Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro and this is a bonus episode of Family Secrets.
Speaker 1: In the last bonus episode, you heard from Jennifer Mendelssohn
Speaker 1: about what it means to explore d NA and genetic roots. Today,
Speaker 1: I am so excited to share with you a special
Speaker 1: excerpt from my audio book of Inheritance. Recording this audio
Speaker 1: book was an intense experience three days in a sound
Speaker 1: proof booth narrating the story of my life, a story
Speaker 1: I had never known until I stumbled upon it as
Speaker 1: a result of a DNA test. Get ready for the
Speaker 1: exact moment that I discover the truth of my own
Speaker 1: genetic identity, the truth my parents had never wanted me
Speaker 1: to know, the truth they took to the grave with them.
Speaker 1: This excerpt is Curtis See of Penguin Random House Audio
Speaker 1: from the audiobook of my memoir Inheritance. Michael came over
Speaker 1: to the bed and sat next to me. It had
Speaker 1: been thirty six hours since we had sat side by
Speaker 1: side on the chaise in my office, since I had
Speaker 1: discovered that my father hadn't been my father, Doctor Benjamin Walden.
Speaker 1: I entered his name my fingers cold and shaking. Benjamin
Speaker 1: Walden ben Walden, Doctor ben Walden. There was no part
Speaker 1: of me that believed this was happening, even as it
Speaker 1: unfolded with a sense of inevitability so profound that I
Speaker 1: will later come to think of it as a kind
Speaker 1: of fate. On the page for a medical website. Doctor
Speaker 1: ben Walden is a thoracic surgeon who retired from active
Speaker 1: practice in two thousand three. He is a well respected
Speaker 1: speaker on the subject of medical ethics. He is a
Speaker 1: graduate of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: In the months to come, indeed, I suspect for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life, I will hear stories. Friends will
Speaker 1: send me links to news items. Experts will share their experience.
Speaker 1: I'll be told of people who have searched for their
Speaker 1: sperm donors, their biological fathers, all their lives. When these
Speaker 1: searches have been unsuccessful, some have had their anonymous donors
Speaker 1: identification numbers tattooed on their bodies, a way of marking
Speaker 1: themselves with their only clue. I've seen photos of arms, ankles,
Speaker 1: shoulders inked with stark series of numbers, and with each
Speaker 1: story of a dead end a locked door. I am
Speaker 1: stunned anew A favorite poem Otherwise by Jane Kenyon, begins
Speaker 1: like this, I got out of bed on two strong legs.
Speaker 1: It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe,
Speaker 1: flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. The poet goes
Speaker 1: on to regard ways in which the bounty of her
Speaker 1: daily life contained within it the shadow of a darker possibility.
Speaker 1: My daughter was conceived in Philadelphia, my mother had said
Speaker 1: that long ago evening, not a pretty story. When pressed
Speaker 1: the word institute, her language was precise. The thing she
Speaker 1: never planned to say that slipped out on the second
Speaker 1: anniversary of my father's death, and only because I introduced
Speaker 1: her to my friend from Philadelphia was an enormous piece
Speaker 1: of luck. What if that friend had been from Detroit.
Speaker 1: What if I hadn't brought my mother to the graduate
Speaker 1: student reading that night. A seam ripped open in my
Speaker 1: mother that night that allowed me access to a vital clue,
Speaker 1: though I didn't know it at the time. A moment,
Speaker 1: a split second, and then it closed up again. If
Speaker 1: she hadn't said those exact words, but if everything else
Speaker 1: had remained the same when I got the results from
Speaker 1: ancestry nearly thirty years later, I would have discovered that
Speaker 1: my father wasn't my biological father, but known nothing more,
Speaker 1: I would have come to the conclusion that my mother
Speaker 1: must have had an affair. I would have supplied yet
Speaker 1: another false narrative to the story of my life. What
Speaker 1: if Adam Thomas hadn't shown up on my ancestry page?
Speaker 1: What then all would have been a yawning, cavernous emptiness,
Speaker 1: devoid of possibility, like the baby bird that fell from
Speaker 1: its nest. I might have wandered through the world, never
Speaker 1: knowing where I came from. I would have been left
Speaker 1: with a hole inside me in the shape of a father,
Speaker 1: or rather two fathers, the father who raised me, who
Speaker 1: died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous
Speaker 1: man I came from but would never be able to identify. Five.
Speaker 1: Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity
Speaker 1: of narratives. Michael kicked off his sneakers and sat in
Speaker 1: bed next to me. My laptop was balanced between us
Speaker 1: as we waited for a YouTube ad to finish. Doctor
Speaker 1: Benjamin Walden five syllables seven. If you included the prefix
Speaker 1: A nice molifluous name. He had a website. It took
Speaker 1: three clicks to get there. It was a simple site,
Speaker 1: a repository of blog posts and essays he had written
Speaker 1: about medical ethics, along with links to a couple of videos.
Speaker 1: The screen went black, and then his name, in white
Speaker 1: sam seraph type appeared. Dr ben Walden speaking at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 1: An old man with white hair and blue eyes was
Speaker 1: standing at a lectern. My God, I whispered. Time slowed
Speaker 1: to a near stand still. I could compute what I
Speaker 1: was seeing, or rather who I was seeing. The man
Speaker 1: was wearing khakis, a blue button down shirt, and a
Speaker 1: fleece vest. He had a pale complexion, but his cheeks
Speaker 1: were pink. His color high, my exact coloring somewhere in
Speaker 1: the background the comments I had fielded just about every
Speaker 1: day for fifty four years. Are you sure you're Jewish?
Speaker 1: There's no way you're Jewish? Did your mother have an
Speaker 1: affair with the Swedish milkman? I saw my jaw, my nose,
Speaker 1: my forehead, and eyes. I heard something familiar in the
Speaker 1: timbre of his voice. It wasn't merely a resemblance. It
Speaker 1: was a quality. The way he held himself his pattern
Speaker 1: of speech. He was recommending a book to the audience
Speaker 1: at toll Gowande's Being Mortal. He referenced an article in
Speaker 1: the Onion. I had the bizarre thought that he had
Speaker 1: good literary taste. I ran my hands down the length
Speaker 1: of my legs. Who was I? What was I? I
Speaker 1: felt as if I might disintegrate right there in that
Speaker 1: hotel room, floating high above the city. This wasn't what
Speaker 1: I wanted to see, But now that I had seen it,
Speaker 1: I would never be able to unsee it. Dr ben Walden,
Speaker 1: his name, continued to appear beneath the lectern, the glint
Speaker 1: of eyeglasses a wedding ring. Michael raised the volume. The
Speaker 1: man's voice moved through me and around me, like something
Speaker 1: invisible stitched into the air. In just a moment, I'll
Speaker 1: open it up to questions, Jesus, Michael was saying, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Now ben Walden was gesticulating. He held both his hands
Speaker 1: in front of him, as if bracketing the air in parentheses,
Speaker 1: a gesture that I suddenly recognized as my own. I knew,
Speaker 1: in a place beyond thought, that I was seeing the truth,
Speaker 1: the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring
Speaker 1: all my life. The audience in Portland was now raising
Speaker 1: their hands. He called on someone in the back row,
Speaker 1: then nodded, smiling slightly as he listened. Do you see that,
Speaker 1: I asked Michael, the way he's he even runs a
Speaker 1: Q and A like you. Michael said, the following summer,
Speaker 1: there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael,
Speaker 1: Jacob and I will take turns looking at it through
Speaker 1: NASA approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA
Speaker 1: approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for
Speaker 1: only a fraction of a second at a time. This
Speaker 1: is the way I watched the YouTube video on that
Speaker 1: June morning, A glimpse, then away, another glimpse, as if
Speaker 1: the old man in the blue button down shirt and
Speaker 1: Patagonia vest who he was and what that meant might
Speaker 1: blind me forever. I slipped out of bed and walked
Speaker 1: barefoot into the bathroom. My mind and body seemed to
Speaker 1: be disconnected. My body wasn't the body I had believed
Speaker 1: it to be for fifty four years. My face wasn't
Speaker 1: my face. That's what it felt like. If my body
Speaker 1: wasn't my body, and my face wasn't my face? Who
Speaker 1: was I? In several weeks, once I'm back East, I'll
Speaker 1: meet my best friend from college for dinner, and when
Speaker 1: I walk into her apartment, I'll realize I'm afraid that
Speaker 1: her feelings for me will have somehow changed, that I
Speaker 1: am now unknowable to her. I'll stand in her living room,
Speaker 1: tears streaming down my face, and ask, do you still
Speaker 1: see me as the same person? And she will look
Speaker 1: at me, amused, compassionate. You are the same person, She'll say.
Speaker 1: But on that morning in Japantown, I encountered my own
Speaker 1: face in the mirror and understood for the first time
Speaker 1: that the information reflected back at me had always told
Speaker 1: a different story than the one I had believed, no
Speaker 1: more than believed known. I didn't feel like the same person.
Speaker 1: The white haired, blue eyed doctor from Portland's was now
Speaker 1: staring back at me. He had always been staring back
Speaker 1: at me, and it wasn't only a physical thing certain
Speaker 1: common features. Watching him on YouTube, I felt, with my
Speaker 1: entire being something I could barely understand come from him.
Speaker 1: I wrapped myself in a robe and sat at the
Speaker 1: small desk where Michael had made the discovery about Bethany
Speaker 1: and Adam Thomas. Less than an hour earlier, I closed
Speaker 1: the tab for the YouTube video and opened my email
Speaker 1: two Dr Benjamin Walden from Danny Shapiro, subject important letter.
Speaker 1: It had been easy, just as everything else had been
Speaker 1: insanely easy, to find his contact information. He had a blog,
Speaker 1: He was out there in the world, a well respected physician,
Speaker 1: a public speaker. He was a man who would probably
Speaker 1: have no reason to think his inbox would contain any
Speaker 1: huge surprises. How old was too old for a surprise.
Speaker 1: He was seventy eight. Dear doctor Walden, I'm writing to
Speaker 1: you about something that may come as a shock. My
Speaker 1: name is Danny Shapiro, and I am a fifty four
Speaker 1: year old novelist, memoirist, wife, and mother of a seventeen
Speaker 1: year old son. I live in Litchfield County, Connecticut. I
Speaker 1: recently took a DNA test as nothing more than a lark.
Speaker 1: I have always believed my parents to be my biological parents,
Speaker 1: but now I have reason to believe that you may
Speaker 1: be my biological father. I won't write more and less. Ah,
Speaker 1: this may sense to you, and be you're willing to
Speaker 1: communicate with me about it. I so hope you're willing.
Speaker 1: I'm going to send you a link to my website
Speaker 1: so you can see something of who I am. Www
Speaker 1: dot Danny Shapiro dot com. Thank you. Danny. Michael was
Speaker 1: in the shower. I waited, my finger hovering for a
Speaker 1: moment before I hit senned. Before she got off the phone,
Speaker 1: Jennifer Mendelssohn had asked me what I was going to
Speaker 1: do now that I had zeroed in on my biological father.
Speaker 1: She urged me to be methodical to do research. Apparently
Speaker 1: there was a right way and a wrong way to
Speaker 1: go about this. There were, she told me, templates. But
Speaker 1: I wasn't feeling careful or methodical. In fact, quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: I was feeling wild and reckless. I needed not to
Speaker 1: sit back and cogitate, but to take any and every
Speaker 1: kind of action. As long as I was in motion,
Speaker 1: my fingers against the keyboard, the pen across the page,
Speaker 1: dressing for the day, swiping lipstick across my now unfamiliar lips,
Speaker 1: strapping on my sandals, I was able to hold onto
Speaker 1: the belief that I was propelling myself forward rather than
Speaker 1: falling backward into the abyss. My publisher has a special
Speaker 1: offer for Family Secrets listeners off my book and a
Speaker 1: selection of other great reads when you shop from Penguin
Speaker 1: Random House. Just visit www dot Penguin Random House slash
Speaker 1: Inheritance and use the code p r H Family Secrets.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagin
Speaker 1: is the supervising producer and Julie Douglas is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with us at listener mail
Speaker 1: at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you can also
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at
Speaker 1: Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's
Speaker 1: fam Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro dot com.