not many days go by that I don't think about Shirley Latimer for many reasons over the past 36 years, but last evening was one of the worst.  We watched 'Philomena', a beautiful film by Stephen Frears about a woman who goes searching for the son she had been forced to give up for adoption 50 years earlier.  Didn't hurt that the movie starred Dame Judy Dench, brilliant as we all know.  The similarities between her case and my mother's were striking.  Both mothers had entered religious institutions for the period -- Philomena with the Sacred Heart nuns, Shirley with the Salvation Army -- and both had signed over their babies as a matter of course.  No second thoughts or future contact permitted.

The scene where she sees her little boy being taken away in a car is heartbreaking and I can only imagine my own mother's painful despair and misery when she had to turn me over, after having been forced to care for me for six long weeks.  I know I bonded with my own children the second I learned I was pregnant, so for these women the pain must have been unbearable.  There were so many other wrenching scenes that I cried my eyes out the whole time.  Her breakdown when she learns her son had died was exactly like mine when I learned about Shirley's death.  The fact that I had never even met her was inconsequential.  I experienced true grief. 

I have written before about my wonderful upbringing by two great parents within a large extended family, but not being able to be with my birth mother created a deep pain that remains locked in my heart from which it all spilled watching this movie. Of course, both I and the son in the movie had much, much better lives than could ever have been provided by our birth families and the movie makes this very clear.  Nothing maudlin in it.  But the blood ties remain deeply ingrained. 

In both cases, stonewalling, government regulations and destroyed records made the search very difficult.  The advantage the movie characters had was the internet; I had no such tool back then.  But never one to be dissuaded, I forged my father's signature on a letter to the lawyer who had handled the adoption and he turned over what he had, which wasn't much, just her name and that she lived in Ottawa at the time.  So a long search of every Latimer from the Ottawa Valley to Kingston ensued.  It was a great aunt in Kemptville, Gladys Latimer, who gave me the news.  I went on to meet her brothers and sister, various cousins, aunts and uncles in Kingston (where she was actually from) but it wasn't the same.  And in a number of cases a few were not very nice people.

As to my birth father?  He wasn't interested and it didn't bother me much, as I thought of him as a one-night-stand sperm donor.  All I know is his name, the fact that he was a superb athlete and retired as an umpire in the American league of baseball.  Long-dead now, I am sure.   

Happily I have many photos of Shirley, which I often look at.  She was gorgeous and apparently very outgoing, charming, poised and self-confident.  When I look at my own children and grandchildren I think of her and thank her profoundly for her sacrifice, usually without too many tears, but not last night.