Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. No
Speaker 1: one live like family. We lie to each other all
Speaker 1: the time. We'd love to keep each other at a distance,
Speaker 1: to give ourselves some elbow room and the claustrophobic nuclear unit,
Speaker 1: to spare each other's steelers, to cut short of conversation
Speaker 1: or to begin one, to ensure that the artichoke heart
Speaker 1: softness of our insights is sealed safely off forever. As
Speaker 1: I write this, my two toddlers are in the next room,
Speaker 1: cheerfully bolting out some interminable preschool song and throwing stuffed
Speaker 1: animals at each other. They're too young to ask me
Speaker 1: about my missing father or my never spoken of mother,
Speaker 1: or why I am the way I am. They're too
Speaker 1: young to understand how much they don't know. Then again,
Speaker 1: I haven't started lying to them yet. This is the
Speaker 1: story of digging out the biggest lie I was ever told.
Speaker 1: That's Liz Shire, book editor, product developer, an author of
Speaker 1: the new memoir Never Simple. The graph to Lizz's book
Speaker 1: from the poet Adrian Rich goes like this. When we
Speaker 1: discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer,
Speaker 1: it forces us to re examine the universe to question
Speaker 1: the whole instinct and concept of trust for a while.
Speaker 1: We are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge in
Speaker 1: a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets
Speaker 1: of rain, in a world before kinship or naming or
Speaker 1: tenderness exists. We are brought close to formlessness. This is
Speaker 1: a story of lies, trust, and one woman's journey to
Speaker 1: be brought back from that bleak, jutting ledge and make
Speaker 1: herself whole. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and this good we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: I was born in New Yorkville, which is the very
Speaker 1: far east neighborhood in New York City. It is basically
Speaker 1: falling off into the East River. And when you here
Speaker 1: grew up in New York City, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people think gossip Girl, and that really could not
Speaker 1: have been further from the truth of my New York City.
Speaker 1: In the eighties and nineties, we were all very middle
Speaker 1: class um, a kind of Manhattan that doesn't really so
Speaker 1: much exist anymore. I lived with my mother. We lived
Speaker 1: in a one bedroom apartment on eighty one Street, and
Speaker 1: it was a very typical setup for the time, where
Speaker 1: I lived in the bedroom and she had created out
Speaker 1: of the hall closet a little nook for herself where
Speaker 1: she had put a twin bed, and we lived there together.
Speaker 1: And I did not know at the time that it
Speaker 1: was unusual for a mother and daughter to share a
Speaker 1: home with nobody else there. It wasn't really true of
Speaker 1: other people. I know once I got out to school,
Speaker 1: but as a small child, I didn't know any of
Speaker 1: that yet. And so there we worked, just the two
Speaker 1: of us together. Describe your mother for me. You know
Speaker 1: your mother during your childhood. My mother was an incredibly
Speaker 1: charming woman. She was brilliant. She had been an attorney
Speaker 1: when very few women were attorneys. She was one of
Speaker 1: the very few women in her law school class in
Speaker 1: the early sixties. She went to n y U, and
Speaker 1: her professors would have ladies Night the first Monday of
Speaker 1: every month, and that was the one day that they
Speaker 1: would call on the women in their classes. And this
Speaker 1: was something I knew about her, even though she no
Speaker 1: longer worked as a lawyer, she was retired, and because
Speaker 1: I was so young, I didn't then know that people
Speaker 1: don't generally retire in their late thirties. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that there was something wrong with that statement. But she
Speaker 1: could be enormously charming. She was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: She told great stories with you know, the arms pinwheeling
Speaker 1: to to gesture and illustrate what she was talking about.
Speaker 1: She was a quite a smoker. She smoked between four
Speaker 1: and six packs a day, depending on how stressed how
Speaker 1: she was that particular week. Um. And so she had
Speaker 1: this sort of deep throaty voice, in this deep chuffle
Speaker 1: that she would illustrate her stories with. And she treated
Speaker 1: everything else in our lives as sort of incidental to
Speaker 1: the fact that we were going to have time together.
Speaker 1: So she would just take me out of school on
Speaker 1: a moment's notice it was a good sledding day in
Speaker 1: the park, or if there was something good at the
Speaker 1: map that she wanted to see when it wasn't too crowded. Um.
Speaker 1: And she just was not interested in anything that would
Speaker 1: get in her way. No, it doesn't sound like she
Speaker 1: was very interested in rules. No, not particularly. And I
Speaker 1: thought everything in our lives was normal until I got
Speaker 1: to school and I started realizing that things and other
Speaker 1: kids lives weren't quite the same. My mother did not
Speaker 1: have a hold on her anger, and she had a
Speaker 1: lot of anger. There was no logical chain between an
Speaker 1: occurrence and her reaction to the occurrence. So whether I
Speaker 1: did some the really terrible and misbehaved, or whether I
Speaker 1: left a water glass in the wrong place, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of one time out of every ten, the rage
Speaker 1: would come up, and it was like you know the
Speaker 1: movie The Terminator, It was like talking to her there
Speaker 1: with a red light would come on behind the eyes
Speaker 1: and the screaming would begin, and I would either lock
Speaker 1: myself in the bathroom or in the closet where just
Speaker 1: sort of try to stay out of her reach. And
Speaker 1: you could see, if you were dumb enough to get
Speaker 1: close enough to see that there was just nobody driving
Speaker 1: the bus there, that she was completely out of control.
Speaker 1: And when the adrenaline wore off, then the self excoriation
Speaker 1: would come in. Then she would say to the ground,
Speaker 1: she would weep, what have I done to you? Why
Speaker 1: do I treat you like this? I'm so terrible and
Speaker 1: such a terrible mother. Um, And I would just try
Speaker 1: to comfort her, because returning to that kind of normal
Speaker 1: before the rage was the best we could do. What
Speaker 1: did she actually look like when she would fly into
Speaker 1: one of these rages. So my mother was a small
Speaker 1: woman when she got pregnant with me. She didn't weigh
Speaker 1: an hundred pounds, and she had a sort of perfect
Speaker 1: blonde ploff if you can think of the seventies hair
Speaker 1: hairstyle of the with a flip in the front um.
Speaker 1: And when she got really angry, you know, her face
Speaker 1: would turn red, the hair would flof up um and
Speaker 1: the spit would start flying. She would she would lose
Speaker 1: the ability to control her mouth or her body, and
Speaker 1: she became huge to me in my eyes, Like you know,
Speaker 1: was a very small child, and although she was not
Speaker 1: a large person, she became like a giant. What did
Speaker 1: you know about your father at that stage in your life?
Speaker 1: What was the story about your father and where he was?
Speaker 1: So I didn't know much when I was very young.
Speaker 1: I didn't really have a firm grasp on the idea
Speaker 1: that there was such a thing as a father. I
Speaker 1: understood that there were men, we knew men, but I
Speaker 1: didn't understand that there was, you know, at least a
Speaker 1: man genetically related to each child. When I was very young,
Speaker 1: she told me a story about my father that went
Speaker 1: like this. My father was her second husband. She had
Speaker 1: married someone read out of college. They had been married
Speaker 1: for some time and divorced amicably, and because it was
Speaker 1: a second marriage, they had a very small ceremony. She
Speaker 1: had borrowed a pant suit from a friend, which she
Speaker 1: returned after they were done. They were only married for
Speaker 1: six months or so. He didn't have a living family,
Speaker 1: that didn't have a lot of friends. And one night
Speaker 1: he was driving and he got to a stop sign
Speaker 1: and he stopped, and the driver behind him didn't, and
Speaker 1: he died instantly. And she was in such a storm
Speaker 1: of grief that she burned all his belongings, burned all
Speaker 1: the pictures of him, burned all the evidence that he
Speaker 1: had ever been there. And at the time, I believe
Speaker 1: this because you believe what your parents tell you. It
Speaker 1: wasn't until I was a little older that I started
Speaker 1: to realize that that story was extremely convenient. It didn't
Speaker 1: actually make any sense at all. It didn't fit together,
Speaker 1: it didn't fit with our lives. You know, people and
Speaker 1: just disappear off the planet, unable to be found, and
Speaker 1: that it just wasn't incredible that nobody who had known
Speaker 1: him was still alive or reachable, And so I thought,
Speaker 1: if she is lying about his death, it must be
Speaker 1: that he's still alive. I couldn't imagine a reason why
Speaker 1: he would have died one way, and she would tell
Speaker 1: me a different way. So I assume that he was
Speaker 1: somewhere still around. And so, you know, we would walk
Speaker 1: around New York and I would just sort of look
Speaker 1: at all the men who were, you know, roughly the
Speaker 1: right age and blonde and might potentially look enough like us,
Speaker 1: and thinking, is that you are you the one? I
Speaker 1: thought that there must be some really romantic, adventurous story
Speaker 1: as to why he was still alive, but nobody would
Speaker 1: let me talk to him. Write that he was a
Speaker 1: spy or you know, wrongfully imprisoned, or an astronaut abandoned
Speaker 1: on a distant planet or something um. And then as
Speaker 1: I got into middle school in high school and got
Speaker 1: to be disaffected, I thought, maybe he's just married. But
Speaker 1: I knew that I was being told something that was
Speaker 1: evidently untrue. I just didn't figure out why. Liz goes
Speaker 1: to middle school at Hunter, an excellent, highly competitive public
Speaker 1: school in Manhattan, and during this time, her mother's rage
Speaker 1: escalates she's violent towards Liz, and Liz's sense that things
Speaker 1: just don't add up about her father is really sinking in.
Speaker 1: Liz grows more and more depressed. Her mother's volatility and
Speaker 1: her father's elusiveness sit at the center of her middle
Speaker 1: school years. I was kind of a weird kid that
Speaker 1: was very socially awkward. I was depressed. I don't think
Speaker 1: we knew at the time what depression looked like in
Speaker 1: teenagers or young teenagers. Now, I think it would have
Speaker 1: been diagnosed much earlier and probably treated. But I was super,
Speaker 1: super unpopular. You know, there were bullies in my school
Speaker 1: that made my life pretty hard, and I knew that
Speaker 1: in a way, they were right that there was something
Speaker 1: wrong with me. There was something wrong with my house.
Speaker 1: And you know, every twelve or thirteen year old kid
Speaker 1: thinks that, but in my case it was really true.
Speaker 1: We were not living a normal life, um and I
Speaker 1: took that very much to heart and thought it was
Speaker 1: something integral to me. The fact that my father was
Speaker 1: not there just really meant that there was no one
Speaker 1: there to see us. We lived this life like a
Speaker 1: panic room in the middle of this city of eight
Speaker 1: and a half billion people. But there were no eyes
Speaker 1: on us. No one knew what was happening in the apartment,
Speaker 1: door closed, and my mother was enormously protective. I was
Speaker 1: not allowed to go to friends houses for the most part,
Speaker 1: I was largely not allowed to leave the apartment without
Speaker 1: her eyes on me or the eyes of friends parents
Speaker 1: who she trusted, and so there was just no one,
Speaker 1: no one to see what was happening. And so I
Speaker 1: despaired because to me, there was something irretrievably wrong with
Speaker 1: our lives, and there was no reason to think it
Speaker 1: could ever get better. A lot of this came to
Speaker 1: a head when I was about fifteen and I had,
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to my mother, started dating an older boy at
Speaker 1: my high school. And he was a guitar player and
Speaker 1: a baseball player, and you know, all those things that
Speaker 1: are very very attractive to fifteen year old girls. And
Speaker 1: my mother at that time, I don't remember what it was.
Speaker 1: I think maybe she was taking a class. I knew
Speaker 1: she was out one afternoon week And so, you know,
Speaker 1: when you grew up in New York City, there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of places to sneak away and make out
Speaker 1: right because there's no basements, So there's no reddy couches
Speaker 1: and there's no river banks, so there's no words, just
Speaker 1: sort of sneak away. You really have to work at
Speaker 1: it to find somewhere private. So I sneaked him into
Speaker 1: my apartment and my mother came home early and caught us,
Speaker 1: and she went ballistic and ended up sending me to
Speaker 1: my godparents house in New Jersey, where I stayed for
Speaker 1: a couple of months until she calmed down. And that
Speaker 1: was really this kind of oasis of time living with them,
Speaker 1: when I started to realize that other people do not
Speaker 1: live on this sort of precipice of constant anger and
Speaker 1: rage and sadness. Many people lived with an even kielan nows.
Speaker 1: Many people never screamed at each other at all, which
Speaker 1: was a totally novel concept. And even though I was
Speaker 1: not living in my mother's house at the time, she
Speaker 1: decided that I had to be tracked uh And so
Speaker 1: she went to the principle of my teachers and she
Speaker 1: had them all sit down together with the guidance counselor,
Speaker 1: and she presented them with a plan for her unmarriageable daughter,
Speaker 1: in which she was going to hire a Barnard student
Speaker 1: to follow me in the streets. Should I ever come home,
Speaker 1: I would not have access to the phone, of course,
Speaker 1: the only plandlines at the time, and every time I
Speaker 1: went to a class, I was going to have to
Speaker 1: sign in, and we didn't do that at my school.
Speaker 1: She required them to put together this whole system of
Speaker 1: clipboards and signatures, and half the time they of course
Speaker 1: forgot that that was supposed to happen at all. This
Speaker 1: really moving thing happened on one day where I was
Speaker 1: sitting in the hallway in a free period and my
Speaker 1: most terrifying teacher came up to me, and I thought,
Speaker 1: what have I done wrong? And she said so about
Speaker 1: this signing in business? And I said yes, And she
Speaker 1: said I want you to know that none of us
Speaker 1: have seen you do anything wrong, and whatever happens, none
Speaker 1: plus will. And that really blew me over because at
Speaker 1: that moment I understood that when they sat in that
Speaker 1: room Princilo in the guidance counselor, they weren't nodding along
Speaker 1: going oh, yes, totally, you know, terrible out of control teenager.
Speaker 1: What can we do to rein her back in? They
Speaker 1: were thinking, this mother is crazy. And it was the
Speaker 1: first time that I understood that people outside of our lives,
Speaker 1: we're seeing that her behavior was completely out of the
Speaker 1: realm of reason, and that her reactions could only kindly
Speaker 1: be classified as only overreactions, and that someone actually saw
Speaker 1: what was going on. So that was a really seminal
Speaker 1: moment during those years. These seminal moments are so important
Speaker 1: in our lives, the ones during which we're seen, recognized, witnessed. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: now some eyes are on Liz and her mother, and
Speaker 1: she no longer feels like the two of them are
Speaker 1: entirely shrouded, their troubles invisible. Their dynamic has been so
Speaker 1: deeply toxic, so much so that when her mother really
Speaker 1: gets angry, she threatens Liz by telling her she's going
Speaker 1: to put her beloved dog to sleep. But now, after
Speaker 1: this encounter with her teachers at school, a bit of
Speaker 1: life begins to dawn. Her teachers aren't out to get her, No,
Speaker 1: they're actively protecting her. The years passed and Liz takes
Speaker 1: off for college. She's still in touch with her mom,
Speaker 1: but she's trying to keep her distance. Then she's home
Speaker 1: from school on vacation when the damn breaks yet again,
Speaker 1: this time with a number of surprising declarations, bombshells really
Speaker 1: from her mother. I was home for fall break and
Speaker 1: I was sort of sprawled on the couch in the
Speaker 1: living room reading something, and she came in, you know,
Speaker 1: wearing one of her crazy movemos. She by that time
Speaker 1: rarely left the apartment and often rarely left her bedroom.
Speaker 1: She was severely a grophobic. So she came and started
Speaker 1: sidling with the door and absolutely very nervous, which is
Speaker 1: definitely not hermilius. I mean, something was up. And she said, so,
Speaker 1: you said you're going to try to get a learner's
Speaker 1: permit while you're home from college. And if I'd gone
Speaker 1: to college and found out the people outside New York
Speaker 1: City drive and that was sonning to me. So I
Speaker 1: was going to go do this thing. And I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's right. And she said you're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to do that and I said, okay, why
Speaker 1: and she said, well, you don't have a birth certificate
Speaker 1: and I said, oh, I can just get a copy.
Speaker 1: And she said, no, no no, no, not, you don't have
Speaker 1: a copy of your birth certificate. I never filed a
Speaker 1: birth certificate for you. There's no record of your birth
Speaker 1: at all. And I said, okay, why, and she then
Speaker 1: came out with this life changing line, I was married
Speaker 1: when you were born, but not to your father. And
Speaker 1: it turns out all of this that I discovered over
Speaker 1: that next twenty minutes or so, that the first part
Speaker 1: of the story she told me was true. She was
Speaker 1: married to this, by all accounts, very lovely man after college.
Speaker 1: They were married for it or ten years, divorced and
Speaker 1: went their separate ways. What I did not know was
Speaker 1: that she had married a second man, a man named Meryl,
Speaker 1: sometime after that, and in the car on the way
Speaker 1: back from their wedding ceremony, he pulled the car over
Speaker 1: to the side of the road and popped the hood
Speaker 1: because the voices from the engine were talking to him
Speaker 1: and he needed to answer them. So there were clearly
Speaker 1: there was there was a lot going on with this man,
Speaker 1: not the least of which was that he was beating
Speaker 1: the crap out of my mother, and she ultimately left him.
Speaker 1: She uh, you know, she would call the police, and
Speaker 1: and it was the seventies, out of big domestic abuse
Speaker 1: was even a term, and they would come and say,
Speaker 1: you know, this is between a man and his wife,
Speaker 1: and then they would leave again. And so she finally
Speaker 1: left him up and she would call, she would refuse
Speaker 1: to talk to him, and eventually he stopped calling. But
Speaker 1: really the key point here is that they never divorced,
Speaker 1: and so until he died when I was a junior,
Speaker 1: a senior in high school, my mother was married to
Speaker 1: a man I had never heard of. And looking back,
Speaker 1: even at all of the kind of weird and crazy
Speaker 1: things that happened, I think that's what strikes me as
Speaker 1: the strangest. That she and I were living in this
Speaker 1: like incredibly codependent, tiny, claustrophobic towsome and there was this
Speaker 1: major thing about her that I didn't know. Twenty minutes,
Speaker 1: twenty minutes and a lifetime the information is on rushing
Speaker 1: a torrent. Lizz's mom tells her the truth for the
Speaker 1: first time, the truth of her father. He was this
Speaker 1: beautiful man ten years younger than she was. He picked
Speaker 1: her up in Central Park by asking for a piece
Speaker 1: of her New York Times, a classic nineteen seventies pick
Speaker 1: up if there ever was one. They embarked on a
Speaker 1: love affair that lasted six months, maybe a year. They
Speaker 1: were both fairly depressed. One day, she realized she hadn't
Speaker 1: heard from him in a little while, so she called
Speaker 1: his apartment and his ex wife picked up the phone.
Speaker 1: The week before, he had jumped from the roof of
Speaker 1: his building and fallen sixteen stories to the concrete below,
Speaker 1: where died. And so my mother went into an even
Speaker 1: greater depression. And after some months she stirred herself to
Speaker 1: have a doctor so as that she was not feeling well,
Speaker 1: and she was seeing the sort of daughtering old character
Speaker 1: of the doctor. And he ransom blood tests and said,
Speaker 1: you have a tomer on your patuitary glance, and you
Speaker 1: are dying. And so she and her grief kicked herself
Speaker 1: up and gets on the plane and flies to California,
Speaker 1: where her brother is living, who had married a woman
Speaker 1: with the four young children who they were raising together.
Speaker 1: And my aunt took one look at her when she
Speaker 1: got off the plan and said, honey, you're not dying.
Speaker 1: You are pregnant. And by that time she was almost
Speaker 1: five months long, and there was nothing to do about it.
Speaker 1: And her idea was that she would put me up
Speaker 1: for adoption when I was born. She had never intended
Speaker 1: to have children. She was alone. What it was not
Speaker 1: not something she had intended to take on, and when
Speaker 1: I was born, apparently I didn't cry, and she felt, well,
Speaker 1: even maybe it's quiet, I could just slit see along
Speaker 1: this last And on day twelve she thought, maybe this
Speaker 1: kid is mute. And she poked me with a diaper
Speaker 1: band and it turned out of his and she decided
Speaker 1: to keep me, and you know, being my mother, she
Speaker 1: didn't name me for the first six months because there
Speaker 1: was no need to distinguish me from anybody else. There
Speaker 1: are only two of us in the apartments. That the
Speaker 1: baby was enough, and so we went done, And so
Speaker 1: they went on. Liz graduates from college and begins working
Speaker 1: and publishing. She's living in New York City in a
Speaker 1: relationship with a woman. She's making her way, but there's
Speaker 1: always the specter of her mother, the possibility of a
Speaker 1: phone call that will up end her hard one equilibrium.
Speaker 1: Once Liz is at her job when she receives a
Speaker 1: call from her mother and she's using what Liz describes
Speaker 1: as her tranquilizer voice. Her mom tells Liz that she's
Speaker 1: missing her own mother, who has been dead for forty years,
Speaker 1: and that she has a brilliant idea she knows Liz
Speaker 1: doesn't want to have children, her health. But maybe Liz
Speaker 1: could give birth to a stillborn baby, Yes, stay with it,
Speaker 1: a stillborn baby who could then be buried with her
Speaker 1: long dead mother so that she wouldn't be lonely in
Speaker 1: the cemetery. Imagine being on the receiving end of that
Speaker 1: phone call, sitting in an office surrounded by coworkers, colleagues.
Speaker 1: Liz has been trying to understand her mother all her life.
Speaker 1: Now she has to consider is her mother mentally ill,
Speaker 1: heavily medicated, eccentric, dangerous, hurting all of the above. At
Speaker 1: that stage, she was calling it a couple of times
Speaker 1: a day. Probably she did not have bipolar disorder, but
Speaker 1: she did have manic CASA. She would have swings where
Speaker 1: these frequent calls would happen, and then if she took
Speaker 1: enough tranquilizers, it would come out in situations where, just
Speaker 1: as an example, she would decide that it was the
Speaker 1: right thing for me to somehow orchestrate is still worth
Speaker 1: And then I don't know what she thought we would do,
Speaker 1: sneak into the graveyard in the middle of the n
Speaker 1: I don't know which a logical chain there was, but
Speaker 1: Danny I realized that it may sound change to say
Speaker 1: this now. But I actually found those moments kind of validating,
Speaker 1: because so often her behavior was just on the edge
Speaker 1: of eccentric and really out of the realm of normal,
Speaker 1: and those moments reminding like, this actually is not normal,
Speaker 1: Like most parents don't do this, Most parents do not
Speaker 1: call and request that you have still one baby. This
Speaker 1: is not this is not in the normal woods. And
Speaker 1: so sometimes these were very comforting conversations because they reminded
Speaker 1: me that I was dealing with something that I could
Speaker 1: not predict, and that if my response to it was
Speaker 1: not perfectly formulated or sufficiently comforting, because of course I
Speaker 1: felt responsible for her, uh that that was not some
Speaker 1: deficiency in me, It was that the situation was inherently bananas.
Speaker 1: Bananas is one word for it, but there's also another. One. Afternoon,
Speaker 1: Liz and her mother are having lunch outdoors at a
Speaker 1: restaurant in Manhattan. When her mother lights up a cigarette.
Speaker 1: The waitress comes over and tells her that smoking is
Speaker 1: against the law, and her mom she goes completely crazy
Speaker 1: on the waitress, livid at being told what to do,
Speaker 1: and then Lizza's mother uses a word for the first time,
Speaker 1: just slips it into the conversation after the waitress walks away,
Speaker 1: and that word is borderline, And you know the moment
Speaker 1: she said that word, I think. I think in all
Speaker 1: of this story there are these pivot points, like one
Speaker 1: of those old yardsticks that were foldable, and the whole
Speaker 1: thing just completely goes off into a direction I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 1: And the moment she said borderline was one of those moments.
Speaker 1: Because again, for all of this time, I had known
Speaker 1: she was eccentric. I had known there was something odd
Speaker 1: about her. I had known that people didn't respond to
Speaker 1: her the way they responded to other people, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was. And having a diagnosis just
Speaker 1: meant the world to me, just that there was now
Speaker 1: something I could read, there was something I could research.
Speaker 1: This happened to other people, but this wasn't something that
Speaker 1: we were just the two of us tussling around between us.
Speaker 1: But this was something out in the world that psychiatristn't
Speaker 1: dealt with and had written articles on. And I could
Speaker 1: read those articles. And so I went and looked up
Speaker 1: the symptoms of borderline personality disorder, and people with borderline
Speaker 1: personality disorder obviously have a wide range of severity and symptoms,
Speaker 1: but it's characterized by extreme fear of abandonment. Usually that
Speaker 1: comes from some kind of trauma and childhood, and so
Speaker 1: people who are suffering with this cannot abide the idea
Speaker 1: of the distinction between them and another person, particularly between
Speaker 1: them and their children, and so so much started to
Speaker 1: fall into place. Her her inability to let go of
Speaker 1: me in any way, her screaming fits of rage when
Speaker 1: as an adult, for example, I would failed to send
Speaker 1: her a Valentine's Day card. These kinds of things made
Speaker 1: her livid, and I never understood why, And that helped
Speaker 1: me understand that those those things where I was not
Speaker 1: responding to the way that she wanted, where I was
Speaker 1: not prioritizing her as the sole thing in my life,
Speaker 1: sent her into her absolute panic that she had been
Speaker 1: abandoned in the bottom of figuratively the bottom of a
Speaker 1: deep well with no getting out of it. That's a
Speaker 1: great description. So in this period of time of young adulthood,
Speaker 1: your girlfriend at the time has a wealthy aunt who
Speaker 1: just really wants to help you figure out more about
Speaker 1: who your father was and find out more as much
Speaker 1: as you possibly can about him. So she offers to
Speaker 1: hire a private investigator. So that was an absolutely amazing
Speaker 1: and shocking conversation I had with We called her Auntie
Speaker 1: because that had, frankly, just never occurred to me at
Speaker 1: that time. I had thought, this man is gone, he
Speaker 1: is dead. There there's no way I'll ever find out
Speaker 1: about him. So it was astonishing to have this avenue opened.
Speaker 1: And so I found out this story when Andy called me.
Speaker 1: I was at work. I was an editorial assistant at
Speaker 1: Random House, and the way it was set up was
Speaker 1: that the cubicles were in the middle of the aisle,
Speaker 1: and there were offices to either side, so you were
Speaker 1: like in a little moat in the middle of the
Speaker 1: stream with people just walking by another side. And Andy
Speaker 1: Collins and says, we have to talk. I had the
Speaker 1: private investigator on the line and found out something about
Speaker 1: your father, and you know, I look up and there's
Speaker 1: seven fifteen people standing around me talking about publicity plans,
Speaker 1: and so I just start of put my shoulders up
Speaker 1: around my ears and tried to make a little climate
Speaker 1: controlled dome around myself. It turns out that Liz's father's father,
Speaker 1: her paternal grandfather, had been a very popular entertainer. He
Speaker 1: had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He
Speaker 1: was in a movie in the nineteen forties. He wrote
Speaker 1: hundreds of songs that were constantly on the radio, and
Speaker 1: he was a fantastically popular children's entertainer. And as the
Speaker 1: investigator was reading this, he said, you know, I used
Speaker 1: to listen to Frank Luther stuff when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: Isn't that amazing? And it was just so astonishing to
Speaker 1: me that, first of all, I had had grandparents, which
Speaker 1: I had never really thought of before. In the face
Speaker 1: of the one more immediate loss, I just didn't think
Speaker 1: beyond my father's absence, and then other people had known them.
Speaker 1: That many people, thousands and millions of people knew who
Speaker 1: my grandfather had been, and that was absolutely shocking. I
Speaker 1: also discovered that I had an aunt's living and living
Speaker 1: on Roselt Island, which is a small island that that
Speaker 1: sits alongside Manhattan, Um, and she was married and had
Speaker 1: two children, that I had cousins living. And these were
Speaker 1: people who were just, you know, half a mile from
Speaker 1: where I grew up, and I had never known they
Speaker 1: were there. So I called my aunt at home that
Speaker 1: evening and she had been prepped by her husband. So
Speaker 1: it was not a complete shock that I was calling
Speaker 1: out of the blue, and I needed to stress here
Speaker 1: or that none of these people knew my mother had existed.
Speaker 1: They certainly didn't know that I existed. So this is
Speaker 1: really just the past coming back twenty five years later
Speaker 1: or whatever. It was really as a shock to all
Speaker 1: of these people. And so, you know, my heart thumping
Speaker 1: in my throat, I make this call. And we had
Speaker 1: a you know, perfectly pleasant, maybe five or ten minute
Speaker 1: conversation where I asked some some general questions, where hating
Speaker 1: gone to high school, what was he like, those sorts
Speaker 1: of things, and she gave me perfectly polite but short answers,
Speaker 1: and over the course of conversation, she let me know
Speaker 1: that she and my father had not gotten along. They
Speaker 1: were not close. There was clearly something else there. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of history between them that was not
Speaker 1: perhaps always very positive, that she remembered him with a
Speaker 1: great deal of pain, and that maybe she viewed my coming,
Speaker 1: my popping up out of nowhere, not not with any joy,
Speaker 1: not with any surer eyes, that all I was doing
Speaker 1: was reminding her of a painful time in her life.
Speaker 1: And then we hung up, and I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: that you know. Number one, I didn't want to cause
Speaker 1: someone pain. That certainly wasn't my intention. And then number two,
Speaker 1: if I was going to find out anything about my father,
Speaker 1: my mother remembered almost nothing about him, just a handful
Speaker 1: of things that maybe I didn't want it to be
Speaker 1: from someone who hadn't gotten along with him. Maybe I
Speaker 1: wanted to be from someone who could remember him only
Speaker 1: with with love. And during that conversation, that brief conversation,
Speaker 1: she did agree your request to send you a photograph
Speaker 1: of him. He had ever seen a photograph of him,
Speaker 1: But my mother had saved an Oldsmobile add that she
Speaker 1: cut out of a magazine from I think seventy seven
Speaker 1: or seventy eight that she had seen when she already
Speaker 1: knew she was pregnant, where there was a model who
Speaker 1: looked enough like my father that she thought would suffice
Speaker 1: that she could say, this is what he looked like.
Speaker 1: But she had no actual pictures of the game. But
Speaker 1: the photograph doesn't come right away, Liz gives up on
Speaker 1: the idea that it will ever come. Reflecting on this,
Speaker 1: she writes, it's a hard lesson that when your needs
Speaker 1: bump up against a stranger's pain, their pain always takes precedence.
Speaker 1: But later that year, the holidays arrive and she receives
Speaker 1: a Christmas card from her aunt with photos in it.
Speaker 1: I open it and into my hand follows these four pictures.
Speaker 1: Remember what pictures look like from that time, They sort
Speaker 1: of CPA toned, you know, colorized with CPIA toned square,
Speaker 1: but with the corners rounded off. And they fall into
Speaker 1: my hand and I was I had just come into
Speaker 1: the house with my girlfriend at the time, and I
Speaker 1: just sat down right in the middle of the kitchen floor, um,
Speaker 1: and it was, you know, the world went white around me.
Speaker 1: I was just in absolute shock because there he was.
Speaker 1: The pictures were taken a couple of years before he died.
Speaker 1: He died at eight, so he was must have been
Speaker 1: twenty six pages a young man, and you know the
Speaker 1: age I was at the time. We were contemporaries. And
Speaker 1: at that moment I understood why I looked nothing like
Speaker 1: my mother, because he and I could have been. I
Speaker 1: happen to have at that point in my life, very
Speaker 1: short hair. We could have been exchanged for each other
Speaker 1: from the neck up, and it would have been difficult
Speaker 1: to tell us apart. We had the same in bullbot
Speaker 1: snows and the same sloping chin and the same infuriating
Speaker 1: cowlick um. And it was the first time I had
Speaker 1: looked at someone who looked like me, and I was
Speaker 1: really just an incredible moment. We'll be right back. As
Speaker 1: time moves on and Liz continues to build her life
Speaker 1: as a young adult with all the professional and personal
Speaker 1: changes that entails, all the while she keeps seeking out
Speaker 1: information about her father. She eventually is able to get
Speaker 1: in touch with her father's ex wife, Lydia, who, unlike
Speaker 1: her aunt, responds to Liz and the situation with kindness,
Speaker 1: not self protectiveness. I had had a sort of strange
Speaker 1: milestone in my life where I had just had an
Speaker 1: absolutely terrible breakup, had major surgery, lost my job, and
Speaker 1: moved all in the course of a couple of months.
Speaker 1: And so suddenly I found myself that's time on my hands,
Speaker 1: and I hired a forensic genealogist. M Again. It turns out,
Speaker 1: just like with the private investigator, that these things which
Speaker 1: remain mysteries for decades, can be found just for the
Speaker 1: for the price of finding a professional um. And she
Speaker 1: put me in touch with my father's wife. They were
Speaker 1: not officially divorced at his death. So she wrote an
Speaker 1: email to Lydia just saying, there's someone who would like
Speaker 1: to know about this man. And she wrote back absolutely
Speaker 1: lovely response, telling me more in that two pages than
Speaker 1: I had ever known about at him before, and ending
Speaker 1: saying I'd be very curious to know who this relative
Speaker 1: is and how this person is connected to the Luther family.
Speaker 1: And again I'm in this this quandary of I am
Speaker 1: about to bring my own pain potentially into someone else's life.
Speaker 1: It turned out my father had been an alcoholic and
Speaker 1: they had split when he was unable to stop drinking.
Speaker 1: Finally they reconciled he was going to move back in
Speaker 1: with her. He arrives at the door drunk, and she
Speaker 1: turns him away, and he leaves the apartment door, takes
Speaker 1: the stairs, goes up to the roof, and jumps off.
Speaker 1: And now that I know this, I'm thinking, how can
Speaker 1: I bring up these memories again, things that she has
Speaker 1: surely put to rest, just because I am desperate to
Speaker 1: know anything about him. But she was enormously generous in
Speaker 1: sharing that information with me, even though it must have
Speaker 1: brought up quite a bit of veried sadness. And you
Speaker 1: tell her that the way that you're related to him
Speaker 1: is that you're his daughter. Yeah, And I sent her
Speaker 1: a picture of myself at about the same age he
Speaker 1: was when he died, and I thought to myself, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of ways this could go. She
Speaker 1: could she could laugh at me, and she could say no,
Speaker 1: get a de sect to me, like you're you're definitely
Speaker 1: not his daughter, and I could have to start all
Speaker 1: over again, like this could all have been a mistake,
Speaker 1: this could not have been the guy. And I was
Speaker 1: really trepidacious about losing this one lead that I had.
Speaker 1: But I sent this picture and she said something to
Speaker 1: the effect of I don't need a DNA test to
Speaker 1: know that you are his daughter. So that was quite
Speaker 1: quite a moment um. She shared some more pictures with
Speaker 1: me that of course I had not seen, and told
Speaker 1: me about what he had been like as a young man,
Speaker 1: which was charming, athletic, loving, affectionate, and in the grip
Speaker 1: of an illness that was ultimate late because of his death.
Speaker 1: She also tells you where she scattered his ashes. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it turned out that she had taken the ashes
Speaker 1: and scattered them in turtle pond. Under Belvede or castle
Speaker 1: in Central Park, or what would become Turtle Pond. And
Speaker 1: I mean I spent half my childhood running up and
Speaker 1: down those steps, which is one of the things that
Speaker 1: that in retrospect is so startling to me. That he
Speaker 1: grew up in this very wealthy, very troubled family lots
Speaker 1: of people, and I grew up just being my mother
Speaker 1: about a mile away, and our lives were overlaid over
Speaker 1: this map of a very small area of the earth.
Speaker 1: And I had been in proximity to his family, his
Speaker 1: living family, and to his remains in the place I
Speaker 1: was playing as a child. And so I went to
Speaker 1: Turtle Pond, and I sat down, and I talked to
Speaker 1: him for a while. And you know, in Central Park,
Speaker 1: I certainly wasn't the only person having a visible come
Speaker 1: station with myself that day didn't trouble anyone. And I
Speaker 1: said goodbye to him there in a way that I
Speaker 1: had not thought I would be able to. As her
Speaker 1: father's life begins to crystallize for Liz, her own life
Speaker 1: gains focus too. She's no longer in flux between jobs
Speaker 1: and relationships. She's advancing her career and starting a family
Speaker 1: with her partner Ari she's pregnant when they get married.
Speaker 1: At their wedding, Liz's mother, whose physical and mental health
Speaker 1: has been on the decline, makes a bit of a statement,
Speaker 1: she's only did she um. I think at heart, what
Speaker 1: she wanted was to have that connection with me and
Speaker 1: to be the last person who saw me before the wedding.
Speaker 1: She wanted the movie moment of pushing the bobby pins
Speaker 1: into my hair and giving me something blue and all
Speaker 1: of that, But we didn't have that relationship. By that time.
Speaker 1: She was even more just jointed from reality than she
Speaker 1: had been in previous years. It had been a very
Speaker 1: challenging a couple of years, and we were not close
Speaker 1: at all. And so the way she decided to make
Speaker 1: that happen was by throwing a fit as I was
Speaker 1: standing upstairs waiting to process Dennie aisle for the wedding
Speaker 1: um and say that if if I did not let
Speaker 1: her walk me down the aisle, which had never been
Speaker 1: the plan, she was going to stand in the middle
Speaker 1: of the synagogue and scream, and she instead I did
Speaker 1: go to the lobby and start screaming until I agreed
Speaker 1: to see her and the you know, the rabbi came
Speaker 1: up and said, we can do whatever you want. Here.
Speaker 1: You can see her. We can hold off the ceremony
Speaker 1: until she calms down, we can have security take her out.
Speaker 1: We will do whatever you want. And I realized that,
Speaker 1: you know, Ari and I had known each other then
Speaker 1: for twenty five years, We had known each other since
Speaker 1: summer camp, but his family didn't know me. We hadn't
Speaker 1: been dating a year at that point, and that would
Speaker 1: be the first thing they knew about me was that
Speaker 1: their golden child, the son slash nephews slash cousin, had
Speaker 1: just married a woman who got her mother arrested at
Speaker 1: the wedding. And I didn't want that to be the story.
Speaker 1: And I think my mother knew that that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: let that happen, and so I agreed to see her.
Speaker 1: And she came up and she, you know, patted me
Speaker 1: on the head and said something nice, and then she
Speaker 1: sat down perfectly nicely and let the wedding occur. But
Speaker 1: that was another one of those pivot points in our relationship.
Speaker 1: Another pivot point in your relationship is that once you
Speaker 1: become a mother yourself, you have two children, you're able
Speaker 1: to see your mother's inability to be a functional grandparent
Speaker 1: much earlier than you ever have been able to understand
Speaker 1: her inability to be a parent. Which I think is
Speaker 1: something that's so universal when somebody has had an extraordinarily
Speaker 1: difficult parent, is that when you become a parent yourself,
Speaker 1: suddenly you see the level of dysfunction or mental illness
Speaker 1: and the cost of it, and you're not going to
Speaker 1: let them happen to your children the thing that happened
Speaker 1: to you. Yes. Yet another pivot point occurs when Liz
Speaker 1: receives a call that her mother is being evicted from
Speaker 1: the apartment she's lived in for years, the same apartment
Speaker 1: that Liz has co signed the lease with her each year.
Speaker 1: So one day when I was pregnant with my second
Speaker 1: and had I had my kids in very quick succession.
Speaker 1: So I'm holding You've got Rachel in a in a
Speaker 1: wrap and the bump seven months bump of David it
Speaker 1: looked like a camel on inside, um, you know, swawing
Speaker 1: through the GC heat. We have moved at DUC for
Speaker 1: ours job and the phone rings and its adult protective
Speaker 1: services in New York. Asking if I'm planning on showing
Speaker 1: up for any of the court appearances and I say,
Speaker 1: what court appearances, And it turns out that she had
Speaker 1: stopped paying rent about a year earlier. And the back
Speaker 1: story on this is that since very soon after college,
Speaker 1: I had started paying some of her bills. Another one
Speaker 1: of the sort of mysteries around my childhood was that
Speaker 1: my mother had worked since the early seventies be whore
Speaker 1: I was born, and to this day, I don't know
Speaker 1: what her source of income was. I don't know how
Speaker 1: she raised me. In high school, she had rented out
Speaker 1: the additional rooms in the apartment to international students. She
Speaker 1: would run about and breakfast, that kind of thing. The
Speaker 1: apartment was her one asset, her her rent stabilized least
Speaker 1: was her one asset. And she had called me in
Speaker 1: the middle of that awful breakup and said, I need
Speaker 1: a little help with at rent this month. And I said,
Speaker 1: I'm in the middle of a move. Things are going
Speaker 1: badly at work. I think I'm going to lose my job.
Speaker 1: I just don't have it right now. And she said, fun,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it. I'll make it. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: And it seemed like she had things under control, But
Speaker 1: it turned out that was the last month she had
Speaker 1: her paid runs. Now a year later, it turns out
Speaker 1: she has been going to housing court all this time.
Speaker 1: She has a court appointed lawyer from the from the city,
Speaker 1: but every time the judge says, and where is the
Speaker 1: lawyer for the other Midshire? She just sat there silently,
Speaker 1: and so I had never shown up. I didn't know
Speaker 1: what was happening. Adult Protective Services was very concerned. She
Speaker 1: did not seem to understand the gravity of the situation,
Speaker 1: and over the next two years that she lived in
Speaker 1: that apartment, RI and I spent hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: hours trying to find her housing that she would accept.
Speaker 1: If you are impoverished and elderly, you are actually in
Speaker 1: a somewhat better situation than if you are middle class,
Speaker 1: because there are no assets to spend down. She had
Speaker 1: qualified for Medicaid, you know, years and years before she
Speaker 1: had neither income nor assets. I think her total income
Speaker 1: was something like seven dollars a month, and in Social
Speaker 1: Security and food stamps and so there are places that
Speaker 1: take Social Security or Medicaid subsidies, but she wouldn't agree
Speaker 1: to go to them. She would throw out what seemed
Speaker 1: to me to be totally insane refusals like it's in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't do Brooklyn. Or there's a shared fridge.
Speaker 1: How would I ever go someone with a share fridge?
Speaker 1: And I couldn't tell if it was her doing her
Speaker 1: like elderly Kent tankers, Jewish lady persona thing, or she
Speaker 1: genuinely didn't understand that she was in the process of
Speaker 1: being evicted and that she would not have anywhere to go.
Speaker 1: And I think, looking back on it, I think there
Speaker 1: was probably a spectrum. Probably at the beginning she was
Speaker 1: doing a ship because she was scared, but by the
Speaker 1: end of it, she really did not seem to have
Speaker 1: any concept of what was going on. And by the
Speaker 1: very end, after the I don't know the tenth of
Speaker 1: the eleventh hearing, a judge came and did a bedside
Speaker 1: hearing and ultimately decided that there was no point in
Speaker 1: continuing them because she just kept repeating, these people should
Speaker 1: leave me alone. I have a month's rent saved, not
Speaker 1: realizing that by that time she was three years in
Speaker 1: the hole, and she's also put you and your own
Speaker 1: finances and therefore your family in a kind of jeopardy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she she sure had um. I did not know that
Speaker 1: there was a laws out there naming me and had
Speaker 1: gone to a judgment that would have what if an
Speaker 1: adult version of going on need a permanent record? Is?
Speaker 1: You know where we're in DC. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: government town. Most jobs require background check. I couldn't have
Speaker 1: passed the security clearance anywhere. We couldn't get insurance at
Speaker 1: one point, just because there was a lawsuit at standing.
Speaker 1: It took a long time. We ultimately did extricate ourselves
Speaker 1: from it, but but my mother obviously remained. He remained
Speaker 1: in the crosstairs. We'll be back in a moment with
Speaker 1: more family secrets. Liz stops returning her mother's calls. She's
Speaker 1: calling ten fifteen times a day. She calls every Friday
Speaker 1: evening and leave the message wishing her a good shop
Speaker 1: is a good sabbath. But Liz won't be pulled back in,
Speaker 1: As she writes, I did what women have always done.
Speaker 1: I cut off the risk to my children. The reminder
Speaker 1: of how dangerous she could be made me quail when
Speaker 1: I thought of them caught up in her vortex. I
Speaker 1: did for them what I had never been able in
Speaker 1: forty years to do for myself. Admit that taking responsibility
Speaker 1: for insanity only spreads the insanity around. So your mother
Speaker 1: is evicted. Yes, So, after a little bit over three years,
Speaker 1: the judgment finally went through and the marshall arrived with
Speaker 1: a drill and drill through the lock, and they brought
Speaker 1: my mother to an intake shelter in the Bronx. I
Speaker 1: don't know if she was surprised or she had expected
Speaker 1: it happened. Her aid had packed her a suitcase and
Speaker 1: took her personal stuff with her, but I think they
Speaker 1: give you half an hour to pack and she was
Speaker 1: gone shortly after Liz's mother is forced to leave the apartment,
Speaker 1: it falls on Liz to go clear out her things.
Speaker 1: Amid the detritus of a life. There are boxes, files,
Speaker 1: documents that is proof in the form of letters and
Speaker 1: exchanges from neighbors who had expressed worry over Liz and
Speaker 1: the sounds that were coming out of the apartment. Liz
Speaker 1: also makes a staggering discovery when she finds a certain book.
Speaker 1: Her mother quite amazingly owns a book titled Understanding the
Speaker 1: Borderline Mother by an author named Christine Larson. Further proof.
Speaker 1: By owning this book, on some level, her mother must
Speaker 1: have known she was so sick, yet not so sick
Speaker 1: that she didn't know that this was the very malady
Speaker 1: that plagued her. It was an extraordinary moment that the
Speaker 1: dust chapter was off the book and I lift open
Speaker 1: the front cover and I just bellowed with astonishment that
Speaker 1: this was what I had found. And you know that,
Speaker 1: to this day, I'm not sure why she bought that book.
Speaker 1: My mother was a ferocious reader of all kinds of
Speaker 1: books and a lot of self help, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: clear to me because borderline personality sort of can be
Speaker 1: passed down from parent to child, as the parents who
Speaker 1: is in such pain creates a traumatic experience for the
Speaker 1: for the next child. And now, having read her mother's
Speaker 1: letters to other family members, I believe that she also
Speaker 1: suffered in the same way. So I don't know if
Speaker 1: my mother bought it seeing herself as the adult child
Speaker 1: of someone of BPD, or if she saw herself in
Speaker 1: it as the parents. And either way, you know there
Speaker 1: was a Dengel cleaning reminder card tucked into page their team.
Speaker 1: She clearly didn't get very far one way or the other.
Speaker 1: You describe reading passages from that book allowed to Ari
Speaker 1: in bed. You know that that feeling of just being
Speaker 1: completely understood in a book of just yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: That's what went on between us. It was incredible to
Speaker 1: read about other people who had had similar experiences. There
Speaker 1: were stories in there that were far worse than what
Speaker 1: my mother and stuff. There were people in the book
Speaker 1: talking about how they slept with a knife under their
Speaker 1: pillow all through their childhood. My mother was capable of
Speaker 1: hurting me, but I knew she would not kill me.
Speaker 1: That was that was never my concern. But it was
Speaker 1: amazing to read other stories of people who had grown
Speaker 1: up in this entirely constructed fairytale life. You know, my
Speaker 1: mother had created the story for us that you know,
Speaker 1: she was mourning her dead husband, living in austere celibacy,
Speaker 1: and that she had the sort of perfect hie, achieving
Speaker 1: child and everything looks great, except, of course, I was
Speaker 1: a greeting depressed mass. She had been having an affair
Speaker 1: with a married man for the majority of her adult life.
Speaker 1: She was not ogado, she had never been married to
Speaker 1: my father. She had me living under a false Social
Speaker 1: Security number. I mean, she just constructed the Truman show
Speaker 1: for us, and none of it was real. Lizz's mother
Speaker 1: is taken to a shelter with a limit for a stay.
Speaker 1: As opposed to be two weeks, she stays for five.
Speaker 1: At one point, a social worker at the shelter caused
Speaker 1: Liz to tell her that her mother had stopped showering.
Speaker 1: That really shook me out. My mother was very big
Speaker 1: on cleanliness, and that, I think really let me know
Speaker 1: that what was happening was no longer stubbornness and no
Speaker 1: longer her putting on any kind of stick, but that
Speaker 1: she was really descending into this last phase in her life.
Speaker 1: And when you know, telling friends about it, I said
Speaker 1: that I could see a couple of outcome. Either she
Speaker 1: would neglect her hygiene so much she would you get
Speaker 1: an infection and die. Or she would get in a
Speaker 1: fight with someone and would be arrested and the justice
Speaker 1: system would take over where the shelter system had stopped.
Speaker 1: Or she would get sick in some other way and
Speaker 1: go to the hospital and then the health system would
Speaker 1: take over. But that we had now reached a crisis
Speaker 1: point where this three years couldn't just unschool forever anymore,
Speaker 1: she could stall anymore. There were now enough people involved
Speaker 1: in her life that something was going to change. And
Speaker 1: sure enough, um after about five weeks, the social worker
Speaker 1: called to let me know that she had been taken
Speaker 1: to assist living facility in Coney Island, Brooklyn, with the
Speaker 1: unbelievably amazing name of Mermaid Matter. And if I'm ever
Speaker 1: get to write to TV series, I will call it
Speaker 1: Mermaid Matter because this is just the fact that such
Speaker 1: a place is. This just tickles me so much. And
Speaker 1: we felt that it was this was the dream come true.
Speaker 1: This was the answer that we have been looking for,
Speaker 1: because all along we kept thinking, should we just go
Speaker 1: rescue her? Should we just go pick her up? You know,
Speaker 1: everyone who called me the court evaluator of the social
Speaker 1: workers kept saying, when are you coming to get her?
Speaker 1: And then I would explain she wasn't allowed access to
Speaker 1: my children because she could be too violent, and then
Speaker 1: there would be this silence, right and we would try
Speaker 1: to figure out what if we pay her rent? What
Speaker 1: if we do this, what if we do that? And
Speaker 1: every solution we came up with uh would not solve
Speaker 1: the problem because she had reached a point where she
Speaker 1: could no longer pay the rent and she would not
Speaker 1: willingly live anywhere else, And so we thought, maybe this
Speaker 1: is the magic solution where she is now somewhere safe.
Speaker 1: You know, she has one roommateance that six, they're feeding her,
Speaker 1: if there's someone watching after her, it's gonna be okay.
Speaker 1: And for two weeks I would talk to her every
Speaker 1: now and then and like she had found her dentries again.
Speaker 1: She sounded normal, she sounded chipper, it's id seemed like
Speaker 1: things are gonna be great. And then after two weeks,
Speaker 1: I get a cough from their social worker saying, your
Speaker 1: mother has gone to the hospital and she hasn't come back.
Speaker 1: So she ends up in the hospital for about a week,
Speaker 1: and she refused to let anyone examine or touch her.
Speaker 1: And so you know, one day that the doctor calls
Speaker 1: me and says, we have a few minutes I can
Speaker 1: intubate her, but she is dying right now. And I
Speaker 1: was alone in the house. I had just gotten home
Speaker 1: from work, and I knew that my mother hated medical care.
Speaker 1: She had me at home in so that she wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to go to a hospital or have any truck
Speaker 1: with doctors. I knew that the disaster for her would
Speaker 1: be extending her life, and so I said, I said, no, don't,
Speaker 1: don't intubate her, let her go, and so they put
Speaker 1: me on speaker phone, and I just listened for six
Speaker 1: or seven minutes as I heard nurses rustling around and
Speaker 1: you know, clipboard being put down, and what I had
Speaker 1: never before thought to think of as the sounds of death,
Speaker 1: which are very logistical in a lot of the ways.
Speaker 1: I heard the sheets rustling, you know, she she coughed,
Speaker 1: I heard a little choke, and then there was silence
Speaker 1: and footsteps and the doctor, whose voice is wavering because
Speaker 1: my mother had had herself checked into the roomatology word
Speaker 1: when she arrived. I imagine you dont have a lot
Speaker 1: of deaths in rooms, tells me that that she has gone,
Speaker 1: And because I'm not there, all I can do is
Speaker 1: imagine it right that this there has been this death.
Speaker 1: The two great dramas of our lives are birth and death.
Speaker 1: And now we have the death and is over and
Speaker 1: now they have to pull up the sheet and do
Speaker 1: the paperwork, and we hang up, and I'm just standing
Speaker 1: alone in my living room and I've been listening to
Speaker 1: a podcast when the call came in. And so this
Speaker 1: American life just turns right back home and starts squeaking
Speaker 1: through earbuds, and it was the most surreal thing that
Speaker 1: had happened, because to me, my mother, despite how much
Speaker 1: she had become diminished, was still that gorgon of my childhood.
Speaker 1: She was so powerful, and she had always been sick,
Speaker 1: but she had never been dying until she was dead.
Speaker 1: Do you think that there's something about the dynamic of
Speaker 1: having a mother like yours where it seems impossible that
Speaker 1: they will predecease you, that you're just going to be
Speaker 1: in it together forever and ever there there so all
Speaker 1: powerful that somehow it's never gonna end. I absolutely thought
Speaker 1: my mother was going to be the first modern woman
Speaker 1: to live to the age of a hundred sixty. She
Speaker 1: was going to be the Jewish medistla and she was
Speaker 1: going to outlive all of us, running on a pure
Speaker 1: diet of emtam and sheet cakes in vitriol. I could
Speaker 1: not have imagined a world in when she was dead
Speaker 1: until very, very suvely she was y you rode, and
Speaker 1: God did I relate to this um? The world without
Speaker 1: her felt safer than it ever had before. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: life as my mother's daughter could be very booby trapped.
Speaker 1: My mother had seen at one stage in her life
Speaker 1: hypnotist in addition to a psychiatrist when she was trying
Speaker 1: to stop smoke, and she found it very helpful, but
Speaker 1: she couldn't afford to go very often, so she made
Speaker 1: tapes of the sessions and saved them. And after her death,
Speaker 1: I found these recordings of her therapy sessions, and I
Speaker 1: went through this whole ethical quandary. You know, I would
Speaker 1: be man, I would be curious if someone ever listened
Speaker 1: to taps in my therapy. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: maybe there were stories on there, Maybe there was more news.
Speaker 1: Maybe there was something about my father she hadn't that
Speaker 1: I never knew. Maybe there's something about her that I
Speaker 1: never knew. Write so many mysteries still to be found out,
Speaker 1: and listening to them was very validating because she she
Speaker 1: presents all these stories to the psychiatrists of how I
Speaker 1: have betrayed her and let her down, and those stories
Speaker 1: were such things as I had gone on vacation with
Speaker 1: my first girlfriend during which time, it turns out, and
Speaker 1: she relates to the stories that these are totally reasonable
Speaker 1: things to do. She had gotten some of her friends
Speaker 1: and mind to research the hotel she knew were staying
Speaker 1: at on the internet. And sent her pictures of it.
Speaker 1: She called the front desk and a security to watch me.
Speaker 1: Those kinds of things were for her the acts of
Speaker 1: the loving mother. And that went on for years and years,
Speaker 1: and in the three years when she was declining and
Speaker 1: caught it in the legal system, we just kept finding
Speaker 1: out more things that I hadn't known, more things about
Speaker 1: the doctor who it turns out, was catching her social
Speaker 1: Security checks, more ways in which she had angered the landlord.
Speaker 1: And when she died, there was this line in the
Speaker 1: sands that there might still be things to find out,
Speaker 1: there might still be papers I haven't found, but she
Speaker 1: can't spring anymore on me. That story is that vant
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly
Speaker 1: z Achor is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
Speaker 1: the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your
Speaker 1: story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
Speaker 1: one eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You
Speaker 1: can also find me on Instagram at Danny Writer. And
Speaker 1: if you'd like to know more about the story that
Speaker 1: inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance Yeah for
Speaker 1: more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.