History Repeats Itself:

Automne Heather

    Karl Marx once said that, when history repeats itself, the first time is tragedy, the second is farce.

    Some things, however, are tragedies no matter how often they happen.

    Many people who’ve read our story told us it’s just about the worst thing they could possibly imagine happening during an adoption. We don’t disagree. Some have forwarded on experiences that, frankly, make us glad they didn’t happen to us.

    For a long time we stood alone as the only people we knew of who’d adopted a child from Russia only to have him die on us. It had, we learned, happened to a couple from San Francisco in China, during the SARS epidemic.

    One of the worst things about it was knowing it easily happen to someone else. Nothing has changed in any way which could prevent it from happening again. We hoped no other adoptive parents would have to live through the horror of watching a baby die.  It’s possible that reading this website has aided a few parents make decisions which would keep it from happening to them. The reality is the industry keeps churining out product without regard to the fact that the product is children. Without regard to their health, or to the interests everyone involved in the adoption field says they’re putting first.

***

   Five years later, almost to the day, it happened again to someone else.

  We found out when one of our frequent correspondents emailed us a post from the forums at adoption.com (The original is gone, but you can read it here). Daniel went to it and printed it out for me while I was at work shortly after Thanksgiving 2004. He told me he felt sick reading it. When I read the painful post, I broke down crying.

    It had happened again.

    We closely read the story. There were some minor differences from us and Cyril. The adopting parent was a single woman, Automne Heather. Because the laws had changed in Russia, she had to make two trips to see her baby. Unlike us, she had more video to go through, having taken a bunch the first trip. Unlike us the baby had gotten through the 10-day wait so she was legally, free and clear, his mother. She had reached Moscow with him, which we never did with Cyril.

    Too many of the details were a nightmarish flashback: “I just could not get past how his skin was hanging on his body and how you could count all of his ribs. ... At about 7 PM I set him down on the bed to change him and he did not look right.  His eyes were no longer focusing and his limbs appeared a bit cold ... Jack came in and when he put him down in the crib, he noticed that he did not appear to be breathing ... We raced him down to the lobby where Jack and an American guest performed CPR for 30 minutes ... Finally they came after an hour and pronounced him dead.” It was like watching our own story from outside again.

    When we regained our composure and our sadness, we sent her an email asking her to get in touch with us. We sent her a link to our website.

    Two days later, as she recounts on her own site, AMREX told her agency, Journeys of the Heart, to lean on her to take the post down, after hundreds of views.  Since she was fearful any further adoption she wished to complete would be jeopardized, she complied by asking the moderator to remove her post. Like us at a similar point, she still believed. Believed in the adoption industry and all its smiles and lies.

    Due to this, her response to our email was very guarded. At the time, she said she wanted to talk to us on the phone.  We were ready, willing and able to speak with her and waited for her call.

    Then her response came in.  She seemed to indicate she didn’t want to talk to us yet in a way that made us think it was the result of legal advice. That was OK ... at the same stage we were hardly ready to talk ourselves. It takes some time to absorb.

    Days went by. Then weeks. Christmas and New Year’s came and went. Automne stayed at the back of our minds. We wondered how she was holding up and hoped she hadn’t been permanently silenced. Elizabeth feared the industry had triumphed again. Daniel was less certain ... he said she needed time, and she’d come to us. Only we could understand her, he said.

    Daniel turned out to be right.  On the first day of spring, March 21, 2005, we happily received an email from Automne, seemingly out of the blue. Our site had been a great comfort, she said, and she was ready to talk. “It has taken me three months to get to the point where I can even begin to function at a nearly normal level.”

    Later speaking to Elizabeth, she told her everything that had happened ... all the similarities to our story. The key difference was that, as Ethan’s mother, she had rights we didn’t. She was fighting to bring his body to the United States so she could bury him near her home in the Chicago area and visit his grave ... a comfort we have never had.

    Her agency, Journeys of the Heart, had worked with AMREX. It did not look promising. She, too, wound up hiring Irina O’Rear to obtain his autopsy report.

    The most important thing she did, however, was set up her own website. Ethan's story hauntingly mirror's Cyril's sad ending.

    And Automne was able to find her own happy ending, too. She persevered with adoption, and like Linda Wright found her way to Casa Quivira in Guatemala. In early 2006 she brought home Connor, the light of her life.