For more than forty years, Diane Sheehan believed her son died shortly after he came to the world. Then, in 2018, he received an email from a 42-year-old man. A DNA test led him to her: that baby was alive.
The story began in 1976, in an Australian hospital.
Diane had just given birth to a son when, according to her story, the hospital staff told her a devastating news: the child was dead.
She was a young mother who had just given birth and suddenly faced a mourning.
You were given documents to sign.
Diane would have told later that she believed it was normal practices to be released from the hospital. Those documents, however, were linked to the adoption of the child.
She left the hospital convinced her son was dead.
And he lived with that certainty for over four decades.
Then came 2018.
That year a 42-year-old man named Simon, who grew up in an adoptive family, managed, through a DNA test and subsequent genealogical research, to reach Diane.
In December 2018 she wrote an e-mail.
She thought Diane might be her biological mother.
Suddenly everything she had believed for more than forty years was questioned.
Your son wasn't dead.
He was raised.
He had a life.
And he was raised by another family.
Diane had to confront a completely different form of pain.
For more than forty years he had developed the death of a child who, in reality, continued to live somewhere without her.
Their meeting could not return what was lost.
He could not bring back the child's childhood, birthdays, years gone far or all the experiences a mother and a son could have shared.
She could return to Diane something she had missed since 1976: the chance to know the truth.
His story takes on an even deeper meaning if inserted in the history of forced adoptions in Australia.
For decades, especially unmarried mothers were subjected to social and institutional pressure that in many cases led to separation from their children. Many people involved have told experiences of coercion, denied information or consent obtained in deeply problematic circumstances.
The scope of this phenomenon has also been recognised at national level.
In 2013 the Australian government formally presented its apologies to people affected by forced adoption practices.
This is the context of making Diane's story more than an incredible family story.
There's not only one DNA test that came in the middle forty years later.
There's a woman who claims she's out of a hospital thinking she lost a son who was alive forever.
And there is a basic question that goes through all its history: what happens to a person when even the possibility of knowing the truth about his motherhood is taken away?
Diane and her son could meet.
The time, however, could not be returned.
And this is perhaps the most painful part: discovering that what you had cried for a life was not a death, but an absence that could have a completely different history.