This month marks the 40th anniversary of my adoptive father’s death.
Rudy Owens, his adoptive father, and his adoptive sister, in the late 1960s
I still have no pleasant memories about him or our time we shared during those earlier years before my family fell apart when I was still in grade school. It is a long story, rooted in his alcoholism and what he unleashed on my adoptive mom and their kids: my adoptive sister and me. I’ve written about this before.
I’ve ignored this anniversary for decades.
However, this month I heard an interview repeated on NPR with the late Rob Reiner, who, with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, was tragically found murdered on December 14, 2025.
Reiner talked about listening to a comedy album his father—the celebrated comedy writer and actor Carl Reiner—made. I realized my late adoptive father had comedy albums like this in his collection that I heard growing up. Then his ghost came rushing back to my memory, like Jacob Marley’s ghost visits Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve in Charles Dickens’ “A Chistmas Carol.”
I did not go to my adoptive father’s funeral. I was in France floundering as an exchange student and very poor then, and it would have been impossible for me to go.
By then, in my own way, I had already forgiven him before I Ieft for college for the path of destruction he left in his wake. I did that because I had to come to terms with who I was and who he was. I needed to do that to get on with my life, and it was an important moment in my life and path toward becoming a better person.
I talked about that in my book because this was an important part of my experience as an adoptee confronting the harsh reality that adoption can force on many adoptees.
Ultimately, my adoptive father was an unhappy soul, tormented by demons, which he unleashed on others. Still I also found something good from those dark years. I grew up fast, and ultimately adversity early in life helped me confront later challenges that surprisingly did not break me. I had a hidden inner strength I could tap into—rooted in lived experience.
We’re all tested in life. He was my first hard test, stretching a long time. I won that test, I think. But it was not simple. Few things in life that count are simple or easy.
VOYCE conference flyer for event in metro St. Louis on July 10, 2025 on upholding patient rights when they receive medical care.
I’m ecstatic a nursing home ombudsman shared this conference flyer with me today. We’ve been communicating now for over six years, and during that time, we’ve had lows, then understanding, and also some wins. She said the topic and issues for this upcoming conference being hosted by VOYCE came up, in part, as a result of our many conversations about gaps in care for nursing home residents needing medical care. There’s been a lot of water under this bridge.
VOYCE is a long-term care ombudsman organization based in metro St. Louis, where I have a family member in a federally subsidized nursing home. Its mission is “to educate and empower individuals and their families for quality living across the continuum of long-term care.” They’ve always been responsive to me, and for that, I’m grateful.
And given all that is going on with the absolute political and economic chaos in my country, I could not have received a better message today.
Sometimes what you do as an advocate counts. This is true for me. I hope it’s also true for people who work for groups like VOYCE, who get too little credit and thanks.
In life, you rarely get the luck or privilege of knowing when your advocacy pays off, but that is not why you do it. You do it because it is the right thing to do, even if you lose, over, and over, and over, and over again. If it’s right, and you are firm and do not back down, you have found an unshakable power. Tapping into that takes time, and lots of trial and error. But it’s real.
I just heard that Bill Moyers died. He was 91 years old and lived a meaningful life. RIP.
Moyer was a consummate media professional. He was an insightful interviewer and a profoundly insightful human.
I love Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell called “The Power of Myth.” The two collaborated in the PBS TV series released in 1988, exploring what enduring myths tell us about our lives. There were six episodes: “The Hero’s Adventure,” “The Message of the Myth,” “The First Storytellers,” “Sacrifice and Bliss,” “Love and the Goddess,” and “Masks of Eternity.” According to PBS, “The Power of Myth” was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television, and it continues to inspire new audiences today. Campbell, sadly, died a year before it was aired.
Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell for the acclaimed PBS series “The Power of Myth.”
The insights from those interviews had an enormous impact on my own life, as I saw how important myth is to the human experience, in the past and the present. Myth in fact defines my lifelong identity as a bastard and adoptee. The series was also one of the most impactful moments for me in the world of engaging ideas.
From his interviews with author Campbell, Moyers elicited truths that speak to me today in many profound ways. This includes my own recent and wonderful adventures finding my biological kin in Finland, a land of my ancestors and also great myths.
Campbell shared with Moyers: “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow, and when you can see it you begin to deal with people who are in your field of your bliss, and they open doors to you.”
University of Toronto professor Timothy Snyder (used for editorial comment purposes)
This week, I had a chance to create a new relationship with someone who I didn’t really know.
I did that because I saw someone who did something different—they spoke out, and they did that where it was not expected and was not comfortable. It was something that created a quiet stir, in my opinion.
After that happened I quickly contacted that person and, I hope, created the start of a mutually respectful connection, one built on trust and shared values.
This was necessary because I needed this person to know that they had done something that matters: they stood out and broke the spell of silence. This matters, according to experts on authoritarianism.
One of the most important voices to help people understand how authoritarianism works and how to confront it is University of Toronto historian of authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder. He is best known as the author of Bloodlands, a detailed and magisterial history of genocides, campaigns of starvation and mass murder, and conflicts in eastern and central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, bookmarked between the two horrific wars. I read about a third of it four years ago, and I did not have the stamina to complete it, but I was impressed by the scholarship.
I just published an essay exploring what the Finnish word “sisu” means amid geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West, and in the context of hard choices that will always come.
I first discuss a video NATO published on January 28, 2025, about Finland’s deterrence strategy and how “sisu” is part of that.
This essay emerged during tense times in my own country, where we’re seeing events never experienced in the history of my government—including dismantling of public agencies and possible violations of the constitution, according to legal scholars.
Crisis moments make me think about historic times when you know that things you have been living and experiencing will not be the same, and when a conflict is coming.
How do people respond, morally, individually, and at the national level?
One lesson that stands out to me is how Finland resisted an unprovoked invasion by the USSR in November 1939. This was one of three wars it fought in WWII. Another, 1941-44, involved Finland attempting to reclaim lost territory from the first war, aligned with, yes, Nazi Germany, and then it fought a final war against Germany, 1944-45, to create lasting peace that preserved the country.
Nothing was pleasant about this time.
Finland endured, and it did it with little help, and by making incredibly complex choices at enormous costs. I’ve seen war memorials in nearly every Finnish city/town I have visited in 2023 and 2024 that highlight these costs.
At some point, hard choices are made when confronting immoral forces and great harm.
On July 15, 1979, the now-late President Jimmy Carter delivered what modern-day commentators and pundits today call the “Malaise Speech.” They still do not understand who Carter was and what he shared so plainly during his address to the nation.
President Jimmy Carter speaking to the American people on July 15, 1979
What has struck me in the six days since Carter died at age 100, on December 29, 2024, is how outraged and confused the news commentators and politicos remain about a U.S. president who dared talk about our country’s “lack of meaning” and overt worship of consumerism. (This sounds a lot like Viktor Frankl to me.)
Forty-five years later, not much has changed in our country. We are a country fueled by consumer spending, measuring 70 percent of economic activity. In that, there still is little meaning.
Carter was and is still right about the underlying truth, and people are afraid of the truth still.
As the nation gets ready to honor his legacy with his upcoming funeral events, I find his words still speak honestly about larger issues we have never changed: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
Discounting history and facts has been one of humanity’s greatest failings. That remains true especially in the bright, glaring hot “now.”
During tonight’s horrifically moderated debate between a sleepwalking President Joe Biden and serial-lying convicted felon and former president, Donald Trump, we saw CNN abdicate all responsibility to moderate by not demanding even a shred of the truth. This event makes this wisdom from past experiences more pressing.
I wrote to a friend right after, “I’ve rarely seen a failure like this ever in presidential debates. I wonder if that’s crossing your mind? The stakes were too high, and CNN allowed this mess to happen. I think history tells us all failures like this are too costly.”
We already know that what has happened before, in a democracy like Weimar Germany 1933, can happen again.
If you’re not familiar with the ease with which a failed coup right-wing plotter, Adolf Hitler, and his Nazi thugs seized power without a majority of the people, I recommend reading this article from Foreign Policy in February 2021, “Weimar’s Lessons for Biden’s America.” There are also dozens of books in your public library. Many will have this story.
We also are dealing with brutal facts about our unfair world.
Authoritarian regimes thrive—in China, Russia, North Korea, etc.—and crush civilian democratic systems without many consequences once public movements are quashed. Who now remembers the brutal crushing of democracy in Hong Kong in between 2019 and 2021. It’s rarely talked about, ever, by media observers or international bodies that promote democratic values.
Minutes after the Biden-Trump debate ended, I sent an email to another older and long-time friend, whose wife is a Belgian citizen, if moving is on their minds. They have a home in Belgium already, and he likely can retire early as a minister.
He probably will mock me as being alarmist, as he normally like to use jokes and insults to deflect hard topics he doesn’t like to address. Also, he is a German American, who never really came to grips with the heritage of his ancestor’s home country, Germany, home of the Nazis and birthplace of what later became some of the greatest crimes against humanity.
I also think that many “smart” and “clever” liberal people, who think their wits and societal standing will endure a society that rips down civil society, will not be able to process past historic facts. In fact, most of us can’t because they are too hard to contemplate.
I believe we are now entering the chapter of historic events, where years later we’ll ask, why did that person see it coming and why did most of the people just allow it to happen and get sucked into the abyss, like the Nazi-sympathizing typical German citizen who was not a criminal or subhuman by Nazi standards. No, this is a new chapter of U.S. history. It’s a chapter where likely violent and also street-smart people will rise to the occasion.
I have already begun planning for what happens next in my country accordingly. I want to be very public about this because I know already this can happen, and I’ve been more than two dozen former Nazi camps that the dictatorship there and its racist regime built.
If you have studied history, you know events and mistakes and horrors can and do repeat themselves, all of the time. Denial is a failed strategy that leads to more failures. I now have to implement a plan.
It is actually great to have even small things go wrong. It breaks up routine. It forces you to use your skills of tolerance and control.
I stumbled on this sign during the COVID-19 pandemic and it has along resonated with me.
Today, on a warm sunny day, I headed to swim at the community center. It was rush hour. It took me 30 minutes to get there. Then, when I arrived, I learned the pool was closed for lifeguard training. I’ve never had that happen. So back home I drove, and got stuck in the late evening traffic jam from the hills of Portland to my home. It was slow, and it’s a drag on nice nights.
I used to sit in this traffic jam daily for nearly two years, when I drove 100 miles a day (there and back) to Salem, usually in the car more than three hours total a day. It was brutal on me. It was also a very hard time when my mom was near death and I was running on fumes. At that moment tonight, I felt blessed. I was now working at home, I am pretty good with my job, and my mom’s suffering has long passed. Her journey had ended, and that was good.
I needed this reminder to be thankful of how far things have come from those days of little sleep and a lot of stress. Here’s a little thing I spotted near my home a few years ago. It rings true for me.
Another year of my life gets ready to end. The clock will start anew to begin the exercise of measuring life’s passing by years. That means it is time to reflect on how I spent it, as my planet circled the sun and I counted away irretrievable minutes, hours, and days of being alive in the universe.
I felt a mythical pull to Finland last year, and found myself there twice in six months, completing a journey that started decades earlier.
Physically, I feel a bit older. That is a given.
However, the cumulative issues I have experienced and still feel in my back have sharpened my understanding of my mortality. I have been humbled, even as I respect every aspect about caring for myself. It is now more clear that my days of very good health could be over. I may now be entering a phase of manageable but slow decay. I’m still overall in great health. I run. I bike. I swim. I rollerski. I surf far less frequently, and cross-country ski even less often. But I can feel the reality of what “the slow glide out” now means. My best years, in terms of physical health, were in my 40s.
My mental health, however, has remarkably improved during the past five years, as I continue to appreciate what a purposeful mindset of “finding meaning” has brought to my daily life. The hardest challenges I have navigated the last two decades strengthened my ability to withstand the strongest storms. Maybe I have just accepted who I am, at last, and the wisdom of wiser predecessors who have offered ideas of living well. So despite many challenges, my outlook is very calm.
Awaiting the inevitable loss of family
I continue to plan for loss and death. Human myths have been doing this for all of us since we first collected our shared stories and passed them down orally. So this is nothing new, and because it’s not new, it should not be feared or avoided.
I have three family members who face very severe health challenges. Two are my biological kin and one is my adoptive sibling. The stress can gnaw at any moment, out of the blue. Yet I can do nothing to change what will inevitably come. That could be any day.
I took this shot in 2015 at the Detroit Institute of the Arts with one of my ill family members, who is nearing the end of their journey.
I fortunately have found my safe harbors in spaces that always serve me well: exercise, good food, a sense of gratitude for my own good fortune, being mindful of what is within my power to address, and deep knowledge of what I cannot change.
Feeling at peace with death is one of the oldest roles of myths for humanity, and I have found my place with its company this year even more. As Joseph Campbell, author of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes, death and death imagery are the very beginning of mythology. Campbell let all of us know that there is comfort knowing that what we all experience has been charted for millennia in myth: “So there’s a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new fresh life.”
In fact, it was the cumulative stresses surrounding the health and wellness of my surviving family that finally propelled me to visit one of my ancestral home countries of my biological mother, Finland. I felt what I can only call a mythical pull to go there.
Hearing the call of Finland
My planning started on an important day celebrating Finland’s great myth, called the Kalevala. On February 28, 2023, on Kalevala Day, I vowed to visit the Nordic nation that summer. What’s more, I would also seek out my biological family I could trace only as far back as my maternal grandmother and grandfather, who emigrated to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. There were no contacts between my Finnish-American biological family and their distal relatives in Finland since the 1950s.
Famous Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s study called “Kullervo Herding his Wild Flocks” (1917) is held in the collection of the Ateneum art museum in Helsinki, Finland.
I announced my idea publicly, to make it known I was taking a mythical journey: “And my new journey into my ancestral past has begun,” I wrote. “Where it ends now, I know not. Once the ship leaves its harbor of safety for parts unknown, the mind, heart, and soul breath in the fresh sea air that only is found by discovery. Finland.”
Everything about this idea was mythical. I could feel the tug, the way I did when I set out to find my birth mother and my biological families in the mid-1980s, completing the task in April 1989 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In fact, understanding myth and my adoption story gave me what I consider to be a tactical advantage compared to other adoptees who start their journeys for self-awareness far later in life. I was in a totally different place because I already had deep knowledge of myth’s meaning to the human experience because I read countless books on myths as a young person and learned the stories of the Bible in church every Sunday.
I knew intuitively why my impossible task had meaning and that I would succeed, like the “hero” celebrated in myths and tales across the time and all cultures. My memoir and study of the U.S. adoption experience explores interplay of myth and adoption in detail, where I describe why my experience closely resembled the “hero’s story.”
In this instance, I immediately recognized the myth dynamic in wanting to go back to a family origin location, in Finland.
That recognition propelled me forward with the power that can only be understood as mythical and by all the dynamic rules of a mythical story. It was familiar territory, and it completely energized me. I knew I was on a journey, which made it easier for me to throw myself completely headlong into this project. The myth played out almost effortlessly, with joy instead of sorrow.
I successfully found my long-lost Finnish relatives, thanks to blind good fortune of finding a benefactor named Satu, a professor who I contacted by email in the early summer 2023. (Even Satu’s role felt mythical, like the kindly stranger who intervenes to propel the hero forward on their journey to the unknown.)
In my long story about meeting my biological family, I describe how we first met by video calls and email and finally in person in Kurikka and Tampere, Finland, in September, 2023. Even before I met them, we knew that the meeting would be special for all of us.
I described in my story how one of my aunts told me how I resembled her adult kids. “I find same features on my sons’ and your faces,” she wrote to me. I also noted: “Later I learned that others in the family, including two daughters, said the same thing, completely separate from each other. When I compared a photo to the youngest son in the family with myself, and shared it with friends, everyone I sent them to were mostly stunned; some swore we could be brothers. All my friends mostly shared that the power of genetic similarities were both astonishing and cool.”
Embracing my Finnish mythical muse: Kullervo
I stumbled on the bronze statue of the famous mythical antihero Kullervo and his loyal friend and dog, Musti, my first morning in Helsinki, probably by fate.
On my first morning in Helsinki in September 2023, I went for a run. It was cloudy and rainy. I got lost. Almost by design, I regained my bearings near Toolonlahti, a bay in central Helsinki. I stopped my run the moment I saw a bronze sculpture of the Finnish antihero, Kullervo. The statue shows the famous mythical character, and his dog Musti, the moment before he kills himself with his own sword. It stands peacefully in an outdoor rose garden in Kaupunginpuutarha park in Helsinki, but feels tense with foreboding. This was no accident. It was myth at play. I immediately shared the photos with my Finnish relatives, who told me it was Kullervo.
Kullervo is perhaps the most beloved character from the Kalevala by the Finnish people, despite a mostly short section in the epic myth relative to other heroes in it. Jean Sibelius wrote an entire musical score with a chorus telling his doomed and tragic story. As an infant, he was enslaved and orphaned, only to be tormented by the clan that destroyed his family. Despite abuses, he learns he has magic power, befriends a dog Musti, sleeps with his sister unknowingly (who kills herself), murders the man and clan that enslaved him, and finally kills himself in anguish.
This is my favorite painting by the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela called “Kullervo’s Curse,” which I know proudly wear around town.
I made my T-shirt honoring Kullervo based on the painting by the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, when I returned from Finland in February 2024.
My latest trip to Finland in February 2024, visiting family again in Tampere and Kurikka, completed the mythic trip I had started in late September 2023. It offered fresh insights into a nation and its national identity and stories. The Kalevala, the national story, is part of this story the Finns tell themselves. It also gave me wonderful insights into my ethnic Finnish roots.
When I returned, I looked back at the year of impossible events. I did what I knew I would always do. I had visited my ancestral villages of my blood relatives. I found my relatives, with whom I shared a physical resemblance and a strong kin connection. I felt connected to my identity that was long hidden from me by laws in Michigan. All told, in one year, I have written nearly 20 stories about my long journey back to my roots.
Without trying to write another book, I laid the foundations for one that arrived almost organically. I had no intention of writing any of these stories when the strange siren call to take the journey started. Yet it just happened, the way a myth naturally unfolds. My friend saw my new collection of essays and called me the “Finland Fanatic.”
What a perfect name for a book. What a perfect description of a mythical character, pulled by the power of the quest. My journey so far has been a happy one. Death of my family is still stalking my path forward. We shall see where it goes this coming year.
Last week I heard a cover of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the classic Simon & Garfunkel folk song from the same-named album released in 1970. It was on regular rotation in my home when it came out. I was only 5 years old at the time. It was wildly popular, and the song and album each won Grammy Awards for best of categories that year.
There’s a reason this song resonated globally at a troubling time. The year of its release was troubling, globally, as the Vietnam War and other tensions boiled. According to Rolling Stone: “It not only lorded over the U.S. charts but went Top 10 in South Africa, Malaysia, Lebanon, Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries. Everyone from Aretha Franklin and country banjo legend Earl Scruggs to cabaret star Peggy Lee covered it. Columbia claimed that the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP sold nearly 2 million copies in three weeks.”
My mom was playing this song in particular on our record player over, and over, and over, and over, again in 1970. Then, as I was listening to this cover more than 50 years later, it hit me. She was desperately trying to leave a horrifically abusive marriage, and it was her way of finding peace. She was able to leave three years later, but by the skin of her teeth. We had nothing (her, me, my sister). There were funner times I can assure you. Funny how one can suddenly realize small things with the power of music.
I feel now, also, we are in such times and feel troubled waters in so many places. Maybe music will be the one thing that can bring peace to many. Music may be the universal medicine to life’s problems.
The Path to Wisdom 