By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
Published April 27, 2025
A year ago I received long-awaited news, the morning of April 26, 2024, that the woman who brought me into this world had died. She passed in the early morning hours in a hospital outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the college community where she spent the majority of her later decades. She was 83 years old.
I now have her death certificate, which the state of Michigan legally cannot deny me by law, unlike my original birth certificate showing our mother-child relationship that is sealed by law and that I took decades fighting to obtain in 2016.
The importance of a death certificate
Death certificates have symbolic power, in addition to being legal documents. They also are not sealed vital records. I requested and obtained an original copy of my bio-mom’s death record in August 2024. I needed it as part of my process to apply for Finnish residency by family relations, which I submitted in March 2025.
This process took nearly half a year, because of delays getting all my vital records showing my family ties, through my bio-mom, to my Finnish relatives and my 100 percent ethnically Finnish bio-grandma, mother of my bio-mom. She is the daughter of my great grandparents, who immigrated to Michigan from Finland and settled with thousands of other Finnish immigrants in Hancock, Michigan.
Despite the lawbreaking by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS)* in initially not releasing additional copies of my birth record that I needed to apply to Finland for residency, I prevailed. One reason I applied for this status to Finland is the rapidly disintegrating democracy of my country and my own desire to embrace a country that cares for its people in ways we do not in my country of birth.
My bio-mom is half-Finnish, ethnically. She really looked Finnish too, with her big and high cheek bones typical of many Finns, dark blond hair, and very thick Finnish lips. I got her dark blond hair, cheeks, and lips, but my other facial features came from my bio-mom’s father’s side, who are mostly Welsh and English. Her ethnic background is listed in the death certificate too.
My bio-mom’s death certificate uses the plain language found in these records, based on the cause of death listed by the attending medical personnel.
In her case, life left her body because of acute respiratory failure with hypoxia, stemming from pneumonia. She had been battling cancer the previous year that had worsened, and she chose in the months before her death to receive no more chemotherapy treatment. That painful treatment had taken her hair and her remaining will to live. It was a long journey to this point, and she wanted it to end.
Even at death, adoptees are not legally kin to their closest relatives
In the many long months leading to her death, my bio-mom was living in a care facility near Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was not allowed to receive any information about her health status because I have no legal status as her biological but non-legal and only child. This is how adoption creates permanent legal severance, by law.
The staff refused to share any information with me. I repeatedly explained that we had the closest of all biological relationships, that of mother and son, and that she was my mother by birth, but legally separated by adoption. For reasons only she could explain, my bio-mom did not list me in her next-of-kin relations in her facility records. This was also part of our reality, created by the circumstances of my birth and complicated existence as her bastard son.
In the end, again, as an adoptee, I was and remained persona non grata, by law and by the system that separated me from my biological family in the mid-1960s in one of the largest maternity hospitals in the United States—the long-closed Detroit Crittenton General Hospital.
The crossing of Tuonela River, the river of death in Finnish mythology
During the eve of my bio-mom’s death, I received regular updates on her status from my biological cousin, the son of my bio-mom’s twin brother, who also died recently at the end of 2023. He is a few years younger than me and we stayed in close contact as my bio-mom’s health collapsed fast in the end.
My cousin dutifully notified me of my bio-mom’s passing with an early morning call. I knew the end was coming because a group chat he had set up included one of my bio-mom’s remaining friends, who visited with her the day before her death. She was struggling with pain, and I sensed the night before the end had come. My cousin, who was my bio-mom’s authorized agent through her advance health care directive, communicated to hospital staff how to ensure my bio-mom’s wishes for end-of-life care were to be carried out by hospital staff.
And then my bio-mom’s spirit passed around 3 a.m. 366 days ago.
I went to work the same day, carried on with my daily work tasks, took a run after work, and in my own way said goodbye.
I found great comfort that day listening to Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish composer who wrote music about the mythical Tuonela River in the Finnish epic The Kalevala. His “Swan of Tuonela” is part of his four-part musical tone poem based on the hero from the epic called the Lemminkäinen Suite. A haunting piece, the “Swan of Tuonela,” refers to the land of death. (You can listen to the complete suite, which is one of my favorite Sibelius compositions.)
Upon the Tuonela River, with its black waters and a rapid current, swims a dark swan, frequently evoked in Finnish paintings as a frightening and foreboding character. In the myth Kalevala, the hero, Lemminkäinen, is killed next to the river on a quest requiring that he kill the swan, but is restored to life by his fierce mother, who travels across the wilderness to retrieve the body of her dead son and restore him to life by the river’s edge. The story of death, a mother and son, and the creative imaginings of a great Finnish composer and Finnish painters still connect with me today, as I write this and listen to the music once more.
In the music from the land of our Finnish ancestors, I found peace the day she died. I still have that calm today, not afraid of the time that will come for me too, when my soul prepares for its voyage across the dark waters to the afterlife that awaits us all.
I shared my thoughts by chat with of my Finnish cousins musing about today’s anniversary. She was supportive and loving. She wrote: “Somehow Tuonela seems to be a calm place. Peaceful, unearthly peace. Not such a bad place to go to, especially in today’s chaotic world.”
*Note: Even after I got a court order to force the release of my original birth certificate from the state of Michigan in 2016, the state again illegally tried to deny me additional copies in fall 2024. They lost, again, after I got another court order.
Meta Tags: Death, Jean Sibelius, Crittenton General Hospital, Adoption, Adoptee Rights, Kalevala, Swan of Tuonela, Lemminkäinen, Lemminkäinen Suite, Finland, Finnish Immigration, Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela