I was struck (figuratively, not literally) by Jon Carroll's column in the San Francisco Chronicle last week. He was talking about grievances and grudges and any number of other things that separate us one from another. And how death trumps them all. People up and die and, after that, there is no possibility for any sort of reconciliation. Or of ever even speaking again.

This is germane to our concerns in a number of important ways.  I'm thinking now of some of the people I've met in my work here who are at total impasse with one another and have either severed all ties or are suing each other. And although we are not in the practice of forcing people to hold hands and sing Kum-ba-yah, we have found that it works in everyone's interests to aim for reconciliation.

As I've said before, this can take any number of forms. It doesn't necessarily mean that you become best friends with the ex-spouse who dumped you for someone else. Nor does it mean that you stop struggling and just go along with your siblings' stupid ideas for how to run the family business.

One thing I respect about death is the way it can put life into perspective. If you ask a thousand people which they regret more: reconciling with a family member or not reconciling, most people will regret not reconciling. Even if "reconciliation" only means that we both say that we agree that our estrangement has been a sad thing.

Sometimes our estrangements have nothing to do with anything we did. Or anything the other party did. Sometimes something happens and the whole thing gets away from us. We find out that the aunt we thought didn't care about us was actually out there thinking we didn't care about her. Or that she hasn't contacted us because no one ever told her we were born. When it comes to kids who have grown up in the foster care system and are about to turn 18, you can bet there have been a lot of breakdowns along the road. A lot of breaches of relationship and a lot of estrangements. It's a safe bet that none of it was their fault.

There's a program I want to replicate here called "California Permanency for Youth Project".   When a child in the foster system turns 18, that system sort of spits them out onto the street without a real home or a real family and, often, without the skills needed to build a good life.   What these guys do (in part) is they go way way out of their way to find people who are related to a kid, or people that the kid once felt connected to, bring them all together and facilitate a process in which connections are made, renewed and will hopefully result in some meaningful relationships that are lifelong.  The way they do this is very cool and I'd like to accord them the sincerest form of flattery by copying what they do. In our line of work, they call these kids "transitional age youth" and there's a growing awareness of their need for "permanency".

Here's something I learned from Robin Allen at California CASA: these terms aren't worth squat to the kids themselves.  Robin quoted one kid as telling a task force (and I paraphrase), "'Permanancy' is for you guys, we don't care about 'permanency'. All we want is a person we can go to."

Translates to: relationship. Everybody is related to somebody. Sometimes CYCP finds long lost relatives — aunts, cousins, etc. — who come in and start being that "person to go to".   Sometimes it's someone totally else: the kindergarten teacher or the ex-girlfriend's mother.  The whole process is driven by the kid who isn't really a "kid" anymore.  The kid calls the shots at every step of the way.  Our job is facilitate the reconnection. 

The homecoming.

The reconciliation.