Commentary: I was adopted. 'Disclosure’ raises new questions about ‘closure.’
By DENNIS HETZEL, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Late in 1951, Marguerite Dargan, a bright, lively 19-year-old woman from Rock Island, got pregnant.
Dennis Hetzel's parents, Marguerite Dargan and Sherman Dutch.(Dargan and Dutch family photos)
The father, Sherman Dutch, was a Jewish man and a decorated Air Force veteran who took part in D-Day. He returned home to Madison, Wisconsin, after the war to get his accounting degree and start a career. He probably met Marguerite when she boarded and babysat at the nearby home of his sister and brother-in-law. After Marguerite learned she was pregnant, her family sent her to Chicago to stay with her grandparents. The plan: Keep things quiet. Offer the infant for private adoption. Get on with life.
The child was born July 22, 1952, and was described as “mixed race” to the few who knew. Marguerite named him “Michael Joseph Dargan” and clouded the father’s identity on the Illinois birth certificate, which records the dad as a soldier named “John Dargan.” Her doctor, Betty Delson, knew a blue-collar couple who badly wanted a child and lived in an ethnic Hungarian neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. The courts awarded custody to Paul and Ruth Hetzel, and they changed Michael Joseph’s name to “Dennis Richard.”
Because of Marguerite, Sherman, Ruth, Paul and everything else that has happened in my life, I’m here and I’m me.
New York just became the most recent state to join Illinois and other states that allow adult adoptees the right to see their original birth certificates, and this certainly will make it easier for more adoptees to learn their stories. However, it’s important to remember that these documents are mere puzzle pieces. “Disclosure” is not a synonym for “closure.” Disclosure is simply the exchange of information; closure provides emotional peace — or at least helps you get closer to it.
Ruth and Paul Hetzel with young Dennis near Reisterstown, Maryland, circa 1956. (Hetzel family photo)
Ruth and Paul Hetzel with young Dennis near Reisterstown, Maryland, circa 1956. (Hetzel family photo)
I’ve also learned that “closure” isn’t just for adoptees. That became apparent the more I learned about Marguerite and other birth moms of the 1950s and 1960s.
Marguerite couldn’t just “get on with her life.” My recently discovered cousins have vivid memories of their late Aunt Marguerite doting over them, but she never had other children and fought her share of demons. She married later in life and found some happiness, but my cousins say deep sadness enveloped her each July — my birthday month. Years later, one of my cousins told me that she felt a spiritual urging to pray for “Marg’s baby.” I surfaced a few weeks later.
It’s possible she didn’t know Sherman was the father or wasn’t sure. Sherman’s family also has accepted me with open arms, and they believe he never knew about his fatherhood. That squares with the experiences of thousands of other unwed mothers and their families during the 1950s and 1960s.
‘Bad girls’ and slut-shaming
You meet lots of women like Marguerite in Ann Fessler’s “The Girls Who Went Away,” a book that brings tears and anger. Most of the birth mothers Fessler interviewed from that era were cast aside as “bad girls,” slut-shamed even by their parents in many cases and secretly sent away to give birth. They were often denied the right to even hold or see their newborns, and one of my cousins recalls Marguerite making such comments.
The cruel message was that keeping them from their babies would make it easier for them to forget. Young mothers heard such broken-record phases often, as if the loss of all connection with a child from your womb was no more consequential than donating a pile of lightly worn, unwanted clothes to the thrift shop.
For the fathers, the situation was quite opposite. Assuming they even knew their status, they and their families could choose their level of engagement, and society offered many incentives to take little or no responsibility.
I had resigned myself as I entered my 60s to never knowing much about my story and was particularly sad that my children and their children would have missing puzzle pieces in their lives as well. Thanks to DNA test results and many helpful people, the answers emerged in the past three years.
Twists in a family history
Dennis Hetzel (Dennis R. Hetzel)
Like many adoptees, I’ve found answers filled with unpredictable twists. For example, I lived in Madison for four years as managing editor of The Capital Times newspaper and knew some of my relatives. I just didn’t know we were related. Today I go to a Methodist church, but my surprising discovery that I’m half Jewish pulls hard on my psyche. I’m not sure what that means for me spiritually — but I’m glad I know.
You also learn that the dead ends on your journey can lift barricades for others. A member of my wife’s family connected with a long-lost daughter from her experience as a teenage unwed mother after getting the huge clue of the daughter’s DNA match to my son. I helped a Chicago doctor learn that the woman who I thought gave birth to my father (she didn’t; she’s a great-aunt) was actually his missing grandmother.
Still, I’d like to know more about Sherman’s and Marguerite’s relationship, and I wonder if Marguerite tried to find me or learn what happened to her child. There’s no evidence she did so, but I know enough to harbor no doubts that she wanted to know what happened to the son she never knew and maybe wasn’t even allowed to hold.
I’ve also learned the closure journey comes with a price. Marguerite paid her sadness forward to me, and I feel it most strongly every July. I don’t mind, because I’m also more at peace. I want to believe that she is too.
Dennis Hetzel grew up in Chicago and Hoffman Estates. He lives in Holden Beach, N.C., and recently retired as executive director of the Ohio News Media Association. He’s a former newspaper reporter, editor, publisher, journalism teacher and the author of two novels, “Killing the Curse” and “Season of Lies.”
Link to the original Chicago Tribune article here.