LilMtnCbn
08-24-2004, 06:35 AM
http://www.gjsentinel.com/hp/content/epaper/editions/monday/8_22_1a_separa
ted_at_birth.html;COXnetJSessionID=BrD9QzfQitXR29h as4DpdG5SLNxHwOCTObXYjvE
HbArSzx22DOgJ!213918824?urac=n&urvf=10933543018590.6426844790963119
Son adopted a half-century ago reunites with mother who thought he died at
birth
Monday, August 23, 2004
By DANIE HARRELSON
The Daily Sentinel
Paul Gavin came back to life a few months ago. In the eyes of the family he
never knew he had, he never lived.
Gavin was born in 1953 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. His mother
didn’t take him home from the hospital. A Grand Junction couple adopted him.
Gavin grew up in Grand Junction, attended Grand Junction High School and worked
in the Grand Valley until the early 1980s.
He decided to look for his birth parents after his adoptive parents died. What
the 50-year-old Colorado Springs man discovered belied everything he thought he
knew about himself and his family.
DIDN’T HEAR BABY CRYING
Gloria Kibel never entertained the thought of giving up her baby boy.
She would have welcomed the newborn into the world with as much love as she
gave her six other children.
She never got the chance.
Kibel, now 78 and living in Goodland, Kan., moved in with her mother, who lived
in Fruita, after she learned she was pregnant with her seventh child. St.
Mary’s Hospital was nearby and promised better medical care, she said.
Her husband, Homer, worked in a Colorado mining camp in Dove Creek. Their
children stayed with her sister in Dove Creek during her pregnancy.
Kibel, who was 28 at the time, said she never would have left home had she
known what would happen.
Fifty years later, she recalls only fragments of the day she lost her son.
“I don’t remember giving birth,” she said. “I was knocked completely
out. I don’t remember hearing the baby cry.”
Kibel planned to name the baby Richard if he was a boy.
She never called her baby by his name. Kibel said the two doctors present at
Gavin’s birth told her he was stillborn. Kibel’s pleas to see her child
were to no avail.
There was precious little time to mourn her loss. Life said move on, and a
grieving mother walked away.
“I already had six children I had to take care of,” Kibel said. “I
didn’t have time to brood.”
And so it would seem that the son whose face Gloria Kibel never saw, whose name
she never spoke and whose supposedly lifeless body she never held, never really
lived.
Dead, it would seem, until a stranger called 50 years later to ask if Kibel
would like to meet her son.
THOUGHT CALL WAS PRANK
Kibel didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line, and she
wasn’t amused by the caller’s questions.
The woman asked for Kibel and her late husband’s name and if she had given
birth to a boy Aug. 26, 1953.
Kibel told the woman yes. She was not so accommodating when the woman explained
her reason for calling.
Gavin’s adoptive father died in 1984, and his adoptive mother died in 1996.
It was not until years later that his search for his birth parents began in
earnest.
He hired a Lakewood-based nonprofit in spring 2004 to track down his birth
parents. Colorado Confidentiality Intermediary Services, which administers the
state’s Confidential Intermediary Program, is the only organization with
authorization to open sealed Colorado court files to help people such as Gavin
locate sought-after family members.
Gavin’s intermediary, who lives in Cedaredge, located his birth mother in
Goodland, Kan. State law required she contact Kibel and get her approval before
Gavin contacted his birth mother.
“At that point, I called her a liar,” Kibel said. “I thought it was a
prank call.”
The intermediary didn’t know Kibel thought her son was dead. She called
Kibel, no doubt assuming based on previous contacts with other clients’ birth
relatives, that Kibel intended to give her son up for adoption.
Kibel wanted to hang up the phone. Guests were waiting, and she didn’t want
to hear anything more about a son she thought was dead.
The woman insisted she jot down her number before hanging up. Kibel called her
back later that day.
The stranger had planted the seeds of doubt in her mind. She needed to hear
more so she could put to rest what was being called into question after so many
years.
“I wanted to find out the specifics,” Kibel said. “I asked her a lot of
questions.”
EMOTION POURED OUT
Kibel wanted to know everything about her son: who he was and where he lived
and what he had done with his life. Disbelief gave way to belief as the answers
came.
For the moment, though, a stranger’s words would have to suffice. The
intermediary was not allowed to provide Gavin’s whereabouts, and mother and
son were not allowed to contact each other without court approval. Kibel
learned the wait could take two to three months.
The necessary OK took about a week. The intermediary told Kibel her son would
call her.
Kibel struggles for words when she describes the first time she heard her
son’s voice.
“It was a little overwhelming,” she said. “I just didn’t know how to
react.”
But react she did. With all the emotion of a mother who’s just learned her
child is safe.
It’s been about three months since mother and son first spoke.
Gavin has since visited Kibel in Kansas and calls her several times a week.
He’s met or at least spoken to all his siblings.
They’ve shared stories and photographs and the same overwhelming realization
that someone thought it best they never meet.
MOTHER WASN’T THRILLED
Time seems the biggest obstacle to piecing together what happened Aug. 26,
1953.
Those who might know why Kibel was told her son was dead are dead.
Kibel suspects her mother, who was less than thrilled when she learned Kibel
was pregnant with a seventh child, may have helped orchestrate the adoption.
“My mother always told me I had too many kids,” she said. “But that
wasn’t her choice to make. That was mine. I would never give a child away.”
Kibel believes her mother may have wanted to tell her what happened to her baby
years after the stillborn birth.
Shortly before her mother joined her at a relative’s wedding in Kansas in
1995, she told Kibel she needed to tell her something. But she refused to talk
about it on the phone; she wanted to tell her daughter in person at the
wedding.
The face-to-face conversation never happened. Kibel’s mother suffered a
massive coronary attack before the wedding and died.
“She had something she wanted to tell me,” Kibel said. “I never ever
dreamed that was it.”
Gavin once asked his godfather — one of the doctors who delivered him — if
he knew anything about his birth parents.
“He got pretty mad and told me to never ask him again,” Gavin said. “I
didn’t look into it after that.”
St. Mary’s spokesperson Devra Ashby said mothers who have arranged for a
family to adopt their child may deliver at St. Mary’s, but the hospital’s
involvement is minimal.
Safeguards in place today that could have prevented Gavin’s unintended
adoption did not exist 50 years ago, said Virginia Appel, executive director of
Adoption Alliance’s Grand Junction office.
Today adoption agencies strive for transparency when dealing with clients and
would-be parents.
“We have to thoroughly explain to young women what their rights are, that
they have the right to parent their child,” Appel said. “We disclose
everything to them.”
“Checks and balances” in the system ensure the birth mother was not coerced
into giving her baby up for adoption, she said.
“Things are very tight in Colorado,” Appel said. “Adoption laws have
gotten stricter than in days past.
“It’s been sort of an evolution. As the times have evolved, (there is) an
openness to the whole process.”
LOOKS LIKE HIS FATHER
Ken Kibel can’t think about the day his mother lost her son without remorse.
The 45-year-old Montrose man, the youngest of Gloria Kibel’s children, was
born five years later. Now that he knows Gavin didn’t die, he lives with the
knowledge of what he never had.
Ken Kibel wanted a big brother when he was a child. Sure, he had older
siblings, but they seemed like grownups when he was young.
“There’s such an age span,” he said. “I never really knew them.”
He wonders what it would have been like to have Gavin around.
Kibel was all nerves the day he met his big brother in Colorado Springs. But
joy replaced anxiety when Kibel realized he was looking at his brother, and not
a stranger, for the first time.
“When I saw him face-to-face there was no doubt,” he said. “He looks like
my dad. He looks like me.”
Kibel said his grandmother’s attitude toward some of her grandchildren leads
him to believe she may have wanted to tear Gavin away from his mother.
“Knowing my grandmother, she could have,” he said.
But knowing isn’t always a cure-all. Learning what really happened to his
brother is hardly a Band-Aid.
“It still hurts that it happened,” he said.
Mother, son and the rest of Gavin’s newfound family would like some answers.
Answers have been hard to come by, so they are trying to move on, with or
without all the answers.
They don’t want to wile away what time they have together dwelling on whom
and what kept them apart.
They would rather spend that time catching up on the last 50 years.
“Paul and I have both decided to forget the past and move toward the
future,” Gloria Kibel said. “We have a future ahead of us.”
It’s a future that Kibel, who suffers from emphysema, hopes to live long
enough to enjoy.
But the more Gavin and his newfound family swap stories, the more they realize
how much Gavin’s adoptive and birth families crossed paths.
Homer and Gloria Kibel moved to Grand Junction in the early 1960s. Homer Kibel
worked on a ranch in the Redlands that’s since been replaced with a golf
course. The Kibels shopped in the drugstore Gavin’s adoptive parents owned.
Gavin and 53-year-old Nancy Brutche, the older sister he recently met, figure
they probably hung out in some of the same places as teenagers. They attended
separate high schools in Grand Junction but suspect they were right under each
other’s noses in high school.
Brutche, who lives in Vernal, Utah, said the worst part about getting to know
her brother is knowing he was so close for so many years.
She wonders what might have been. She wonders if anyone will ever claim
responsibility for what kept her from her brother.
“Everybody is gone now, and you can’t ask why,” Brutche said. “You just
have to say ‘OK’ and try and make up for those 50 years.”
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
ted_at_birth.html;COXnetJSessionID=BrD9QzfQitXR29h as4DpdG5SLNxHwOCTObXYjvE
HbArSzx22DOgJ!213918824?urac=n&urvf=10933543018590.6426844790963119
Son adopted a half-century ago reunites with mother who thought he died at
birth
Monday, August 23, 2004
By DANIE HARRELSON
The Daily Sentinel
Paul Gavin came back to life a few months ago. In the eyes of the family he
never knew he had, he never lived.
Gavin was born in 1953 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. His mother
didn’t take him home from the hospital. A Grand Junction couple adopted him.
Gavin grew up in Grand Junction, attended Grand Junction High School and worked
in the Grand Valley until the early 1980s.
He decided to look for his birth parents after his adoptive parents died. What
the 50-year-old Colorado Springs man discovered belied everything he thought he
knew about himself and his family.
DIDN’T HEAR BABY CRYING
Gloria Kibel never entertained the thought of giving up her baby boy.
She would have welcomed the newborn into the world with as much love as she
gave her six other children.
She never got the chance.
Kibel, now 78 and living in Goodland, Kan., moved in with her mother, who lived
in Fruita, after she learned she was pregnant with her seventh child. St.
Mary’s Hospital was nearby and promised better medical care, she said.
Her husband, Homer, worked in a Colorado mining camp in Dove Creek. Their
children stayed with her sister in Dove Creek during her pregnancy.
Kibel, who was 28 at the time, said she never would have left home had she
known what would happen.
Fifty years later, she recalls only fragments of the day she lost her son.
“I don’t remember giving birth,” she said. “I was knocked completely
out. I don’t remember hearing the baby cry.”
Kibel planned to name the baby Richard if he was a boy.
She never called her baby by his name. Kibel said the two doctors present at
Gavin’s birth told her he was stillborn. Kibel’s pleas to see her child
were to no avail.
There was precious little time to mourn her loss. Life said move on, and a
grieving mother walked away.
“I already had six children I had to take care of,” Kibel said. “I
didn’t have time to brood.”
And so it would seem that the son whose face Gloria Kibel never saw, whose name
she never spoke and whose supposedly lifeless body she never held, never really
lived.
Dead, it would seem, until a stranger called 50 years later to ask if Kibel
would like to meet her son.
THOUGHT CALL WAS PRANK
Kibel didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line, and she
wasn’t amused by the caller’s questions.
The woman asked for Kibel and her late husband’s name and if she had given
birth to a boy Aug. 26, 1953.
Kibel told the woman yes. She was not so accommodating when the woman explained
her reason for calling.
Gavin’s adoptive father died in 1984, and his adoptive mother died in 1996.
It was not until years later that his search for his birth parents began in
earnest.
He hired a Lakewood-based nonprofit in spring 2004 to track down his birth
parents. Colorado Confidentiality Intermediary Services, which administers the
state’s Confidential Intermediary Program, is the only organization with
authorization to open sealed Colorado court files to help people such as Gavin
locate sought-after family members.
Gavin’s intermediary, who lives in Cedaredge, located his birth mother in
Goodland, Kan. State law required she contact Kibel and get her approval before
Gavin contacted his birth mother.
“At that point, I called her a liar,” Kibel said. “I thought it was a
prank call.”
The intermediary didn’t know Kibel thought her son was dead. She called
Kibel, no doubt assuming based on previous contacts with other clients’ birth
relatives, that Kibel intended to give her son up for adoption.
Kibel wanted to hang up the phone. Guests were waiting, and she didn’t want
to hear anything more about a son she thought was dead.
The woman insisted she jot down her number before hanging up. Kibel called her
back later that day.
The stranger had planted the seeds of doubt in her mind. She needed to hear
more so she could put to rest what was being called into question after so many
years.
“I wanted to find out the specifics,” Kibel said. “I asked her a lot of
questions.”
EMOTION POURED OUT
Kibel wanted to know everything about her son: who he was and where he lived
and what he had done with his life. Disbelief gave way to belief as the answers
came.
For the moment, though, a stranger’s words would have to suffice. The
intermediary was not allowed to provide Gavin’s whereabouts, and mother and
son were not allowed to contact each other without court approval. Kibel
learned the wait could take two to three months.
The necessary OK took about a week. The intermediary told Kibel her son would
call her.
Kibel struggles for words when she describes the first time she heard her
son’s voice.
“It was a little overwhelming,” she said. “I just didn’t know how to
react.”
But react she did. With all the emotion of a mother who’s just learned her
child is safe.
It’s been about three months since mother and son first spoke.
Gavin has since visited Kibel in Kansas and calls her several times a week.
He’s met or at least spoken to all his siblings.
They’ve shared stories and photographs and the same overwhelming realization
that someone thought it best they never meet.
MOTHER WASN’T THRILLED
Time seems the biggest obstacle to piecing together what happened Aug. 26,
1953.
Those who might know why Kibel was told her son was dead are dead.
Kibel suspects her mother, who was less than thrilled when she learned Kibel
was pregnant with a seventh child, may have helped orchestrate the adoption.
“My mother always told me I had too many kids,” she said. “But that
wasn’t her choice to make. That was mine. I would never give a child away.”
Kibel believes her mother may have wanted to tell her what happened to her baby
years after the stillborn birth.
Shortly before her mother joined her at a relative’s wedding in Kansas in
1995, she told Kibel she needed to tell her something. But she refused to talk
about it on the phone; she wanted to tell her daughter in person at the
wedding.
The face-to-face conversation never happened. Kibel’s mother suffered a
massive coronary attack before the wedding and died.
“She had something she wanted to tell me,” Kibel said. “I never ever
dreamed that was it.”
Gavin once asked his godfather — one of the doctors who delivered him — if
he knew anything about his birth parents.
“He got pretty mad and told me to never ask him again,” Gavin said. “I
didn’t look into it after that.”
St. Mary’s spokesperson Devra Ashby said mothers who have arranged for a
family to adopt their child may deliver at St. Mary’s, but the hospital’s
involvement is minimal.
Safeguards in place today that could have prevented Gavin’s unintended
adoption did not exist 50 years ago, said Virginia Appel, executive director of
Adoption Alliance’s Grand Junction office.
Today adoption agencies strive for transparency when dealing with clients and
would-be parents.
“We have to thoroughly explain to young women what their rights are, that
they have the right to parent their child,” Appel said. “We disclose
everything to them.”
“Checks and balances” in the system ensure the birth mother was not coerced
into giving her baby up for adoption, she said.
“Things are very tight in Colorado,” Appel said. “Adoption laws have
gotten stricter than in days past.
“It’s been sort of an evolution. As the times have evolved, (there is) an
openness to the whole process.”
LOOKS LIKE HIS FATHER
Ken Kibel can’t think about the day his mother lost her son without remorse.
The 45-year-old Montrose man, the youngest of Gloria Kibel’s children, was
born five years later. Now that he knows Gavin didn’t die, he lives with the
knowledge of what he never had.
Ken Kibel wanted a big brother when he was a child. Sure, he had older
siblings, but they seemed like grownups when he was young.
“There’s such an age span,” he said. “I never really knew them.”
He wonders what it would have been like to have Gavin around.
Kibel was all nerves the day he met his big brother in Colorado Springs. But
joy replaced anxiety when Kibel realized he was looking at his brother, and not
a stranger, for the first time.
“When I saw him face-to-face there was no doubt,” he said. “He looks like
my dad. He looks like me.”
Kibel said his grandmother’s attitude toward some of her grandchildren leads
him to believe she may have wanted to tear Gavin away from his mother.
“Knowing my grandmother, she could have,” he said.
But knowing isn’t always a cure-all. Learning what really happened to his
brother is hardly a Band-Aid.
“It still hurts that it happened,” he said.
Mother, son and the rest of Gavin’s newfound family would like some answers.
Answers have been hard to come by, so they are trying to move on, with or
without all the answers.
They don’t want to wile away what time they have together dwelling on whom
and what kept them apart.
They would rather spend that time catching up on the last 50 years.
“Paul and I have both decided to forget the past and move toward the
future,” Gloria Kibel said. “We have a future ahead of us.”
It’s a future that Kibel, who suffers from emphysema, hopes to live long
enough to enjoy.
But the more Gavin and his newfound family swap stories, the more they realize
how much Gavin’s adoptive and birth families crossed paths.
Homer and Gloria Kibel moved to Grand Junction in the early 1960s. Homer Kibel
worked on a ranch in the Redlands that’s since been replaced with a golf
course. The Kibels shopped in the drugstore Gavin’s adoptive parents owned.
Gavin and 53-year-old Nancy Brutche, the older sister he recently met, figure
they probably hung out in some of the same places as teenagers. They attended
separate high schools in Grand Junction but suspect they were right under each
other’s noses in high school.
Brutche, who lives in Vernal, Utah, said the worst part about getting to know
her brother is knowing he was so close for so many years.
She wonders what might have been. She wonders if anyone will ever claim
responsibility for what kept her from her brother.
“Everybody is gone now, and you can’t ask why,” Brutche said. “You just
have to say ‘OK’ and try and make up for those 50 years.”
-------------------------
A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
