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Last
month marked the 6th
anniversary of Jehanah’s passing. Of course her friends and family
remember her, and this blog continues to commemorate her life in
pictures and poems. While we all need to eventually move on and
recognize that this life is for the living, it can be grounding to
pause for a moment once in a while to remember loved ones.
More
and more these days I am cautious about feeding personal info to
social media and commercial data aggregators, and I'm increasingly
concerned about data security and privacy. Can you think of any
unintended consequences of sharing your personal information with the
Borg? And why is it that young people in the 21st Century
don't care about personal privacy? Don't tell me you have
nothing to hide. Well, just this once I want to share a personal
story...
Earlier
this year something amazing and unexpected emerged from the ether of
the internet. The Jehanah blog apparently provided a trail of
breadcrumbs to long-lost children of Jehanah. These children then
confirmed what they suspected through a DNA match to my first cousin,
provided by a common genealogy website. The match was further
confirmed by facial recognition of each of the children.
The
closed birth records system in Texas was
supposed to prevent this from happening - and yet, just like systems
everywhere - it has been disrupted! We have been identified and
correlated through data aggregation and digital media. This is an
unintended consequence that has made Jehanah's dearest wish come
true.
******
Jehanah
was forced to put two daughters up for adoption in her early life,
long before she conformed to the normal societal role of Midwestern
bleach blonde housewife. She spent a lifetime trying to recover from
and make sense of this trauma, and we know that she made a lot of
progress. Jehanah had always hoped to find her lost babies one day,
but I’m sure she never could have imagined how the story would play
out.
When
her daughter and grand-daughter found us, we became acquainted
through email and text messages over the course of several weeks. I
wanted to meet them in person, and took a trip to visit them in their
home state of Texas in October. Though I don’t fully know their
impressions of our short visit (I was on my best behavior), I found
them to be beautiful people, and I felt as though we had known each
other for a long time.
The
second long-lost daughter lives on the East Coast. She found Mom and
had the opportunity to meet her back in 1988. She and I have
corresponded and been good friends over the years, though I have only
seen her three times in the last 28 years.
*****
*****
