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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.