BY KIMBERLY WARNER, MEMBER
Hello everyone… I am so happy to have found you! I want to make an introduction to my story through a podcast I did last year for The Dougy Center, a community for bereaved adults and children. I have had the fortune to be a volunteer facilitator with this center for over a decade, but a strange twist of events and a DNA test later, left me right back in the center of a new kind of grief. My father who raised me died in a car accident just before I graduated from high school. Two decades later, in 2014, a DNA test revealed he wasn’t my biological father. Eager to understand more about the mystery of my beginnings, I began a search for my biological father, only to find out he disappeared in a sailing accident when I was ten years old. Unfolding this part of my history continues to be a complex and poignant adventure of self-discovery, threading together universal themes of identity, belonging, family secrets and the strange, unconscious pull of DNA that encourages us into our fullest expression.
The song featured in this podcast episode, Have You Seen, was written and performed by my biological father, Charles Brauer, on his 1982 album, Home & Away. It’s been a profound three years of discovery, confusion, loss and reclaiming and I am eager to connect with you all as we unfurl ourselves into these new identities.