Today a funeral will be held for a very good man. His death was unexpected, but while his earthly life is over, his impact will continue on for generations. He was the co-founder of the foster care agency we work with and his vision and passion yielded tangible results. Children had save, loving, Christian homes because of the work he did to provide a faith-based place for foster parents to be trained and find support. I am glad to have known him in the small ways I did and I’m glad to have partnered with him as a Christian Heritage foster family.
I don’t remember the first time I met Gregg Nicklas. This is a typical problem for me. I don’t have good facial recognition skills and usually have to “meet” someone a couple times before it sinks in that I’ve met them before. I do remember about two years ago Brian and I spoke to a group of people about why we were foster parents. The session ended with a question and answer time where we spoke openly about our experiences with our agency and answered questions about them. When we got done Brian said to me, “You know who that guy was in the back, right? That’s Gregg Nicklas. He runs Christian Heritage.” He came up to us afterwards and warmly thanked us for speaking to the group and left. That said a lot to me about what kind of man this was. Here was somebody speaking about HIS organization— the good and the challenging— and he never intervened, never mentioned who he was in order to better field a question, never pushed his reputation around to be sure we said what he would want, never hunted us down later to clarify things. It gave me a lot of respect for him.
But it’s the conversation Brian and I had with Gregg a couple months ago that will haunt me for a long time. I don’t think in this one post I can do justice to all my thoughts about it and I’m sure it will find its way into many more of my conversations and writings over the years to come. And it wasn’t just his unexpected death that made this conversation powerful. Brian and I knew when we walked away from that interaction that his words had us thinking and we wanted that thinking to lead to action. When I heard the news that Gregg had died, my first thought was, “But we were right in the middle of a conversation! I wasn’t done yet!” That “conversation” had happened months before, but in my mind, it was ongoing and needed to be revisited. So I want to share that conversation with you in the hopes that it will inspire ongoing thoughts for you, too.
I met with Gregg for lunch (along with Brian and two other representatives of Christian Heritage) to talk through a few things. The two other CH employees were there to talk about the potential of me doing some writing for them, but Gregg was there for something else. He had heard that some foster parents had concerns about a new program Christian Heritage was involved in. CH had received a grant to partner with the organization Family Finders to do more targeted searching for relatives of children in foster care with the hopes of connecting children to more avenues of support. I had some concerns about how that was practically working and how foster parents were being included (or not) in the process. Gregg wanted to meet with me to explain exactly how this was working and to hear what my fears and concerns were. (And what a testament to Gregg that he was willing to meet with a foster parent to discuss something that essentially wasn’t any of my concern in the hopes of setting the record straight because he was passionate about this topic.)
He started the conversation by explaining why he felt creating family connections was so important for kids. He talked about how hard it would be to be taken from your family and how many of these kids have relatives who would want to have relationships but don’t even know where the kids are or that they’re in foster care. He gave specific examples of children who have been able to find some stability through connections with adult relatives they didn’t know previously. I told him I couldn’t agree more. I told him how we have worked to create relationships with our children’s families even when we were counseled against it by caseworkers. I told him about our hearts for reunification and our hearts for the families even after their legal rights have ended. I told him my fear was that those proposing radical change to foster care always seem to be looking for a bad guy. For a long time the bad guy has been the biological family and severing those connections has been seen as the route to stability for kids. My fear was that in Family Finding we are saying the foster parents are the bad guy and the only hope for stability is to find permanency for kids with the biological relatives. I told Gregg that we want to be included on the team of people who are pushing for healing in these families. We have access to information about the location of relatives that may be helpful to the Family Finding team. We may be able to help foster relationships between these kids and their adult relatives. If a child is adopted into our home, we are the ones responsible for maintaining connections and need to know that we aren’t perceived as the bad guys or the worst case scenario for our children. After I told him a specific situation about one of our kids and the lengths we had gone to facilitate a relationship, that’s when Gregg said the words that have stuck with me:
“That’s great. But I don’t think you know how rare you are.”
The conversation continued, but when we got in the car that was the phrase Brian and I needed to discuss further. Are we rare? We don’t want to believe that. Gregg has spent years involved in “the system” and has seen much more than I have and from his perspective our attitude about biological families is unusual. I want to believe that isn’t the case, but I’ve had to accept the reality that I have surrounded myself with people who feel the way I do about foster care and biological families. When I run into someone who bad mouths the biological family I feel kind of like you would if a relative told a racist joke. It feels incredibly uncomfortable and I get frustrated that this person has some connection to me and what I love and has the potential to damage my reputation. So I distance myself from those people and I don’t feel “rare” because those around me believe the same way I do.
It was good for me to hear this sentiment from Gregg. It has helped me see my purpose as not just being about caring well for the children and families we are involved with, but also as a mission to recruit quality families who truly get what we’re doing, and as a diplomatic mission to those in “the system” who are used to dealing with foster families who are adversarial towards the biological family. I want that conversation to have been the beginning of Gregg seeing changes that were coming. A different kind of relationship between foster parent and biological parent. While maybe we are “rare” today, I think we are becoming much more common and my hope is that we will become the norm. As much as I can spread the message of how that partnership instead of adversarial attitude benefits children, I want to be telling our story. I want Gregg’s desire for children to have meaningful connections to their biological family to become the passion of every foster family as much as it is possible and safe.
I know this is just a starting point for me personally. I have much self-analysis to do about how we foster these connections with our own kids and how I am taking this message to other foster families. This isn’t the last time this conversation will come up. While Gregg isn’t here to continue the dialogue I so wanted to have with him and won’t be here to see the results, I’m going to pursue with new passion what he was so passionate about.