MERCER COUNTY — There he goes now, here he starts.
This paraphrase of John Barlow’s lyrics for Bob Weir’s “Cassidy” is a fitting description of how the connection between Michael W. Murphy and Jordan Daniel Fors began.
Murphy died April 16, 2004, and his fiancee Diane Daffin set up a foundation to do good work in his name.
This year, one of the recipients of a grant from that foundation is Christine Fors. The Grove City woman is adopting a boy, whom she has named Jordan, from China and hopes to have him home by his 3rd birthday on April 17.
The realization that Jordan was born the day after Murphy died struck both Ms. Fors and Ms. Daffin.
“Serendipity,” Ms. Fors called it.
“I just think that things happen for a reason,” she said. “The people you meet come into your life at the time they’re supposed to.”
Ms. Daffin said it was amazing. Jordan also shares a birthday with her late father, Pete Daffin.
And she said one of the last things she and Murphy talked about was the new buds on a plant and how they represented new life.
“Maybe (Jordan)’s that new life,” said Ms. Daffin, adding that she knows who his guardian angel will be.
Ms. Daffin was on vacation when she got the call that Murphy had passed away, she said. He had an unknown heart condition and suffered an allergic reaction to some medication.
Murphy graduated from Sharon High School in 1974 and worked with Diane at Daffin’s Candies.
Though his death was a tragedy, Ms. Daffin said she wanted to do something positive in his memory.
Each year in August the foundation holds the Shamrock Scramble golf outing to raise funds; this year the foundation gave $4,000 in grants to local causes.
Ms. Fors was given $1,000 to put toward the cost of adopting Jordan, which is about $12,000.
A single mother by choice, Ms. Fors has two daughters she adopted from China. Jocelyn, 6, and Jaedyn, 3, are excited about their new little brother, Ms. Fors said.
She found Jordan through the Phillip Hayden Foundation, a Christian facility outside Beijing that takes care of children with special needs in need of families.
A friend was adopting a child from there and Ms. Fors said she got on its Web site because she was curious about where he was going to come from.
“I just fell in love with this little guy named Daniel,” she said. She considered adopting him in summer 2005, but the time wasn’t right.
When Ms. Fors decided to look into adoption again, she was surprised to find out that the boy she’d wanted before was still available.
“It’s like it was meant to be,” she said, noting that the agency had just gotten his file back the day she called. “He’s supposed to be my little boy.”
Ms. Fors teaches Spanish and French at Grove City High School and her girls go to Chinese school one day a month.
She wants her children to keep up with their heritage and language, Ms. Fors said, and there’s a support group of people from the area who’ve adopted children from China.
Ms. Fors lives with her mother Christina and has strong family support, which she will likely need when there are two 3-year-olds in the house.
“They all think I’m crazy at this point,” Ms. Fors said, laughing.
Other grant recipients included Mercer County Head Start, the Parents for Special Needs Children Foundation and the Paige Viscuso Fund of the Caring Community Fund which assists in paying for her muscular dystrophy treatments.
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