The Boy Who Cried: Jeff's Story

 For Jeffrey Allen Chase (1971–2025)
May your song finally be heard.

It was the morning of April 4 when Josh hung up the phone and stared into a place past me, past the room, past the world. “I think Jeff’s dead,” he said. The words landed like shrapnel that didn’t explode right away—just embedded themselves under the skin and waited. The room felt smaller. The air thinned. We sat there in his room, two grown men suddenly young again, waiting for an answer we didn’t want, praying that uncertainty might somehow be mercy. But the morning kept opening, and with it, the ache. Months later, Josh is still grieving his little brother. Some grief is a river; some is a tide. This one is an ocean that doesn’t recede.

I am writing this because silence is a kind of unmarked grave. I am writing this because Jeff lived, and because love deserves a record.

Jeffrey Allen Chase was born on February 28, 1971, in New York. He came into this world with a cry that seemed to know more than a baby should. He was passed through four different homes before being adopted by Joel and Roberta through Louise Wise Services. Four months old when he arrived—new name, new house, new mother. He cried almost constantly. His parents tried everything: rocking, singing, doctors, car rides. But nothing stopped the crying. He was a baby who knew absence. He was searching the air for the voice he had known before language, the heartbeat that had been his first home.

From the moment he arrived, Jeff carried a hunger no bottle could fill. The nurses said he cried for hours; Roberta said it was like he was searching for something just outside the edge of sound. Even as a grown man, he carried that cry inside him—not as noise, but as music. Every melody he ever played was a reaching, a calling, a sound shaped like where are you? The world mistook it for talent. I think it was homesickness—the kind no address can fix.

Adoption, for some, is rescue. For others, it is an old wound that heals over and over without ever fully closing. Jeff carried that wound. It didn’t make him weak; it made him tender in places the world is not careful with.

He grew into a handsome boy, shy in a way that looked like distance but was really defense. He never had a girlfriend, though girls noticed him. He didn’t chase romance; he chased sound. Music was his first language—maybe the first time the world made sense to him. He could pick up any instrument and coax a melody from it like he’d known it in a previous life. Guitar, piano, anything with strings, anything that could be struck or blown—he found his way to the note the way some people find their way home in the dark.

In the late 1980s, the family split apart. Divorce is a word; what it does to a house is something else. Joel was a gay man living in a time and place that punished honesty. The fear of being found out twisted him, and that shame curdled into anger. His rage became a weather system in the house—blows for Josh, cruelty for both boys, hostility for Roberta. Abuse is not a footnote; it is a climate in which children either wither or become cacti. Jeff and Josh grew thorns in self-defense. That is not a failing; that is survival.

The boys lived with Roberta after the divorce. She became their country of safety. She loved without condition. She was gentle where Joel was cruel, steady where he fractured, luminous where he went dark.

Jeff drifted through jobs, working enough to get by but never finding a place that fit the shape of him. Sometimes he taught music lessons, and in those moments, something like light poured through him. Not everyone gets a career; some people get moments that matter. He had those.

In 1997, he joined the 12 Tribes. People make jokes about cults until they meet someone who, for the first time in their lives, finally feels held. Jeff felt at home there—structure, rhythm, community. But they wouldn’t let him play music. Imagine telling a bird it can live here as long as it does not fly. He tried to stay, but music is the marrow of some people; you can’t forbid blood and expect the body to thrive. Eventually, he left.

He lived with his mother, Roberta, and he loved her with a devotion that might look simple from the outside but was vast if you knew the map of their lives. The baby who cried for a mother became the man who stayed with his mom. There is a holiness in that that doesn’t need a temple.

Then came 2024, a year that felt cursed by a string of falling dominoes. Roberta had a knee replacement at eighty-one. A few weeks later, the replacement shattered her femur. Surgeries followed—the kind that remake the body in order to save it—followed by a year in a care facility. In that same brutal spring, a neighbor’s home caught fire. Flames jumped and pulled Roberta’s house into the catastrophe, and a woman—the neighbor—lost her life. Jeff wasn’t home when it happened. I am grateful for that single, stubborn mercy. But the aftermath was relentless: months in a hotel, and then months of rebuild. Picking flooring and paint colors and countertops isn’t trivial when the house is a body you’re trying to resurrect. Jeff chose carefully. He rebuilt what he could.

In March 2025, Roberta finally came home. Imagine the relief in that. The relief that comes not as a single exhale, but as a hundred small breaths teaching the lungs to trust air again. Two weeks later, in the dark quiet of a night, Jeff woke her and told her to get dressed. He drove her to the hospital and told them to run every test. He said he would be back at 7 a.m. to pick her up. He did not come. What happened next belongs to the hush of grief, and to the friends who shielded Roberta’s eyes from a scene no mother should ever hold.

Roberta never gave up on Jeff. From the day she carried him home as a crying infant to the last morning she saw him, she loved him without conditions. When her body failed her after the surgeries, she refused to hire strangers to care for her. “Jeff will help me,” she said. And he did. He bathed her, dressed her, lifted her when she couldn’t stand. It was love turned into labor, devotion that asked more of him than anyone could have known. But he was not a caregiver and he complained often, and was cruel at times to Roberta we later learned, something she did not deserve. The weight of it pressed on him like a silence that grew heavier each day. Roberta still blames herself for that, though she shouldn’t. She gave him everything she had, and he gave everything he had back to her. Two people bound by a love that was too deep, too human, and finally, too heavy.

There, in the home Jeff helped to rebuild, he strung a rope at the top of the stairs, climbed over the railing and jumped. The weight he carried became too heavy, and it pulled him from us. And I will say this, for anyone who needs to hear it: the shape of a person’s leaving is not the sum of their life. Jeff lived for fifty-four years and a month. He loved his mother. He loved his brother. He loved music. He survived more than most people know. He tried, and he tried again. And on April 4, 2025, the pain asked too much.

Their mom called Josh that morning before they found Jeff. She was worried he had killed himself. When Josh hung up from her—he said, “I think Jeff’s dead”—he carried not only the shock of a brother’s loss, but the long, invisible history of two boys raised in the crosswinds of secrets and silence. Adoption has its saints, but it also has its institutions, and institutions can do harm. Louise Wise Services placed Jeff after he had already been moved through four homes. That is not just a fact; it is a fracture line in a human life. When babies cry inconsolably, we pathologize the symptom and ignore the cause. We forget that infants grieve. We forget that grief at four months is still grief.

I have learned a great deal through Josh’s search for his own origins—the sealed records, the bureaucratic cruelty of being told to wait until the year 2065 to see what should have been his from the start: the pages that say who he came from. I think of Jeff in that context, too. Adopted at four months. Birth parents unknown. The file that governed his earliest days probably fit into a manila folder. But what was inside him—the questions, the ache, the sharpened sensitivity—could not be contained there. When we, as a society, talk about adoption, we’re too quick to skip to the happy ending. Sometimes there is one. Sometimes the ending is complicated. Often the middle is a battlefield waged in silence.

There is another truth here: Jeff’s life cannot be told without honoring Roberta. She loved him. She provided. She took him in her arms when he was a crying infant and never really put him down. When her body broke in her eighties, he stayed. He helped rebuild the home after the fire. He tried to make the world okay again so that she could come back through the door and feel the embrace of “we made it.” If you look only at Jeff’s last day, you miss the decades of devotion that came before it.

I try to imagine Jeff’s inner life the way I listen to music: the motifs that return, the variations, the rests. There was the boy who cried, the teen who learned to keep the world at a small distance, the young man who sought community in 12 Tribes and had to walk away because they amputated the part of him that made life bearable—his music. There was the adult son who chose proximity to his mother as a way of saying, I am here, I am here, the words she once whispered into his sleeping ear returning to her like a tide.

I keep thinking about the hotel rooms during the rebuild. How he must have carried the whole house in his head, every hinge and handle and color. It is easy to underestimate how much energy it takes to hold a home together with your mind because you have no walls to lean on. When Roberta finally returned in March 2025, he had completed a marathon no one clapped for. The finish line looked like a doorknob turning for the first time, a light switch that worked, a stove that warmed a pan. He gave her back a place to live. That is a gift beyond price.

And yet, pain has a way of collecting interest. It compounds silently. It accrues behind the ribs. We tell people to be strong without asking what they are already lifting.

I write this not to carve Jeff’s life into a cautionary tale, but to offer it as an altar of witnesses. He was more than what hurt him. He was more than how he left. He was a son who stayed. He was a brother who is missed every day by Josh, who still wakes to tidal grief months later, because love does not know what to do with emptiness. He was a musician who could coax a hymn out of a stranger’s instrument. He was a person who tried to rebuild a house and, in doing so, showed us how love looks when it puts on work boots.

If you loved Jeff, I ask you to remember him as he was in his best measures: head bent over strings, fingers finding their way; quiet in a crowded room, listening as if he could hear something good approaching; patient with children; tender with his mother; stubborn about small beauties like tone and texture and the way light falls on finished floors.

If you didn’t know Jeff, I ask you to hold space for someone like him in your own life—the one who seems to orbit the edges, who may be carrying an origin story heavy enough to warp gravity. Ask, gently, what their first memories are. Ask whether the first goodbye ever healed. Believe them when they tell you it didn’t.

I will speak plainly.

This is a call for justice for the crying children of Louise Wise Services and for every adoptee sealed away behind a bureaucratic door. Unseal the files. Unseal them for the living, not the archives. Unseal them because identity is not a privilege doled out by a state, but a birthright. Unseal them because grief thrives in silence, and we have had enough funerals. I can't even count how many people adopted through Louise Wise Services have killed themselves, but I do know it's more than just Jeff.

This is a call for awareness about adoptee mental health and trauma. Stop gaslighting the crying baby by calling him colicky and calling it a day. Name the separation. Provide support for the thing that actually happened. Fund mental health care specific to adoptees and families navigating reunion and non-reunion alike. Train clinicians in the language of loss that starts before language. Understand that some people live in homes that are rebuilt over and over, and each time the paint dries, they still remember the smell of smoke.

This is a call to acknowledge that institutions can do harm, even when they believe they are doing good. Accountability is not an indictment of every act of kindness that occurred within those walls; it is simply the truth that some walls were built with the wrong blueprints, and the cost was paid by children who grew up into adults who either made it anyway or did not, and both outcomes are testimonies that deserve our witness.

This is a call to families: love is not a cure for unknowing, but it is a light. Hold the ones who are crying, whether they’re four months old or fifty-four years and one month. Notice the thorns and ask what desert they grew in. Be brave enough to say the hard parts out loud: the abuse that happened, the secrets that hurt everyone, the identities that cost people their gentleness.

Finally, this is a call to remember Jeff in the tense that does him the most justice: not just past, but present. He is present in Josh’s grief—the fierce, tender kind that proves love is alive. He is present in Roberta’s house—in the choices he made with his whole heart, in the quiet places he restored. He is present wherever music becomes the language for what we cannot say.

He was a boy who cried because he knew a mother was missing. He became a man who stayed with his mom so she would not be alone. He was the sound in a room that made it feel like home. And even though the morning of April 4 made the world smaller and colder, even though the ocean of grief keeps roiling, I believe this: the song of him is still playing somewhere just beyond the wall, and if we are quiet, if we are kind, if we demand justice and unseal the doors that should never have been closed, we will hear it again.

Rest now, Jeff. We will carry your melody the rest of the way.