 So a little bit about me. I am a finance guy by background. I did broadcast immediate deals for banks, for investment banks. I was a chief financial officer of two radio groups. A year after Casey's suicide, I was laid off in the financial meltdown. I worked at Wells Fargo and my whole department got axed and, frankly, as I was just telling Joan here, I just didn't care, didn't care about anything. So we were living in Tiberon at the time, sold our house, moved to Fairfax to downsize. And since then, I've been blogging, I've been writing, I've been doing suicide advocacy work, particularly on the Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier, working with kids in the Marin County school districts, and, frankly, just still trying to figure out my life. My wife Erika was involved in the jewelry business when we were married in 1988, but became a full-time mom after we brought Casey into our lives. And we really, really, really wanted a family, but Plan A just didn't work out for us. We tried to get pregnant, we tried infertility, or we tried in vitro fertilization, all of the reproductive technologies available in the early 90s, and it just didn't happen. And I know some people take years trying to conceive, but we just couldn't put up with the years of an emotional roller coaster and not to mention the cost. So we wanted a family. We wanted to be parents and turn to adoption. And at the time, we were living in Connecticut. We weren't living here. So we didn't know anything. I mean, we assumed at the time that there were millions of babies out there, but we're stunned to find how difficult it was and how many years it could take. And at one point, we thought we may not have any children at all ever. And that was probably the second lowest period of our lives. We turned to a foreign adoption in just by sheer luck. A series of connections led us to an adoption attorney in Warsaw, Poland. Now Polish adoptions, especially infants, are pretty rare, but Erika was a Polish descent. She spoke the confounding language and still had family there. And so to make a long story short, we went from having no kids and maybe no prospects of ever being parents to being the proud parents of our beautiful KC about six to seven months later. So this would have been August of 1991. So before going to Poland that summer, we read every book we could find about adoption. There was no internet, but they all talked about bonding and creating her adoption story as little as we knew and just loving her enough. There was nothing about birth trauma separation or the lifelong effects of institutionalization in an orphanage or even that could also be foster care. So KC was everything. She was everything to us, but she wasn't perfect. KC was a premium. Her twin died at birth and she lived in an orphanage for about a year. She was 14 months old when we received her, but at the developmental stage of a six-month-old. We had very little medical history and figured best case she might be mildly handicapped. She might have a learning disability. She could even have cerebral palsy. At 14 months old, she couldn't sit, she couldn't crawl, she couldn't stand, she couldn't walk, she couldn't feed herself, she just couldn't do anything. She was just weak, listless, and when we received her, she was also sick. But within days with us together, she became an entirely different child. She sat up, she played with her toys, she was more verbal, more engaging, and demanding. And by the time, and she was that way for the rest of her life, and by the time Erica brought her home five weeks later, KC was walking the furniture, and that was truly astonishing. So within five weeks going from not being able to do much of anything to walk in the furniture was just amazing. So by the time she was two, she was just like any other toddler, a bit overly sensitive and high strung, prone to tantrums, but she was two. And even though we were always honest with her about her adoption from day one, we never hid that from her, of course, but honestly, we barely gave the orphanage another thought. And then when we did bring up her adoption with her, she never wanted to talk about it ever. Just didn't want to go there. So we moved to the Bay Area when KC was five and things continued to be fairly normal. She had friends, she did well in school, all of her teachers loved her. She never got in trouble, but she was still prone to meltdowns in tantrums and was extremely stubborn. Into middle school, things didn't really change much. So outwardly, she was perfectly normal, but still had these disturbing behaviors that we thought she would have grown out of. And Erica and I asked ourselves, what are we doing wrong? Why doesn't she behave? Why doesn't she mind like the other kids? It had to be us. So we took her to therapist, after therapist, after therapist. They all knew about her past and her behaviors. But all they had to say was set boundaries, be tougher with her. Only one therapist even hinted at a connection between her behavior and her infancy. Something called attachment disorder. But tragically, she never followed the throat. That was the last we ever even talked about attachment of any sort. She had to hold the last therapist had an entirely different agenda and treated KC like every other kid. So in high school, we added screaming hormones to the mix. She was a beautiful, popular teenager. Redwood High School, Robin Williams, Alma Mater, class of 69, with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old. Erica and I just stumbled from one parenting technique to another. Do we ground her for life? Do we send her away? Or do we just back off? In December of 2007, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief when KC was accepted at Bennington College in Vermont, a very prestigious school. And we were just over the moon. And KC, I know, was anxious for independence. We just figured it'll be just a few more months until she's out of high school, off to college, and then she'll be happy and a whole new chapter of her life. But a month later, we had a big fight one weekend. Erica, KC and I, and you know, parents fight with their kids, right? At one point, she locked herself in my office, my home office, crying and screaming at me and said, I'm going to go live on the streets and you'll never see me again. And I thought, yeah, right, drama queen. So I said, good, so good parenting dad. Later that night, I passed her in the living room. She was sitting on the sofa with her laptop watching TV, and we just glared at each other. And it's the last time I saw her. I woke the next morning to a note on her desk. Her room was neat as a pin, and there was a note on her desk that said, the car is parked at the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm sorry. Turns out, at about dawn, she'd taken the keys to our car, drove to the bridge and jumped. And the life we once knew, all our dreams for the future, everything we lived and worked for was gone. Poof. It was as if Casey wanted to disappear and just hit the delete button on her life. And she did. She was never found. I wanted to go to sleep that day and never wake up. I did not want to outlive my Casey for one minute. We made our story public and joined the fight for a suicide barrier on the bridge. But when you tell people that your child jumped from the bridge, it's as if you told them that Santa Claus and Elmo ganged up to murder your child. And people would say, don't blame the bridge. Blame the victim and her idiot parents for bad parenting. And I've heard that over and over again. So there's just simply no empathy. I mean, I'm sorry to say that there is simply no empathy among the public for suicide victims. I mean, the reactions range from indifference to downright cruelty. People drifted away from us as if we were toxic. And I guess we were. I guess we were in their eyes. Suicide is just a different kind of death than, say, you know, something unintentional, like cancer. So I was alone drowning in grief and soul crushing survivors guilt, second guessing every single decision I ever made. Why did I have to say good? Why didn't I have? Why didn't I go back to her that night and tell her I'm sorry, honey? People around me lectured and scolded me with meaningless platitudes. You just have to get over it and move on. Well, you don't get over something like this. It just becomes a new normal that you learn to live with. Then I started writing and with the help of a Derek Lair, who we talked about earlier. She's an excellent writing teacher, former columnist. She's published a bunch of books. I had a book and it took about three years. So the book is about my search for answers to Casey Suicide. Why did she do it? What did everybody miss? What could we have done differently to keep her alive? And my research started with a simple Wikipedia search of that the phrase that the last therapist told us about, attachment disorder, the one that she never followed up on. So in Wikipedia, it's also known as RAID, reactive attachment disorder. That's the formal diagnosis. And it was described in Wikipedia as a disorder of mood, behavior, and socialization caused by a failure to form normal attachments to a primary caregiver early in life. And then it went on to describe the symptoms that are common to children who have been orphaned, neglected, or abused. A simple Wikipedia search explained everything about Casey, the tantrums, the mood swings, the defiance, the self-loathing, everything that we told the professionals. And it just seemed so obvious. It just seemed so obvious and yet everybody missed it. It was right under my nose for God's sake. So I read everything I could find on adoption and attachment disorders in children. I called the experts for interviews. Many calls and emails went on return. Who was I? But there was a short list of people to whom I'm still incredibly grateful. And I share all this with a reader. So why did Casey jump? She lived a pretty privileged life. By most standards, she lived in Marin. She was surrounded by an adoring family who showered her with hugs, kisses, and I love yous even when she pushed us away. She had a great group of friends since kindergarten that she loved more than anything and she got into Bennington, her dream. The note she left on her desk that morning wasn't the real suicide note, I think. It was simply instructions for where to find the car and an apology for putting us out. I'm sorry. So I spent years torturing myself over what she meant. Why did she say I'm sorry? The real note, I think, was in a text she sent about 36 hours before she jumped. It said, in effect, I'm just tired of life and everything in it. So how could that be when everything was going so well? I learned it in those 36 hours before she jumped. The case he had actually gone to the bridge late the previous Sunday night. So she jumped on a Tuesday morning, but she went late Sunday night, snuck out of the house of the car after Eric and I were in bed. So apparently Sunday was supposed to be the day, not Tuesday, and just one thing stopped her. The gate to the pedestrian walkway was locked for the night. So she turned around and went home. And I also learned that Casey and her friend Maurice had chatted online at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning. And it was a normal conversation. You know, look, kids are up in the middle of the night. They're night owls. That's not unusual. Casey asked Maurice in this chat if she believed in reincarnation. Now kids talk about all sorts of things in the middle of the night. There was no reason for Maurice to think there was anything unusual about that. So Casey went on to talk about how fortunate they were to be the top 1% white, upper middle class living in Tiberon. I was so unlike her because Casey would complain incessantly about Tiberon materialism. She then declared that if she were reincarnated, it would probably be something, quote in her words, really shitty. Six hours later, Casey was gone. Casey's friend Julie and share with me after she died that he didn't think she had any intention of going to Bennington. She just wanted to prove that she mattered. She could get into an elite school. And I learned as I learned later in my search, Julian's observations were incredibly right on target. It would be disingenuous of me for it would be disingenuous for me to say the case he had attachment disorder or rad. So case closed. That explains everything. I don't particularly like the word rad because it does tend to get abused by parents who are frustrated by their kids who've already been objectified. So I just don't want to see them objectified anymore. There is just so much that we don't know. But somewhere in Casey's infancy was your downfall. What I've learned is that the act of separating a child from the mother is traumatic. How could it not be? I talked to other adoptive parents who insist while my child was adopted from the delivery room. So it's all good. Well, adoption experts pointed out to me that in one Nancy very who's a world renowned adoption therapist said, Think about this. You have to wait like four to six weeks to adopt a kitten or a puppy from the ASPCA. But they hand over a child in the delivery room. And I thought, wow, that's really mind blowing. So for Casey, this trauma was compounded by that premature delivery, the stillborn twin sister, the incubator and the orphanage. And no one ever suggested everybody that we took her to no one ever suggested she have a psychological evaluation. So there may have been other undiagnosed issues. I've heard from many adoptees who feel like they don't fit. They feel like trash. They feel shame and have this terrible self-loathing. And it makes perfect sense now. We stumbled across online message board posts that Casey had made going back to middle school that revealed the same self-image. She wrote, my body is sort of a benign tumor. I believe that is why I'm so terrified of relationships. I never let anyone get too close. I want someone to fix me, to hold me, to tell me they love me with all my imperfections. I'm hopelessly flawed. I've been failing for five years now. What should I put on my college application? Extremely adept at killing myself slowly? Turns out just about everything I thought I knew about adoption was wrong. It's extraordinarily complex and fraught with risk. But don't get me wrong, a lot of these kids turn out just fine. They turn out great. But far too many like Casey need help and can't find it. Even when their parents know about attachment and know that they need to find a specialist. So, you know, even now when there's so much more known about adoption and attachment. So lessons learned. Lesson number one. We should have asked more questions of Casey's caregivers in Poland. But we were too afraid. We didn't want to blow the deal. We should have asked for, we should have asked to see the room she slept in. But we didn't. We were too afraid. We should have kept her birth name. Ioana. We made her birth name her middle name. But we should have kept it as your birth name. That's her identity. Who even gave her the name Ioana? We should have taken something from the orphanage. These kids I was told have a need to cling. For all I know we left something important behind. A pillow, a blanket, a t-shirt, a stuffed animal. Something, something even with a scent that she could take with her. But we didn't. We needed to be her prosthesis to help herself soothe. Because these kids have trouble regulating and self soothing. And it's up to the parents to be that prosthesis. You don't just, you know, when your child is acting up, you don't say, go to your room until you can come out and act like a human being. You got to stick with them. And that's hard. Sometimes loving her enough may not be enough. And then lastly, despite Casey's denial of interest in her first mother, she, I learned from older adoptees that she might probably come around and be desperate for information even if it's painful. They have to know. I learned that you need a specialized adoption and attachment therapist who knows what questions to ask and how to ask them. As one therapist told me, you invest a lot into these kids and have to accept that it may not be your Hallmark family experience. I learned that kids like Casey could be surrounded by love and privilege among family and friends, but they can't let it in. I learned that adopted children is a group at a higher risk than other kids for learning disabilities, substance abuse, behavioral disorders, unplanned pregnancies, juvenile detention, and suicide. I learned that our adoption system fails these kids and the sad irony is that everyone in the system wants what's best for them. Adoptive parents need to put them first, meaning their kids first, and get them the right kind of help. If they aren't properly diagnosed, they can't be properly treated. So remember, no matter how privileged your life is, they didn't choose this life. No matter how privileged it is, some adoptees talk to me about not bonding with their parents. We never felt that way about Casey at all, but maybe we were deluding ourselves. There was never a moment of, gee, what if we got pregnant? What? And the only answer to that is that we'd never have our Casey. That was just inconceivable. Despite the sole crushing grief and the guilt over losing her, Erica and I feel like the luckiest people in the world do have been her parents for 16 over 17 years. Would she have felt the same way about us? I don't know. People ask me what she was like. Well, she was a fighter, a master debater, and an arguer from day one, Taurus the Bull, who grew into a genuinely compassionate, unfailingly loyal, ruthlessly honest young woman. Her imperfections and flaws made her human and made so many of us love her that much more. We were so proud of our many accomplishments and grieve the good the world has lost without Casey Joanna Brooks. So I finished the book in 2013 and I shot for an agent, shot for a publisher. Everybody said it was too sad. No one's going to read it. So I self-published and then a funny thing happened. People started to read it and they loved it. It won two literary awards and then last year it got picked up by Scribner and then it was re-released this past February and that like never happens, never happens in the book business to a rookie like me. And there are a lot of good adoption books out there. Scott Simon wrote a book, Janice Newman wrote a book, they're good books about their foreign adoptions, but they end with wheels up from Beijing and Moscow which implies that everything was okay after that and maybe it was, I don't know. But you just never get to find out what happens next when things really start to get interesting. You know, just too many adoptions aren't that great despite the best of intentions from a whole system from caregiver to adoptive parent. So the girl behind the door is, it's about a tough subject. There's a lot of shame, a lot of stigma around suicide. There's stigma around adoption. But when people hear the story and read the book they're really deeply touched on a great many levels whether it's international adoption, attachment, parenting, troubled and difficult kids, the Golden Gate Bridge and suicide. So thank you folks for coming and I will read a couple of excerpts from the book and then open it up for any questions. So the first thing I'm going to read is a short chapter, it's chapter two and it's how I imagined Casey's birth from what little information we were given from the adoption attorney. Katerina was 36, unmarried and pregnant. She already had two children. They lived in her parents' house 160 miles north of Warsaw in the Nigerian Lake District, a resort area known as the summer capital of Poland. On the night of May 3rd, 1990, Katerina went into labor six weeks early. Her father bundled her into the family car for the short trip to the nearest public hospital in Gieżicko. Bear with me here. I think it actually, which my wife who speaks excellent Polish tells me means it's really a very sexy word, or sexy title, the independent public health care facility. It sounds much better in Polish. Her mother stayed behind with the children. Soon after they arrived in the emergency room, Katerina gave birth to a girl. Small and weak, weighing only three pounds, struggling to breathe through lungs that hadn't yet fully developed. The triage nurse rushed the baby to an incubator. Within seconds, the doctor realized that there was another baby, a twin. She was dead. The baby in the incubator was named Joanna. She remained in the hospital for two months, protected from human touch, until she could breathe on her own. Katerina's parents had persuaded her to give the baby up for adoption. She signed away parental rights to her surviving daughter. When Joanna was well enough to breathe on her own, she was sent to the Domeczka, the state home for children in the nearby town of Maragovo. This would be your home for the next year. So I'm going to skip ahead to chapter 12. I'll read a couple of pages of this. Casey is 15 at this time, and she and I are on a road trip to go skiing up in Tahoe. Casey and I passed through Sacramento on I-80, heading north toward Lake Tahoe. It was February 2006, President's Day weekend. And we'd planned to go skiing for a few days in Squaw Valley over her winter break. Vacations together had become increasingly rare. As Casey, a soon-to-be 16-year-old, preferred the company of her friends. She hated being seen with us in public, sometimes going to extremes to avoid being spotted by her friends. She had slumped down in the car or insist we walked 10 pieces behind her at the mall, as if she were in the witness protection program. We took advantage of this trip to Tahoe to be together while we still had a chance. Unfortunately, just before leaving, Erica came down with a flu, and it looked as though the trip would be off. But to my amazement, Casey insisted that she still wanted to go alone with me. I was flattered, but also worried that we'd run out of things to talk about. Erica had no such problem and could always be counted on the awkward, dead air with conversation. On the road, I feel comfortable with long stretches of zen-like meditative silence. Casey sat in the passenger seat next to me, wearing one of her favorite outfits. A tomato-colored quilt pattern, hoody, her ripped jeans, and a rose-colored t-shirt with a label, F-C-U-K, from the French Connection UK store in New York. She loved the edgy wordplay of the work where she hoped to live one day. Her beat-up Congress All-Stars lay in the heap on the floor, my prerequisite for allowing her to use the dashboard as a foot rest while she listened to her iPod. Since our last major blow-up, Erica and I had done nothing to follow up on our threat of therapy over Casey's schoolwork. There had been no discussion of Erica's suspicion about Casey cutting and purging. Sometimes our fights with Casey were like boxing matches that were treated bloody to our corners after a particularly bruising round. It was easy to be lulled back into complacency on the good days and put off the uncomfortable responsibilities of parenting. Our failure to take action in our tendency to postpone threats of consequences hung over me like a dank cloak. In the heat of her profanity-laced rages, I sometimes forgot that there was so much good between us that normalists that we craved. When she was three, Casey danced around our living room in Simsbury, Connecticut, insisting that she'd marry me and we name our child Casey. At seven, when being together with Dad was a treat rather than a burden, Erica dolled her up in a little black dress, purple stockings, party shoes, and a dab of lipstick and mascara so that we could go to the father-daughter dance together. At 13, we went down an early morning walking marathon through Lower Manhattan, searching for a coveted pocketbook she'd found on the Internet. That same year, she blew my mind by giving me an expensive watch for Christmas with a little help from Mom. And I began to understand her attitude towards gift-giving. If you're going to give, give big. Otherwise, don't bother. And I'll never part with that watch. Hey, Dad. Casey unplugged her earbuds and shook her hair out. How long till we get there? Probably an hour or two, depending on traffic. She groaned, looked out the window. Man, this place is pretty cutty, Dad. She said referring to the procession of malls and subdivisions that line the freeway north of Sacramento. Yep, I loved her teen, her Marin teen vernacular. We continued north past Auburn, Colfax, Yuba Gap. By Kingvale, we saw snow on either side of the car. I took a risk. So, are there any boys at school you're interested in? She shot me a look of disgust. Her mouth ajar, as if she were about to vomit. Dad, I can't believe you asked me that. I have more important things in my life right now. It was hard for me to believe that boys weren't tripping over themselves for her, but I was biased. I had a pretty good idea of which boys she thought were cute, like Nathaniel, Dylan, her friend Emily's brother, David, even our minister's son, Steven. She spent a lot of time with her friends, Julian and Max, but they seemed platonic. In fact, all of her relationships with boys seemed platonic. Perhaps sensing my thoughts, Casey said, you know, I'm not gay, Dad. And if that's what you're thinking, that glass tatter, a bit surprised by your statement. And by the way, don't think I'm going to have kids and don't think I'm going to get married and have kids, because I'm not. I hate kids. I stifled a laugh. I just want you to be happy, sweetie. You know that. We were silent again, drifting back into our thoughts. I was pretty sure she hadn't been sexual with anyone, but that wasn't unusual. Most of her girlfriends hung out in the pack. We suspected that some of them were sexually active and some not. Casey seemed to put intimacy of any sort at arm's length. I didn't care whether she was straight or gay. I just didn't want her to leave her life alone and feared that her tendency to push people away could leave her stranded. At Donner's Summit, the snow was well over the roof of the car. It felt like we were driving through a freezing white corridor of 15-foot high snow walls. We stopped a truckie for a snack and a quick bathroom break and then made the last leg of the trip to Tahoe City. I whiffed on the boyfriend thing, but while I had her captive, I took another risk. Honey, have you ever thought of talking to your birth mother? I would sit with another look of revulsion. Dad, why would you even ask me something like that? She muttered while shaking her head. I don't know. I was just wondering if you'd ever want to talk about it. With you, she cranked up her iPod until I could hear the rap beats exploding from her earbuds. It was one of the few timid exploratory missions into her biological past. A reality check. Of course, my inquiry was met with her usual slapdown. I'm going to read one more passage. This is towards the end of the book. This gets to our lessons learned. I began to understand what it might have felt like to be Casey. She was always screaming her outrage from her crib at being left behind. Thrust into the arms of two strangers from a foreign country, we who couldn't comfort her no matter how well-intentioned they were. She despised them for their lack of understanding and for being so foolish as to love someone like her. So she put on a show of bravado, suited up her armor, and pretended that she needed no one, especially them. But at the same time, she might have looked at her behavior, something she just hinted at with Dr. Palmer and asked herself, what the hell is wrong with me? She had hid behind that suit of armor, lashing out at the only two people who were safe, her adoptive parents. I come to learn that parenting a child who had suffered so much trauma and infancy was completely counterintuitive. The time-tested methods of raising and disciplining a securely attached child that we'd learned from Dr. Spock, T. Barry Brazelden, and Dr. Phil. But they were woefully inadequate for a child like Casey. Sometimes you have to parent in a way that's good for your child, even if it doesn't feel good to you, Ray Kinney said. He was an adoption therapist I talked to. Dr. Keck, another attachment specialist. Dr. Keck recommended that infants shouldn't be left alone to cry it out. As I'd heard from others, the parents should stay with her if she's screaming, crying, and inconsolable. There was that disastrous trip to the Urba Buena skating rink when Casey was eight. We left her in her room to cry it out because she said that's what she wanted. If we'd known better, we would have overridden her. Erica could have rubbed her back, massaged her feet, cooing in a soft voice the way she did when Casey was younger. Chanting a Polish verse that Casey loved as an infant. It was about a little spider sneaking up on her, crawling up her tummy. Erica learned it from her mother, and my mother had a similar verse, but instead of a spider, it was a creeping mouse. I imagine Casey's face lighting up in anticipation of what was to come when Erica's fingers would pounce on her neck with the dreaded spider tickle, eliciting her delicious laugh. Dr. Kent wrote that the child should be fed on demand to establish a pattern that her needs will be met and help her develop a sense of trust that relief is there when she's distressed. Daycare was to be avoided, if possible, as it could further reinforce the pattern of abandonment by the primary caregiver. Thank God we got one thing right. We didn't put her in daycare. We continued to send Casey to therapists, to treat her as they did their other patients, repeatedly focusing on corrective behavior rather than getting to the core until Casey had had enough. Now I don't blame her. She was right. Their kind of therapy was a waste of time. Unfortunately, in our blindness, Erica and I were enraged. We saw this as just one more of her infuriating acts of defiance and our failure to control her. We didn't realize that she might have just given up on herself. Children like Casey have to be treated differently. Different therapies, different parenting, if they're to survive and thrive. The professionals to whom we dragged her over the years just weren't equipped to understand, deal with, or even recognize her unique life experience. They resorted to the only treatments they've been taught. After all, they'd worked for their other patients. Why not Casey? So that's all I'm going to read from the book. And we have some time left. So again, thank you. Thank you really for coming. I appreciate every single person who shows up to these events and gets involved. If there are any questions, any comments, if anybody wants to buy a book in the back, I turn it over to you.