Panelists will share what it means to navigate grief alongside the emotions and complexities of making contact with birth/first family, including the loss of time, unanswered questions, emerging relationships, and the opportunity to know someone only briefly, or not at all. Together, they will explore the deeply personal experience of holding connection and loss at the same time, and the ways adoptees make meaning of relationships, identity, grief, and remembrance. This panel centers the experiences of adoptees whose journeys toward making contact with their birth/first family were profoundly shaped by death and loss. For some, contact was followed within months by the death of a birth family member. For others, the possibility of making contact ended with the discovery that a birth family member had already died.

Points to Ponder:

How can contact with birth family and grief exist at the same time, especially when a relationship is newly forming or never had the chance to begin?

What kinds of grief can arise when an adoptee loses a birth family member soon after making contact, or learns that person died before they could ever meet?

How might death affect an adoptee’s sense of identity, belonging, family connection, and the questions they hoped contact might help answer?

What do adoptees need from family members, professionals, and their communities when navigating the layered experiences of contact, reunion, death, and unresolved loss?