In July 2013, my family and I went to the sixth No Barriers Summit in the historic mountain town of Telluride, Colorado. At the opening ceremony, I welcomed the five hundred people in the audience and then introduced a recent acquaintance who was one of the growing community of No Barriers ambassadors. Mandy Harvey was a professional singer who had released two albums and played to sold-out shows in clubs around the country, including two performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. As she sang classics like “Over the Rainbow” and “Fly Me to the Moon,” her voice was so pitch perfect and beautifully haunting that it was hypnotic. After her set, as she introduced herself to uproarious applause, some must have been wondering why she’d been performing sign language as she sang. It all made sense as she casually mentioned that she was deaf—not just hard of hearing, but profoundly, unequivocally deaf. The audience sat in amazed rapture. Many, I noticed, were sniffling and crying.
After Mandy, Adrian Anantawan, a world-class violinist, took the stage. He played Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 in A Minor. Adrian was born missing his right arm just below the elbow, making him an unlikely candidate to become a concert violinist. He told the audience that when growing up, his family had never asked what would be the easiest instrument for a person with only one arm to learn. They’d ignored that question entirely, simply asking themselves, what instrument makes the most beautiful music? The answer had set the trajectory of Adrian’s life. At ten years old, his parents took him to a prosthetist who rigged up a plaster cast that fit over his stump. Adding a piece of aluminum tubing that connected to the base of the bow enabled him to manipulate the bow back and forth across the strings.
“At first, the instrument fought against me,” he admitted. “For the first ten years, I sounded like a dying cat! But everything I put into the instrument, it eventually gave back to me in the most profound ways.” Adrian had performed all over the world, including in front of three American presidents.
Adrian said that it had been a dream of his to play his violin on a mountaintop. So early the next morning, we set out with a group of No Barriers youth from around the country, and several hours later, our team—including kids who were blind, amputees, and teens who had never before been in the mountains—stood on a high summit above the deep valley of Telluride. We gathered around Adrian and listened to him play. The sound started softly, dipping and idling, then soared up and pierced the thin mountain air. The deeper notes spread out and reverberated against the distant cliff faces. As I listened to his bow dancing over the strings, I immediately recognized the song and quietly sang the words:
A—mazing Grace! How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.
* * *
Later that afternoon, back in the auditorium, a friend of mine rolled onto the stage for a demonstration. Amanda Boxtel had been in a wheelchair for almost thirty years, but on this day, she stood up using a cutting-edge exoskeleton technology. As she walked across the stage, I listened to the electric whir and hum of the gears lifting and lowering her feet. Arjun, next to me, said, “Whoa, Dad, she looks like Iron Man.”
I followed the sound as she carefully descended the set of stairs, walked in front of the crowd, pointed at a group of wheelchair users in the front row, and said to them, “Get ready to walk.”
Afterward, Ellie took a photo of Amanda and me. As Amanda said, “Cheese,” I listened to where her voice emanated from.
“You’re about five foot seven.” I laughed. “I never knew that.” I gave her a big hug.
On the last day, we presented Hugh Herr with the inaugural No Barriers Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on prosthetics technology. His new BiOM ankle system, just released, was again revolutionizing the field of bionics, similar to the Rheo knee I’d held in my hands seven years ago at the Cortina No Barriers Summit. The new BiOM held sophisticated microprocessors and sensors in the joint that emulated the functions of lost muscles and tendons, enabling it to move in the same way as a biological ankle. He showed us how he could use an app on his iPhone to program the degree of flex and spring. Then he tapped his toes on the stage, just to show off a little. “I imagine a future when leg amputees will be able to run faster than people with biological limbs,” he said. “A world where visually impaired people are no longer visually impaired. A future in which technology is so advanced and sophisticated that people with unusual minds and bodies will no longer be disabled. I think, in the twilight years of this century, we will have a world in which disability no longer exists.”
Kyle Maynard closed out the summit with his harrowing account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He described the intense pain in his elbows only three days into the expedition. On the fourth day, at twelve thousand feet, he went into his tent and cried. The summit remained over seven thousand feet above him, and his team figured it would take another fifteen days. Kyle had to reckon with the fact that he wasn’t going to make it, that he’d provided false hope for all the people who’d believed in him, especially those military heroes lying in hospital beds somewhere who were following the climb. But what hurt the most was breaking his promise to a woman named Vicky. He’d met her randomly, learning that her son, Corey, a marine, had been killed in combat five months earlier. Corey left behind a wife and three daughters. It had been his dream to travel after his deployment and to climb Kilimanjaro someday. Vicky asked Kyle if he would carry Corey’s ashes to the summit. On the spot, he agreed. Kyle was determined not to break that promise, but the grueling days and the intense pain were wearing him down. So he and his team made a bold decision: Instead of sticking to the standard route, they would save twelve miles by choosing a shorter, but much steeper and more dangerous route. It was his best chance.
Ten days after beginning, Kyle, exhausted and covered with dirt, crawled over the top, stopping near the sign that marked 19,341 feet. All day, he’d been carrying Corey’s ashes on a lanyard around his neck. At a flat spot between two rocks, his team helped retrieve the lanyard, and while fighting back tears, Kyle spoke softly, “It’s an honor to be able to bring you here, brother.” Then he poured Corey’s ashes onto the earth as he looked down into a sea of clouds, then forest, and farther, the African savanna, all the way to the Indian Ocean.
Kyle told us that, while crabbing slowly toward the summit, he’d get frustrated and discouraged each time he’d look up at the great distance he still had to go. He said he tended to do that in life way too much. So he began forcing himself to stop and look back at the vast terrain he’d already traveled. Our No Barriers movement had been similar; an idea had begun with three friends atop a desert tower more than ten years ago. Along the way, its future had felt so uncertain; it had almost fizzled and died. So now it was gratifying to sit in the audience and soak in what we’d built, a powerful force for change and transformation.
However, as inspiring as the summit was, it didn’t reveal any immediate answers to the dilemma we faced about Arjun’s recently discovered Nepali mother. The subject weighed heavily on us, and we consulted Arjun’s therapist, whom he’d been seeing once a week since his arrival in the United States. Arjun was still at the age that talk therapy wasn’t as effective as play therapy. So during his sessions, he was able to choose from a huge array of toys, objects, and figures and manipulate them in a giant sand tray. The idea behind it was to help Arjun resolve conflicts, remove obstacles, and gain acceptance.
In the beginning, for a long while, Arjun only involved inanimate objects like seashells, spools of thread, and driftwood. There were no living creatures in his imaginative play. When Arjun was having a rough week, when there was conflict around the house or at school, his made-up games would involve ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars. Pretend sirens blared; imaginary fires blazed. His play seemed in crisis. So it was a breakthrough when, many months later, he took a toy house off the shelf, buried it, and then, at the end of the hour, uncovered it and placed it atop the sand. His therapist shared with us that it might be a sign he was beginning to accept his new life with us. It was an even bigger breakthrough when, many months later again, he placed a family of dinosaurs in the house: a mother dinosaur, a father dinosaur, and two baby dinosaurs. It was impossible to tell, but I hoped the babies were a boy and a girl. Those many months showed Ellie and me that the bonds of a family didn’t form instantaneously. Love, trust, and cohesiveness were built one stitch at a time, and we feared this new revelation might just tear that fragile knitting apart. Arjun’s therapist agreed. “He is not psychologically prepared to deal with the magnitude of this information,” she said. “I say protect, protect, protect.”
* * *
In the hot tub behind our house, we discussed what to do. Ellie and her brother had been adopted themselves, so she had firsthand perspective. “When I was growing up, I was curious about where I came from. I wanted to meet someone who looked like me and had my blood running through them. But now, I can understand why my parents did a closed adoption. Your worst nightmare is that there might be a loophole, a weak spot in the system, a reason why it didn’t stick, a change of heart—something that will disrupt your family, something that will take your child away. And I know how unfair that feeling is because Arjun’s mother was a victim. She didn’t deserve this.”
“And what if she got sick and died?” I asked. “We would then be responsible for holding back an important piece of Arjun’s life. We’ll remove his prerogative. At some point, he’s got to confront this, to own his history.”
“He may find out anyway,” Ellie said.
We knew this was the age kids got curious and Googled their names. Recently, there had been an article written by an organization working to connect Nepali moms and their children and exposing the corruption. They’d chosen to show a photo of Arjun and Kanchi—despite our request to keep Arjun’s photo off the Internet.
In the end, we both felt strongly that he just wasn’t ready to know. “It’s all too fragile right now,” Ellie said. “Maybe when he’s sixteen or so, when he’s more mature, when he can handle this better.”
Our biggest fear went even deeper, though. It came down to commitment. There were times, like on our Green River trip, when Arjun’s doubts flared up and this new family hadn’t felt real. The next time we sent him to his room for misbehaving, would he be thinking, My real mother wouldn’t have done that? He already had a fantasy life that blurred with reality. When he was little, he’d imagined floating up from his foul-smelling bedroom in the orphanage, full of other farting boys, and flying over the city of Kathmandu like a superhero. It was a natural escape mechanism, but when his family, friends, or school weren’t going well, could this become a Peter Pan fantasy to always hold on to as a plan B? Uncle Rob was a strong advocate of plan Bs, but in this instance, it could become a wedge, a way of rejecting his present circumstances. It would be natural to wonder if that other life might have been better.
I recalled those early hints that Arjun had memories of his mother. He had even spoken the words aloud: jail. They floated in his subconscious, emerging from time to time above the surface like a dream you can’t quite remember. We had wondered why Arjun had wailed on the bed that night before flying away, not like the tears of a boy who skinned his knee, but as Ellie described, “a wail as deep in the heart as pain could go.” Unbeknownst to us, a few months earlier, he’d been visiting his mother in jail, saying good-bye and pledging not to abandon her. He had no idea where he was going but knew what he was leaving. That half memory was a lot for a boy to carry, and there was no way for it not to cause a wound. But it was our job as parents to repair that injury, to help it heal and scar over. That would enable Arjun to move forward, to grow and develop into a healthy, happy young man who trusted his family and felt a deep bond with other human lives. Most importantly, he had to believe that, although bad things happened, the world was a good place that you could navigate with confidence.
However, what if it became more than a wound, but instead a break, like snapping a dry twig in half? What if that break was too wide to span? What if this became the reason why the journey ended, stuck in that no-man’s-land between two worlds—loyalty to the past or loyalty to the new life? Training for the Grand Canyon had taught me that if you wavered, the fears and reservations would sink down and paralyze you. Commitment was the only way forward.
When Arjun had kicked the soccer ball with Uncle Rob behind the hotel on that very first meeting in Nepal, his spark and talent were obvious. It was further revealed when he came to America and learned English in three months and figured out how to ride a bike, with no training wheels, in three days. In that first spring, Arjun had joined a soccer club, and parents would frequently comment on his quick reflexes, exceptional coordination, and intuition for the game. But as the kids his age progressed through the years, they seemed to develop quickly, and some emerged as star players. Arjun appeared, however, to be falling behind. I didn’t care whether he was a star, but I did want him to be proud of himself as he worked through a process and continued to grow and improve. I hated to see him go from such natural talent to coming in last during sprints, not following the coach’s advice, and clearly holding back as the other kids gave their all. It seemed as if he didn’t know how to tap into that spark, or like something else was blocking that spark from igniting. I thought of the race we’d had on that sand dune when Arjun had stopped before the finish line, and I wondered what would push him to reach inward and begin growing what he had inside. By the second half of the season, he wasn’t playing very much, mostly riding the bench, and was a nonfactor during the games. At age ten, the club split into thirds, with Arjun chosen for the C-level. His team had a painful season, not winning a single game, and for the majority of the games, not scoring a single goal. Sometimes we’d make the mistake of trying to give him advice on the car ride home: “You’re flat-footed out there … You’re not trying to get open … You’re letting your opponent beat you to the ball.”
But the language gap was wide, and Arjun would often get angry. “You’re saying I stink.”
“Not at all,” I’d step in. “I think you’re awesome and just wonder why you hold back.”
“Well, basically, you’re saying I’m not any good.”
Often it would degrade into an argument, and we noticed Arjun beginning to lose interest. He skipped a season, trying some other sports like wrestling and baseball, but the next fall, a friend from school asked him to play on a new soccer team, just formed. It was the best news, because the team was part of a recreational league. There’d be no pressure; the goal was just to play and have fun. But I admit it was a little hard from the sidelines as Ellie described the kids goofing off, giggling and poking each other as the coach tried to give feedback. Once during practice, Ellie gave me a play-by-play as Arjun and another boy moved the plastic cones in order to shorten the distance of their dribbling drill. The other kids high-fived them and made them out to be heroes.
During games, Arjun fell right in as the boys bunched together, hogged the ball, and refused to communicate with each other. It was like he worked hard to be a chameleon, to not stand out, to be at the level of the lowest common denominator. Most infuriating was when the team was losing by one goal with a few minutes to go. Instead of sprinting and rallying, they began walking and joking around, already defeated in their minds. Ellie and I weren’t sure if this rec team was sending Arjun the right message.
Six months went by, and we debated what to do about his Nepali mom. It was on our minds constantly. As parents, our hearts were burdened with the knowledge of a mother who had lost her only son, but also as parents, we knew the fragility of Arjun’s emotional state. Ultimately, we decided to do nothing. We found ourselves retreating and protecting our son. Protect, protect, protect! We had to keep him safe at all cost.
* * *
In December, Mandy Harvey was in town for a holiday concert. We’d stayed in touch since the summit. She drove out to Golden, and we walked along Clear Creek, where I’d spent hundreds of hours training. “I loved your performance at the summit,” I said as the winter sun shone down on our faces.
“Yeah. It’s ironic I’m even up there at all,” she replied. “I had no intention of ever becoming a performer. I wanted to be a choir teacher. I’m super shy, and I get stage fright! My freshman year of high school, I was in a choir vocal competition. There was only my dad, four other people, and the competition judge, but even with that small audience, I started shaking, and then I started crying, and then I turned around and sang the rest of the song while they stared at my butt, because I couldn’t look at them.”
Mandy was born with a connective tissue disorder that affected her hearing. Her ear canals would frequently fill with fluid and were susceptible to infections, resulting in multiple surgeries. “When I was about four, I had an entire year when my eardrums didn’t vibrate. I started lip reading because it compensated for what I wasn’t sure I was hearing. When I was in eighth grade, I went on an airplane on a school trip. The change in air pressure perforated both eardrums, and it was six months before they recovered.”
In high school, her hearing stabilized, and being from a musical family, Mandy joined an elite choir. They performed all over the world, including a concert at the Sydney Opera House.
As we walked and I listened to Mandy relate the string of events that sent her spiraling downward, I felt stunned. It seemed like a cosmic joke, like a bizarre scene I remembered from the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A cartoon image of a guy innocently stands with flowers growing from out of his head. A brass band plays in the background as an oversized foot comes down from the sky and, for no reason at all, crushes him and his flowers. And to add to the joke, the squish is associated with a loud fart noise. As Mandy began Colorado State University as a music education major, the cosmic foot was about to drop.
Almost immediately, her residual hearing started declining again. She noticed she couldn’t understand her professors and started moving closer and closer to the front of the room. One day she could no longer hear them at all. She was panicked, just faking it, trying to survive. As I listened to her story, I was viscerally feeling every word, remembering my own experience in middle school as the print in books got smaller and smaller and the whiteboard got farther and farther away.
As if losing her hearing were not enough, she tripped one day, and being particularly vulnerable to injuries due to her connective tissue disorder, she dislocated her knee, ripping all the ligaments around it. She had a surgery the third time to repair her ACL and was in a wheelchair for a month. Mandy now had to get to class by pushing herself on her chair down an icy path to catch what she termed “the short bus.” She began missing a lot of class, sitting in her dorm room, depressed in the dark. “People would come up and say, ‘That must be really hard.’ I could barely understand them. I just wanted to escape. I was a shell of a person who they pitied. They talked to me, and I just sat there staring at them.”
“All the things you’re talking about, it’s like I’m reliving my own story of going blind,” I admitted. “You hate the fact that people are looking at you in a certain way. You feel like an egg that’s been cracked and squished on the ground, and everyone’s looking at the mess.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “And sometimes they’re just poking it, and you’re like, ‘Stop! You’re not really seeing me. I used to be something else!’ It doesn’t make sense, but somehow it felt like it was my fault. I felt responsible. Somebody could say, ‘You look beautiful today,’ and I’d still cry because one way or another, they were only saying that because they had to. Inside, I was convinced I was broken. I was that disgusting egg.”
That feeling of being responsible was compounded when Mandy decided to join a church for a little solace. One night the group surrounded her. They put their hands on her and began to pray for a miraculous cure. “I stopped going after that. It was like they were saying I was the cause, that if I only had more faith, I’d be healed. I got really confused then, like, what had I done? Or why had God forgotten about me? But my father said, ‘God’s not a genie, and he’s not poking you with a stick just to put you through a trial.’ Things just happen. This is a flawed world. He said, ‘Maybe God’s watching the whole thing and crying along with you.’”
In the second semester, her musical theory class was taking their first test. The teacher played a piano song, and the students had to score it by tallying out the rhythm and notes. The teacher was facing Mandy, and from her chair, she couldn’t see over the back of the piano to know if his fingers were moving, and Mandy was too embarrassed to get up. After the test, she sat there with a blank paper as everyone began leaving. The teacher brought Mandy down to the dean, where they said, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going to work.”
“They were just waiting for the shoe to drop,” Mandy said, “and it dropped that day. I’ve never been so mad in my life. All I wanted to do was punch a kitten or smash a car. I’d been given a letter saying I was being released from that class.” Her dream of becoming a choir teacher had died, and she had no idea what to do next.
Mandy was walking back from class that afternoon on the bike path. She was just out of the wheelchair. “A guy began waving in front of me,” she said. “I didn’t know what he was trying to say.” Then it became clear as a bicyclist plowed into her back. “A month before, I’d gotten fitted for hearing aids. They only worked for a couple of weeks; my hearing was too far gone at that point. They were $3,000 apiece, and insurance didn’t cover them. My parents paid for them out of pocket, even though they had just declared bankruptcy. My dad had taken the money out of his retirement fund. That day I happened to be wearing them when the bike hit me. One of them fell out, and I fell on top of it and crushed it.” The fall also put her back in the wheelchair for another week and set her recovery back for months. “I just fell on the pavement, but it was like I’d fallen down a well,” she said.
Soon after that, the faculty dropped Mandy from the music program. “It was more humiliation,” she said, “but I was going to at least finish the semester. That was my ‘fuck you.’ I’m going to do it. I have to finish.”
“What was it like at the end when you left that place?” I asked.
“When we started driving away, it was euphoria,” she said. “I just wanted to go home and be done with this nightmare. But then after we left the city limits, it was a feeling of being crushed under a weight. I had let everyone down. Then I just got really quiet and I stopped talking to people. I shut down. I wasn’t even mad. I was numb.”
Mandy went home to live with her parents again. She spent a lot of time by herself in her room. “I barely got out of bed. I had so little energy, everything became a math problem: seventeen paces to the bathroom, eight paces from my bed to the door. I hadn’t just lost the ability to hear music but simple things, like the ease of conversation, or the sound of a whisper, being able to hear people calling out from behind me, or the click of the door latch on my car when I push the remote. If I have kids in the future, I’ll never hear them say, ‘I love you.’ I had to mourn the loss of the life I thought I’d have.”
“I know,” is all I said. “I remember.” Then I asked, “When did you let it die?” wondering if she’d have a clue what I was asking.
She knew immediately and replied, “It took about a year, but I watched it die, laid it to rest, and I said, ‘Good riddance.’ Then I had to start over as a new person.”
An amazing thing happened after that. Mandy’s father, always a tremendous supporter, convinced her to begin singing again, just the two of them, like they had done together since Mandy was a young girl. There was no pressure either. The two of them decided to record a song, “Come Home” by OneRepublic, as a gift for her old voice coach, Cynthia Vaughn. Her father played the guitar while Mandy sang. “I was just going to hand Cynthia this little song that we recorded on a tiny fifteen-dollar digital recorder, and it was just going to be private between the two of us, a thank-you for all her help over the years.” When she played the song, Cynthia began crying, and Mandy assumed it was because she sounded terrible.
“I know I sound horrible,” Mandy said.
“No,” Cynthia replied. “They’re tears of joy.” Mandy had somehow retained her near-perfect pitch.
I thought about my first meeting with Dr. Bach-y-Rita, who had proven the truth of neuroplasticity. He had shown the scientific world that it was the brain that saw, not the eyes. I wondered if he knew his theory applied to deaf singers too. It was the brain that heard, not the ears. Dr. Bach-y-Rita would have been proud of Mandy.
In 2008, Mandy’s voice coach convinced her to sing at open mic night at a bistro in Fort Collins, Colorado. She still had doubts. “I thought I was going to suck,” she said. But when they told her she was going on in two minutes, something powerful occurred.
“The thing that I had feared the most all of my life, all through my childhood, was losing my hearing. And that had already happened,” Mandy said. “So I thought, What’s the worst that can happen here?” With her hand on the piano so she could get the tempo through the vibrations, she stared at a spot on the wall above the audience and summoned up the courage to begin singing. The audience’s applause told her that she could actually do this, and the folks at the bistro invited her back the very next week. Soon, Thursday nights were “Mandy Night.” Sometimes she’d appear barefoot so she could really feel the vibrations through the instruments, the drums through her feet and the bass through her chest. “I couldn’t hear myself sing, so I’d lost the ability to scare myself, to judge myself, which was the big factor behind my nerves. I had always wanted to be perfect. I always wanted to do things so well that I debilitated myself, stopping myself from performing the way I wanted to. I was trying to live up to a standard that was nonexistent. But I was now a new person, and that enabled me to stop worrying about how it came out. The crazy part was that the people who knew me both when I could hear and after I went deaf said I sang better after.”
I’d bought four tickets to hear Mandy perform that night at a popular jazz club in Denver to a packed holiday concert. I sat with my family at a small table, Ellie and I drinking beers and the kids enjoying Shirley Temples. We’d prepared by listening to Mandy’s CDs, and all of us had our favorites. We bet cherries from the kids’ drinks which song she’d start with. Ellie won as Mandy started with “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” Like the summit, the crowd cheered with love and admiration. Her following was cult-like, with Mandy’s voice elevated by her fans and the rising energy in the room. The mood then shifted and became more subdued as she introduced her next song, “Smile,” made famous by Nat King Cole. “I learned sign language back in college,” she told the crowd, “as I was losing my hearing. It’s pretty ironic that my sign name became Smile.” She held her hand up to the crowd and made an M by tucking her thumb under three fingers, and then brought her hand up to her face and drew a grin. It was Mandy’s signature slang—combining the sign for M with the sign for smile. “I always thought it was funny; anyone who had burrowed into my soul at that time would have seen that it was hell in there. So this song reminds me to keep smiling through it all.”
Her version was stripped down and simple, with Mandy’s voice at the center. Somehow it conveyed both strength and vulnerability, all at once.
Smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it’s breaking.
When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by.
If you smile through your fear and sorrow, smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through for you.
Light up your face with gladness, hide every trace of sadness.
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile.
Though I couldn’t see them, I was pretty sure Emma, Arjun, and Ellie were smiling right along with Mandy. I know I was. Then Ellie whispered in my ear that Mandy’s pianist had been giving her visual cues by looking up and nodding proudly when it was her beat to begin singing. It reminded me of how I relied on Rob and Harlan and my other guides to kayak a river, or how a kid depended on his family to grow into a strong, healthy adult. Arjun was no exception. He was leaning on Ellie and me to make the right decisions to support him, the way Mandy was lifted up by the audience, the way she rode atop the swell of belief coming from her band. As parents, it was our responsibility to keep Arjun safe, to build his trust, confidence, and happiness, to make sure the world never hurt him again. But maybe that was impossible. I’d been too wrapped up with how I thought life was supposed to be, rather than seeing it as an adventure. Mandy had surely watched her life radically change. She had been thrown down a deep well and had eventually found her way out by discovering an inner voice. I wondered what that voice was telling me now. Part of it was screaming that Arjun wasn’t ready; our family wasn’t ready. We needed to circle the wagons and fight this new circumstance that had dared to change our family so swiftly and completely.
My mind flashed back through the last six months of indecision, of pain and worry, all the way back to the No Barriers Summit in Telluride, and I found myself reliving that day on a peak with Adrian Anantawan, the concert violinist. Similar to Mandy, his story represented that inner voice, often so foreign and counterintuitive. But maybe when you got down to the very core, it sounded something like Mandy’s songs, or like Adrian’s violin soaring over the mountains, pure and simple, like sound transformed into joy. Then I knew what to do. Arjun had a Nepali mother. She existed. That was truth, and it was to be celebrated. It was a life reborn. I leaned into Ellie, pulled her in tight, and whispered, “He needs to know.”
“You’re talking about Arjun, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
She squeezed my hand. “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” she whispered back.
That week, we sent photos and a letter to Kanchi through the Nepali organization and then asked Kami Tenzing Sherpa to meet her. During their introduction, he filmed a video greeting that he subtitled in English, and we watched it on Ellie’s computer.
“Namaste to Arjun’s mommy and daddy,” she began. “I am happy you have given Arjun a better education than I could have ever provided. I am also happy, because I always used to give him dal bhat, and now you are doing the same. He always said, ‘Give me dal bhat, Mommy.’ He’s crazy about it.” Kanchi was beginning to cry as she continued, “I am happy that I got to see his pictures. You are both very kind. You took my son under your care when he was a very small child and have raised him. You’ve given him more happiness than I ever could and motivated him to do better. You have done a great job in raising him, and I am very happy from the heart to know that. For all these years, I have been wondering where he was, how he is. Now I know. Now I just wish to meet him again. He is my son, and he is yours too.”
Ellie and I both cried along with Kanchi, and we were pretty certain this was not a scam by the way she cried. But we’d been duped before, more than once, so we decided on a plan that would give us absolute proof. It was perfect timing, because coincidently, Uncle Rob was heading out soon on a trek through the Himalayas with his wife and friends. So we asked him to take a day and meet Kanchi. Ellie had found a DNA kit online and showed it to Rob. “Somehow,” she said, “you’re going to have to swab her cheek for a DNA sample.”
“No problem,” Rob said, smiling and eager for the challenge. Just as tricky, Ellie had to get a DNA sample from Arjun and send the two samples off to a company to see if they were a match.
Ellie and I sat on Arjun’s bed one night and reminded him that Ellie was also adopted—just like he was. “Are you ever sad?” she asked. “Do you ever think about your Nepali family?”
Arjun nodded.
“I know about that curiosity,” she admitted. “I want to give you permission to ask yourself, ‘What the heck happened?’ That curiosity is natural. It’s all such a mystery.”
“Would it be okay,” I stepped in, “when Uncle Rob goes to Nepal, if he were to ask around? Maybe ask some questions?”
Again, Arjun nodded.
Two weeks later, at the end of his trek, Rob and Kami arranged a meeting with Kanchi at the headquarters of the organization that had connected us. Rob introduced himself and explained that Arjun called him “Uncle Rob.” He explained how he’d been a part of Arjun’s life from the beginning. He flipped through various photos of Arjun: at the Telluride Summit, at camp, kayaking, and rock climbing. He showed a video of Arjun playing his new saxophone. Kanchi smiled, and Rob mentioned that Arjun had that same smile. “He’s very smart,” Rob bragged. “He’s in a special accelerated math class.”
As Kanchi listened, her eyes began to tear up. “I cry too much,” she said. She revealed, “When he was little, he told me that when he grew up, he’d protect me and take care of me, but now I am alone. I worry Arjun will forget about me.”
Rob assured her that Ellie and I had nothing but empathy for her situation and hoped this meeting would be a step in reestablishing a relationship. Then it was time for Rob to get her DNA. He showed her how to rinse her mouth and swab her cheek. As he demonstrated with the Q-tip jammed in his mouth, he made goofy faces, and by the end of the meeting, everybody was giggling and taking photos. “We’ll make this a DNA party,” Rob said cheerfully. “I’m so glad to be able to hold your hands and go back and tell the Weihenmayers that we were able to meet.”
Then he asked Kanchi for any parting words for Arjun. “Always be honest. Study hard. I give my blessings, and I am waiting,” she said.
When Rob reported back, “Mission accomplished,” Ellie implemented the next step in the scheme. But how could she trick Arjun into a cheek swab without having to explain what it was for? Luckily, Ellie had done her research; earwax was an ideal source of DNA. Looking at Arjun’s ears, she exclaimed, “Gosh! You gotta clean those things!” She helped him use a Q-tip to clean them, and afterward, she stealthily plucked the dirty Q-tips out of the garbage and put them into a plastic bag.
When the results came back, they were a match, no question. So that night, Ellie and I asked for a family meeting. We sat on the couch in the living room, and, before I lost my nerve, I came straight out with it. “Arjun,” I said, “you know how Uncle Rob was in Nepal? Well, we found your Nepali mom. I want you to know, it doesn’t change anything. We will always be your family. This will always be your home. Emma will always be your sister, and we’ll always be your parents, but now you have two mothers, a second mom who loves you.” We put our arms around him and said, “You never have to worry or wonder. When you’re ready, only when you’re ready, you can meet her. She’s there, and she’s waiting.”
We then showed the kids a picture of Kanchi. She wore a striped dress with a pretty purple-and-blue scarf draped around her neck. Her face was round, and her long black hair was pulled back. Like the first picture Ellie saw of Arjun, Kanchi wasn’t smiling. She looked stoic, perhaps defiant; her face wore the burden she’d been carrying.
Arjun didn’t have any questions. He must have been utterly overwhelmed. We gave him the picture, but he buried it away under his bed. Every week or so, Ellie would check in to see if he had any questions, or if he wanted to talk more, but each time, he hardly said a word.
On the fourth week, however, Ellie had an idea. “How would you feel,” she asked, “about making a little video, so Kanchi could see your house and learn a bit about your life?” He mulled it over for a few minutes, and to my surprise, he agreed.
When they filmed the video, I was away on a river trip, but on my return, I listened to it again and again. It contained no soaring speeches or emotional revelations. It was just an eleven-year-old kid giving a tour to a new acquaintance. But something within it was very brave, and I got a sense there was more of this kind of courage to be revealed.
“Namaste,” he begins. “This is my house. We live in Golden, Colorado, next to the mountains.” Arjun points to a toy plane. “This is a LEGO set that I made,” he says, “and I think it’s pretty cool because I made it without instructions.” Next, he points to a half dozen awards. “These are some of my medals I got; this one’s from wrestling. Right now I’m in soccer. In the winter, I do indoor soccer and wrestling. They’re pretty fun, and I know some kids on the teams.”
He holds up a picture. “I drew this in fourth grade with watercolors. They’re aspen trees. We get to travel a lot. We went to Croatia this year. I have stuff from Hong Kong, and I also have some stuff from Hawaii.” He points to a shark poster, displaying all the different classifications. He walks outside to his backyard. “This is one of our chickens. We named her Little Red Hen.” The chicken begins clucking as he places it in its pen. Then he walks across the yard and lets our two dogs out of the side yard gate. “Sit.” Instead of sitting, Uri lies down at Arjun’s feet, and he lies down next to him, stroking his back. “He’s a guide dog, and he helps my dad go through the airport.” Then Ellie joins Arjun. She pets Uri and adds, “Arjun’s job is to brush and walk the dogs.”
Lastly, Arjun grabs his soccer ball and begins juggling. He gets to six before the ball escapes and hits the driveway. He tries again and gets to fifteen.
Arjun then does a trick move with the ball rolling up the back of his ankle. He kicks it up over his head with his heel.
The video ends with Ellie and Arjun kicking the ball back and forth. Then they sit on our front yard swing together. Waving good-bye, Arjun says, “Thank you.” Then, with a smile, he speaks the Nepalese translation: “Dhanyabad.”
* * *
In August, just before leaving for the Grand Canyon, I planned a father-son adventure for Arjun and me. As I’d been upping my kayaking skills, Arjun had been joining me on Bear Creek Lake and Clear Creek. He was such a natural; he had a solid roll at age nine and a “hand roll,” a roll without a paddle, at age ten. So I thought it was the right time for his first kayaking trip down a big river.
We headed to the Upper Colorado with the team. Arjun loved being one of the boys, squeezed into the backseat of Skyler’s truck, trading insults, burping, noogies from Steven, and the chance for us to break out all the jokes that hadn’t worked on each other in years:
“AJ, did you see that apomi out the window?”
“No. What’s apomi?”
“Nothing. What’s up with you, homey?” This was followed by another round of noogies.
Through the rapids, his paddling technique and balance actually surpassed mine. I’d emerge from the bottom breathing hard and frazzled, while Arjun would ride the waves with a ballet dancer’s grace and come out smiling. “Dad,” he’d say, “that wasn’t so hard.”
The day proceeded with splash fights and chases, purposely trying to flip each other. Steven finally got Arjun with a classic river joke: “Hey, I think you have a rip in your dry top.” Steven pointed to Arjun’s armpit area, and when Arjun lifted his arm to check, Steven pushed his elbow, sending him over. Arjun came up sputtering, and he was officially initiated. Although he was utterly exhausted by the end, he paddled all fifteen miles. At the end of the day, we sat relaxing together at the edge of the river, and I thought it was the moment to break away from the “bro”-atmosphere.
“AJ,” I said, “you know I’m off in about a week. I want you to be a good boy while I’m away.”
Arjun sat still, not that comfortable with direct statements or overt emotion, but nevertheless, I put my arm around him and rubbed his back. Recently, we had produced a bunch of No Barriers flags, and we told people to bring them out and hold them high at significant moments. I thought this qualified, so I pulled one from the zipper pocket of my dry top and handed it to Arjun. “I want you to have this,” I said. “You deserve it.”
“Why you crying, Dad?” Arjun asked.
“They’re not tears,” I said, wiping them away with the back of my hand. “My face is just wet from river water.”
“If you say so,” he replied.
“You’ve been through more than most boys your age,” I forged on. “I want you to know I’m proud of you, and I think you’re very brave.” Then I tussled his hair, gave him a tight hug, and got up quickly before more tears could flow.