For 45 years, Carol King-Eckersley kept a promise not to look for the baby boy she had given up for adoption when she was just a teenager, but that changed when her husband died last year and she decided to track down her son.
She knew his name and birth date, and she easily found a reference to him on the Internet — her excitement soon turning to horror as she realized she was on a page for victims of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“So it became a kind of double tragedy,” King-Eckersley, 65, told a BBC documentary. “I found him and lost him on the same day.”
The Oregon widow was the 19-year-old daughter of a school principal when she became pregnant and felt pressured to give up her baby.
The only time she ever saw the infant who would become Kenneth Bissett was the day he was in the car of the attorney who arranged the adoption, as she left a New York City hospital.
“There was this little bundle wrapped up in the front seat and all I could think, all the way from Queens in New York to mid-Manhattan, was ‘please don’t cry’,” she told the BBC.
“I knew that if he cried I would not be able to do it. I never held him but now I get to grieve for him.”
