“What does it mean to meet the child you once let go?” For Mary Grace Westman, that question became more than a private reckoning—it became art. In 2021, she stepped in front of the camera to play herself in *Mary Meets Grace*, a short film written and directed by her biological daughter, Faryl Amadeus, whom she had given up for adoption decades earlier. The project, which screened at several festivals, was a fictionalized retelling of their real-life reunion, exploring the tangled threads of family, grief, and the longing to belong.
Amadeus, adopted from Kentucky into a Brooklyn family, had been “shipped from Kentucky, like a box of whiskey,” as she once described it. She found her birth mother in 2005 and reunited with her biological father in 2012. “The emotional mystery of adoption could fuel countless stories,” she told *Nerd Daily*. In making the film, she said, “My birth mom was so generous with this project. She lent me photographs of herself, she flew during the pandemic to film. We have a very special connection. And it is different from being my mom, which I have. It is something special. ‘Birth mom’. Part friend/part self.”
That reunion also brought Amadeus into contact with her five half-siblings, including a three-year-old then known as Robert—later Robin—Westman. Years before the tragedy that would thrust the family into national headlines, their lives had briefly intersected in a moment of cautious connection.
On August 27, 2025, Robin Westman—now 23—opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during morning Mass, killing two children, Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, and injuring 18 others. Police say Westman had no clear motive but was “obsessed with the idea of killing children” and harbored a fascination with previous mass shootings. The weapons were legally purchased, and writings recovered from the scene revealed a “pure, indiscriminate hate,” according to U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson.
The violence struck at a place deeply woven into Mary Grace’s own history. She had worked as a secretary at Annunciation Catholic School until her retirement in 2021. Her son had graduated from the same school in 2017. In the aftermath, she rushed back from her second home in Naples, Florida, as law enforcement searched multiple properties linked to the shooter.
For those familiar with the emotional terrain of adoption, the juxtaposition is jarring: a mother who once collaborated with her relinquished daughter to tell a story of reconnection now facing the shattering reality of another child’s role in a devastating act. Research into adoption reunions shows they can stir complex emotions—relief, joy, grief, and sometimes unresolved tension. Creative projects, like *Mary Meets Grace*, can serve as a safe container for these feelings, much like art therapy helps adopted children and birth parents process identity and loss. In one study, arts-based workshops for mothers who had experienced non-consensual adoption provided a “powerful voice… without actually speaking to anyone” about their trauma, allowing them to reclaim agency through creative expression.
Amadeus’s own work has long centered on themes of “family, grief, isolation, and yearning to belong.” Her artistic lens mirrors findings from adoption-focused art therapy, where symbolic storytelling and tactile creation help bridge gaps between lived experience and emotional understanding. Such processes can make visible the invisible—turning intangible feelings into something that can be held, examined, and, sometimes, shared.
While Amadeus has not commented publicly on the shooting, her absence from the “twisted letter” Robin left behind is notable. That letter, addressed to several siblings, reportedly blamed Mary Grace for inspiring an “unquenchable thirst for murder.” Yet in the film they made together, mother and daughter chose to focus on a different narrative: one of meeting across time, acknowledging absence, and shaping meaning from it.
In the wake of the Minneapolis tragedy, the contrast between those two narratives—one of artistic reconnection, the other of irrevocable loss—underscores how family histories can hold both beauty and unbearable pain. And how, even in the most public of tragedies, there are quieter, deeply personal stories that shape the people at the center of them.
