WEBVTT - Sail On 0:00:00.200 --> 0:00:04.560 Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:06.160 --> 0:00:09.720 Only recently did my father Larry appear in a dream. 0:00:10.200 --> 0:00:13.480 We were together in a small harbor, crowded with sailboats, 0:00:13.520 --> 0:00:16.040 tied one to the other in a web of lines, 0:00:16.600 --> 0:00:20.239 hopping from one deck to the next. Despite their jostling 0:00:20.280 --> 0:00:24.479 by waves, the holes didn't bump. The water sounded alive, 0:00:25.200 --> 0:00:27.800 proud that I would finally take up ocean sailing. My 0:00:27.880 --> 0:00:31.480 father wanted to help me choose the best boat. His 0:00:31.560 --> 0:00:34.520 words of encouragement were brief, but his smile was ripe 0:00:34.560 --> 0:00:39.440 with paternal love. Perhaps the imprint of my parents exists 0:00:39.479 --> 0:00:42.600 in the truthful tale of my genes. The color of 0:00:42.640 --> 0:00:47.360 my hair, my mother's dark brows, my conover wide smile, 0:00:47.880 --> 0:00:52.160 my father's easy laugh, my small muscled body that loves 0:00:52.200 --> 0:00:55.520 to dance a wild streak, as I'm told my mother did. 0:00:56.600 --> 0:01:00.360 And two whatever I experienced as an infant must also 0:01:00.440 --> 0:01:04.000 be within me. The tethered gaze between my mother and me, 0:01:04.640 --> 0:01:08.080 her voice that I surely recognized straight from the womb. 0:01:08.520 --> 0:01:11.600 My father's touch as he stroked the tiny wings of 0:01:11.640 --> 0:01:15.639 my shoulder blades, the smell of my parents, the taste 0:01:15.680 --> 0:01:19.200 of her milk, my primal known world. 0:01:22.360 --> 0:01:27.440 That's Sarah Conover, author of the recent memoir Set Adrift. 0:01:28.040 --> 0:01:31.520 Sarah's is the story of a family tragedy that occurred 0:01:31.520 --> 0:01:34.639 when she was a very young child, so young, in fact, 0:01:34.920 --> 0:01:37.800 that she has no memory of it. She's left with 0:01:37.840 --> 0:01:41.959 a lifetime of questions, of longing, and of the profound 0:01:41.959 --> 0:01:45.759 desire to understand all that has been lost? What can 0:01:45.800 --> 0:01:49.360 we piece together even when the pieces have been shattered 0:01:49.680 --> 0:02:07.720 beyond recognition. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, 0:02:07.960 --> 0:02:10.160 the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we 0:02:10.240 --> 0:02:13.920 keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. 0:02:19.040 --> 0:02:23.280 It's kind of a complicated map my childhood. So my 0:02:23.400 --> 0:02:28.600 parents and grandparents vanished on January eighth, nineteen fifty eight. 0:02:29.400 --> 0:02:33.520 My grandfather spent a lot of winters down in the 0:02:33.560 --> 0:02:37.120 tropics sailing. He was one of the most trophied ocean 0:02:37.240 --> 0:02:41.520 racing yachtsmen of his time, commodoer of the Cruising Club 0:02:41.520 --> 0:02:45.000 of America, publisher of Voting Industry, on the board of 0:02:45.080 --> 0:02:48.720 Yachting Magazine, and my father was a contender for the 0:02:48.760 --> 0:02:52.600 Olympic Trials, and they had invited my parents down. My 0:02:52.960 --> 0:02:58.519 grandfather and grandmother to join them. Right after Christmas. January first, 0:02:58.560 --> 0:03:00.840 nineteen fifty eight is when they left the Florida Keys 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:06.440 headed extensively to Miami, but actually by way of the Bahamas, 0:03:07.000 --> 0:03:10.360 and they ran into the worst unpredicted storm in the 0:03:10.520 --> 0:03:15.040 Miami Weather Bureau's history at that time, where the day 0:03:15.120 --> 0:03:18.320 started out as you know, life breeze is expected, and 0:03:18.360 --> 0:03:22.120 then like within six hours, there were seventy mile an 0:03:22.160 --> 0:03:27.320 hour winds and forty foot waves. Many boats foundered, many 0:03:27.360 --> 0:03:30.760 many and my family's voat was the only one that 0:03:30.880 --> 0:03:36.080 didn't return. And because of my grandfather's renowned in the 0:03:36.160 --> 0:03:39.200 yachting and business worlds, it was probably one of the 0:03:39.200 --> 0:03:44.120 most extensive private searches, private and public searches of the time. 0:03:44.840 --> 0:03:49.160 The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Cuban Navy, all sorts. 0:03:49.440 --> 0:03:52.960 They combed twenty four thousand square miles looking for them, 0:03:53.480 --> 0:03:56.640 truly needle in a haystack, and one of the problems 0:03:56.800 --> 0:03:59.960 was that the weather state stormy for a number of days. 0:04:00.880 --> 0:04:04.640 They were reported missing on a Saturday, and the search 0:04:04.680 --> 0:04:08.200 couldn't start till a Tuesday, and that might have been 0:04:08.240 --> 0:04:11.760 the only window where they could have been saved. They 0:04:11.800 --> 0:04:14.840 were seen by a fishing boat nineteen hours after the 0:04:14.880 --> 0:04:20.279 storm almost capsized five people hanging off the lines what 0:04:20.400 --> 0:04:24.120 are called drogues by the end of the boat sea anchors. 0:04:24.800 --> 0:04:28.279 But the boat that saw them was also foundered. Their 0:04:28.279 --> 0:04:32.640 motor had cut out, so there was a search that 0:04:32.800 --> 0:04:37.040 went on for quite a bit, and the dinghy of 0:04:37.080 --> 0:04:40.320 the boat, the kind of the little lifeboat, washed ashore 0:04:40.560 --> 0:04:45.559 on north of Miami about eighty miles five days later 0:04:45.720 --> 0:04:50.080 or so, and nothing else was found. Pieces were put 0:04:50.120 --> 0:04:53.440 together of maybe what happened, but really, you know, forty 0:04:53.560 --> 0:04:57.120 forty five foot wave, seventy mile an hour winds, it 0:04:57.240 --> 0:04:59.679 tells a lot, and there might have been a mechanical 0:04:59.720 --> 0:05:01.200 fil on the boat. We don't know. 0:05:02.200 --> 0:05:05.600 You were eighteen months old, your sister Eileen was almost three. 0:05:06.440 --> 0:05:11.799 At what point did you have any sense of anything 0:05:11.839 --> 0:05:15.919 about the story of knowing that you have lost your parents. 0:05:17.040 --> 0:05:20.400 It's a funny question because you know, back then with 0:05:20.560 --> 0:05:23.320 doctor stock era, you don't talk to kids about these 0:05:23.400 --> 0:05:26.440 kind of things, right, They can't understand it. Really, adults 0:05:26.480 --> 0:05:30.000 can't understand it either. So my sister, who was older, 0:05:30.480 --> 0:05:33.599 she was the one who was told. My grandmother said 0:05:33.680 --> 0:05:37.040 your parents are dead, and I know, my grandmother must 0:05:37.040 --> 0:05:39.160 have said it a number of times. But this is 0:05:39.200 --> 0:05:42.560 the weird thing about early childhood loss is one of 0:05:42.560 --> 0:05:46.080 the things you mourn is that you just know your 0:05:46.080 --> 0:05:49.279 world vanished, and you don't you don't have those stages 0:05:49.320 --> 0:05:54.760 of recognizing cognitively, Oh, I lost my parents. You know, 0:05:54.880 --> 0:05:58.120 it was almost preverbal and all that, so you don't 0:05:58.120 --> 0:06:00.400 have those stages of grief. There was no in a 0:06:00.480 --> 0:06:04.560 way to recognize it. My sister seemed to. She remembers 0:06:04.760 --> 0:06:07.800 people coming into her room and she was in her 0:06:07.839 --> 0:06:11.120 crib and it was like a big black cloud that 0:06:11.240 --> 0:06:14.800 came over the hole. Everything the world just stopped. 0:06:18.040 --> 0:06:20.719 But after the world stops, it also must go on. 0:06:21.720 --> 0:06:24.960 When Sarah and her sister are orphaned by this mysterious 0:06:25.000 --> 0:06:28.440 boating accident, they're sent to live with their aunt, their 0:06:28.480 --> 0:06:31.760 father's sister, fram and her husband, who have two children 0:06:31.800 --> 0:06:35.920 of their own. But Sarah and Eileen's maternal grandmother puts 0:06:36.000 --> 0:06:40.960 up a fight, a long fight. A custody battle persists 0:06:41.080 --> 0:06:44.600 for ten years, during which Sarah and Eileen are required 0:06:44.600 --> 0:06:48.240 to see their grandmother every other weekend. The atmosphere in 0:06:48.279 --> 0:06:51.640 their aunt's home and their grandmothers could not be more different. 0:06:53.320 --> 0:06:55.760 She was the one who was fighting for custody for 0:06:55.800 --> 0:07:00.800 a decade and filled me with vitriol about the family 0:07:00.839 --> 0:07:04.120 with majority custody. They aren't your real family, Those aren't 0:07:04.160 --> 0:07:09.200 your parents. You're not one of them. My father's sister's family, 0:07:09.840 --> 0:07:12.400 the way they had to respond to the grief was 0:07:13.160 --> 0:07:17.280 fran My father's sister couldn't talk about the accident at all. 0:07:17.480 --> 0:07:20.440 She lost her favorite brother, she lost her hero, her mother, 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:24.400 her father. She just couldn't talk about it. So there 0:07:24.440 --> 0:07:27.320 was one family that just couldn't talk about it and 0:07:27.360 --> 0:07:31.400 wouldn't despite all the sailing trophies on the India hutch. 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:36.280 And then the other family, the other one fighting for custody, 0:07:37.040 --> 0:07:42.000 would only talk about it and would say that those 0:07:42.080 --> 0:07:43.880 conivers they killed my daughter. 0:07:45.280 --> 0:07:48.520 You have this phrase in your book that really struck me, 0:07:48.600 --> 0:07:52.080 which was that you were schooled in dissociation and numbness. 0:07:52.600 --> 0:07:56.560 And we've talked a lot about dissociation on this podcast 0:07:56.640 --> 0:08:01.200 as sometimes a healthy defense mechanism degree you know, that 0:08:01.320 --> 0:08:04.720 protects us until we don't need protecting. Obviously, it can 0:08:04.760 --> 0:08:07.440 also be unhealthy. I mean, one of the things that 0:08:07.480 --> 0:08:10.160 also really strikes me is the way that and you 0:08:10.320 --> 0:08:14.000 as so many kids in that era in particular, where 0:08:14.040 --> 0:08:16.720 there was a tragedy in a family or something difficult 0:08:16.720 --> 0:08:21.160 in a family, were left to piece it together for themselves, right, 0:08:21.360 --> 0:08:24.600 And you know, in a way you're dissociating, but at 0:08:24.600 --> 0:08:27.920 the same time you're working overtime to try to piece 0:08:27.960 --> 0:08:30.960 it together between what your grandmother, who you don't really trust, 0:08:31.040 --> 0:08:34.240 is saying to you and what your adoptive parents were 0:08:34.280 --> 0:08:37.439 raising you are saying or not saying to you because 0:08:37.440 --> 0:08:39.560 they don't really want to talk about it, especially Fran. 0:08:40.080 --> 0:08:43.160 Yeah, one of the tragic things is that the family 0:08:43.160 --> 0:08:47.240 that a majority custody was really blown apart, and Fran, 0:08:47.840 --> 0:08:50.839 my mother there just you know, she had four kids 0:08:51.200 --> 0:08:54.560 and she just couldn't give me the attention that my 0:08:54.640 --> 0:08:58.920 grandmother could. And so you know, in certain ways I 0:08:59.000 --> 0:09:02.040 gravitated like this person could give me all the attention 0:09:02.160 --> 0:09:06.120 I need. And my sister and I we would visit 0:09:06.160 --> 0:09:10.160 my grandmother and she was rather an amazing artist and 0:09:10.320 --> 0:09:13.000 had oil paintings that she'd done of my mother and 0:09:13.080 --> 0:09:16.360 had professional photographs of my mother, no conovers, but of 0:09:16.440 --> 0:09:20.280 my mother all over her house in Connecticut. And she 0:09:20.400 --> 0:09:22.880 moved from Fresno to be close to us and to 0:09:22.920 --> 0:09:26.760 try to rest us from the other family. And the 0:09:26.880 --> 0:09:29.000 weird thing was, you know, there were pictures of her 0:09:29.200 --> 0:09:31.439 mother all over the house, but it was that era 0:09:31.600 --> 0:09:35.600 where people didn't smile in photographs, and my sister and 0:09:35.679 --> 0:09:38.719 were like, that's our mother. I mean, you did not 0:09:38.920 --> 0:09:42.240 want to attach to these photographs, and it just it 0:09:42.440 --> 0:09:45.960 just did not really compute that this could be our mother. 0:09:46.640 --> 0:09:50.960 My grandmother was complicated and fascinating too. You know, she 0:09:51.120 --> 0:09:53.839 lost her mother and her sister in the nineteen eighteen flu, 0:09:54.520 --> 0:09:57.440 so she had a tragedy behind her and I think 0:09:57.600 --> 0:10:01.760 her losing her daughter just center over the edge and 0:10:01.840 --> 0:10:04.160 she would do anything to get custody of us. 0:10:04.760 --> 0:10:07.600 Why was she so against your aunt and uncle, who 0:10:07.600 --> 0:10:09.200 became your adoptive parents. 0:10:09.800 --> 0:10:12.680 I think it was existential for her. And she was 0:10:12.679 --> 0:10:16.240 a bit of a kookie character. She was always weirdly 0:10:16.360 --> 0:10:18.480 ended up as a single not weirdly, I think very 0:10:18.520 --> 0:10:22.120 intentionally ended up as a single parent and married in 0:10:22.160 --> 0:10:26.840 the end about five times. And she had sort of 0:10:26.880 --> 0:10:30.920 amazing perseverance and as a single mom, but she would 0:10:30.920 --> 0:10:34.280 divorce whatever guy she got married to pretty fast. 0:10:34.800 --> 0:10:36.640 And your mother was her only child. 0:10:37.240 --> 0:10:40.560 No, she also had a son by a different father, 0:10:41.280 --> 0:10:45.000 and that when she kept her son laying very close 0:10:45.240 --> 0:10:48.280 in ways that you know, I'm sure could be psychologized 0:10:48.440 --> 0:10:51.240 very easily in terms of the Oedipus something. You know, 0:10:51.280 --> 0:10:54.320 he never got his own career. She always supported him. 0:10:54.360 --> 0:10:58.440 He was actually very very smart guy and a great 0:10:58.480 --> 0:11:01.960 flamenco guitar player. She kept him close, and I think 0:11:02.160 --> 0:11:07.040 it was existential for her after losing her daughter that 0:11:07.280 --> 0:11:10.959 she didn't lose him. So in a way, she made 0:11:11.080 --> 0:11:15.040 everybody's life miserable between the two families. And on another hand, 0:11:15.880 --> 0:11:18.840 she taught me to see beauty. In some ways she 0:11:18.880 --> 0:11:22.080 really saved my life. She would set up an easel 0:11:22.360 --> 0:11:24.920 for both my sister and I and a beautiful still 0:11:24.960 --> 0:11:28.199 life on her breakfast table. The weekends we were with 0:11:28.240 --> 0:11:31.440 her and teach us to paint watercolor and oil colors, 0:11:31.520 --> 0:11:35.560 and she played the piano and danced. You know. It 0:11:35.640 --> 0:11:37.480 was she would let us have the run of the 0:11:37.520 --> 0:11:39.280 house and that was pretty fun. 0:11:39.760 --> 0:11:42.520 She also didn't want you to call her grandma right. 0:11:43.080 --> 0:11:45.960 Right, so that was another thing, so she had us 0:11:46.040 --> 0:11:49.240 call me mayor, which means mother in French. We did 0:11:49.280 --> 0:11:53.160 not know that, and it also ironically means the sea 0:11:53.320 --> 0:11:53.880 in French. 0:11:59.400 --> 0:12:16.520 We'll be right back buck. Memory is such a puzzle. 0:12:17.040 --> 0:12:22.360 We need witnesses, especially in circumstances like Sarah's. As she writes, 0:12:23.240 --> 0:12:27.440 orphans not only lose their parents but also the historians 0:12:27.559 --> 0:12:31.680 of their early years. And in Sarah's case, she's on 0:12:31.720 --> 0:12:34.520 the receiving end of contradictory stories from her aunt and 0:12:34.559 --> 0:12:38.160 her grandmother. So pieces of the story of the truth 0:12:38.800 --> 0:12:41.679 come to her over time, like bits of buried treasure. 0:12:42.600 --> 0:12:45.680 She begins to be able to assemble, little by little 0:12:46.040 --> 0:12:49.080 the truths of who she is and where she belongs. 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:54.640 There's different stages where you can think, oh no, wait 0:12:54.679 --> 0:12:58.120 a minute, wait, I look like her. But when you're little, 0:12:58.240 --> 0:13:02.720 you're just trying to land somewhere. And the whole family, 0:13:03.000 --> 0:13:08.000 everybody was set adrift by this accident, and where do 0:13:08.080 --> 0:13:12.480 I belong? I think orphans have the ability to you know, 0:13:12.520 --> 0:13:15.160 they're kind of a desperate figure, but they also can 0:13:15.200 --> 0:13:18.600 remake themselves. And at some point I just decided that's 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:22.120 what I'm going to do. I watched the Sound of 0:13:22.200 --> 0:13:27.240 Music probably twenty times, and you know, decided that mountains 0:13:27.280 --> 0:13:29.560 weren't going to be my thing. I just couldn't go 0:13:29.640 --> 0:13:34.960 near the water, and so completely left the whole sailing 0:13:35.440 --> 0:13:40.040 business behind and pretty young, went out to rocky mountains 0:13:40.240 --> 0:13:44.360 and took a mountaineering course. And you know, I was 0:13:44.400 --> 0:13:48.480 probably maybe seventeen or eighteen when I walked across Switzerland 0:13:48.480 --> 0:13:51.760 by myself after having watched the Sound of Music, not 0:13:51.840 --> 0:13:54.720 realizing that that movie was in Austria, thinking it was 0:13:54.720 --> 0:14:00.560 in Switzerland. But I orphaned myself. I orphaned the grief, 0:14:01.200 --> 0:14:05.320 and you know, it seemed okay. I was restless, but 0:14:05.440 --> 0:14:10.320 I also looked around me and I saw alcoholism. You know, 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:13.360 by the time I was a teenager, my sister, Eileen, 0:14:14.280 --> 0:14:18.880 the other orphan, she had really disengaged from my grandmother, 0:14:19.120 --> 0:14:21.600 and my grandmother had shown me a lot of favoritism 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:26.120 by then, and so that wasn't really a refuge anymore 0:14:26.160 --> 0:14:28.600 at all. And I didn't I couldn't trust my grandmother 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:33.600 then either. You know, my father's siblings, except for Friend, 0:14:34.000 --> 0:14:37.760 really dove into alcohol and very troubled lives. And that 0:14:37.880 --> 0:14:40.600 nobody would talk about the elephant in the living room. 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:44.280 You know, I understand that that generation, the greatest generation. 0:14:44.480 --> 0:14:47.920 They had no tools. Nobody was talking about post traumatic anything. 0:14:48.640 --> 0:14:52.240 Nobody knew what to do with grief. So I understand 0:14:52.280 --> 0:14:54.560 it now. But you know, I had that group not 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:57.920 talking about it, and the other group who was so skewed, 0:14:58.120 --> 0:15:02.440 my my grandmother. I just thought, nobody's telling the truth here, 0:15:02.600 --> 0:15:06.760 and I need to know. I need truth. There has 0:15:06.840 --> 0:15:09.880 to be some authenticity. So at a very young age, 0:15:09.920 --> 0:15:13.640 I became, you know, a religious seeker. At first, it 0:15:13.760 --> 0:15:17.840 was through nature. When I was walking through Switzerland, I 0:15:17.920 --> 0:15:20.760 happened to walk into the tent where the great Indian 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:25.960 saint Christiana Murdy was teaching of all people, and that 0:15:26.240 --> 0:15:30.000 started to open other doors, and I became a religious 0:15:30.000 --> 0:15:33.240 studies major. Fran used to call me the biggest why 0:15:33.320 --> 0:15:35.760 kids she ever met, And I think I've been asking, 0:15:35.920 --> 0:15:37.640 you know, what is the question we've been asking our 0:15:37.680 --> 0:15:41.720 whole lives. One of them is why? Why? And what? 0:15:42.560 --> 0:15:46.000 And are we loved and by whom? And so there 0:15:46.120 --> 0:15:49.440 was a lot of why for me, why and where 0:15:49.680 --> 0:15:54.160 is truth? Where's our foundation? I left home when I 0:15:54.240 --> 0:15:58.920 was seventeen. I graduated early from high school, went out west, 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:03.760 went to a commune. But you know, along with the 0:16:03.840 --> 0:16:08.440 hippie era, there was a lot of spiritual banqueting around 0:16:08.480 --> 0:16:12.280 as well, and I guess I, you know, religious studies 0:16:12.280 --> 0:16:15.400 certainly gave me a view of it, and I had 0:16:15.400 --> 0:16:18.760 to just keep searching. There was a time when I 0:16:18.880 --> 0:16:22.000 was hiking in Nepal and I was hiking by myself. 0:16:22.000 --> 0:16:25.000 I was trekking in Nepaul and a Tibetan monk came 0:16:25.080 --> 0:16:29.360 in the opposite direction and smiled at me in a 0:16:29.360 --> 0:16:31.880 way that I'd never seen a human being smile in 0:16:31.920 --> 0:16:37.080 my life. And this was right before college, and I 0:16:37.080 --> 0:16:39.880 felt like, Okay, that is my compass, whatever that is, 0:16:39.920 --> 0:16:41.240 that's my compass. 0:16:42.480 --> 0:16:46.160 I can so picture that encounter with the monk on 0:16:46.240 --> 0:16:49.080 the path. I can picture that smile. I really, I 0:16:49.080 --> 0:16:52.640 can just see it. And you know, I wonder. I mean, 0:16:52.680 --> 0:16:55.480 you were, on the one hand, trying to stay ahead 0:16:55.480 --> 0:16:59.800 of what was haunting you as you were making these tracks, 0:17:00.080 --> 0:17:03.880 these trips and searching for something that you weren't sure 0:17:03.920 --> 0:17:08.639 what you were searching for. You quote the Buddhist psychologist 0:17:08.880 --> 0:17:15.480 Tara Brock as saying that trauma is severed belonging, and 0:17:16.000 --> 0:17:18.560 that really really struck me. It struck me as a 0:17:18.600 --> 0:17:24.000 deep truth. And it seems that your sense of belonging 0:17:24.280 --> 0:17:27.360 was ripped away from you as an eighteen month old. 0:17:27.880 --> 0:17:32.720 And if that's your story, then it would seem that 0:17:32.800 --> 0:17:39.600 life becomes to some degree at some point about finding 0:17:40.560 --> 0:17:43.760 a way for that belonging to become a whole. 0:17:44.960 --> 0:17:48.760 Yeah, and I do think that's what you know. Sometimes 0:17:48.800 --> 0:17:50.800 I call it the mother whole, but it could be 0:17:50.920 --> 0:17:54.359 the God hole. It could be what makes this steel whole. 0:17:55.000 --> 0:17:57.800 I think orphans is a noun and a verb. We 0:17:57.880 --> 0:18:01.800 are orphans, but we are also or in others that 0:18:01.920 --> 0:18:04.960 you know as a protective mechanism. And it gets mixed 0:18:05.000 --> 0:18:07.679 up with that horrible thing of you know, independence in 0:18:07.720 --> 0:18:13.400 American culture, but we orphan ourselves from one another. And yes, 0:18:13.600 --> 0:18:18.439 the need for belonging is so fundamental, and I was 0:18:18.520 --> 0:18:22.480 looking for that, whether spiritual nature. I was looking so 0:18:22.720 --> 0:18:26.920 hard for that. I was looking for bedrock. So I 0:18:26.960 --> 0:18:32.200 decided the Gagnes, my eventually adoptive family. I'd already been 0:18:32.200 --> 0:18:34.960 told by my grandmother forever, they're not really your family, 0:18:35.040 --> 0:18:38.000 And you know, your name is Sarah Conover and their Gagne. 0:18:38.119 --> 0:18:41.399 Even though I grew up as a Gagne. I think 0:18:41.480 --> 0:18:46.240 that I just was looking hard and working hard for 0:18:46.359 --> 0:18:49.400 that sense of belonging. What do I belong to? What 0:18:49.760 --> 0:18:51.840 do we all belong to? Which is our bedrock? 0:18:52.640 --> 0:18:54.320 How old were you when you changed your name back 0:18:54.359 --> 0:18:54.840 to Conover. 0:18:55.640 --> 0:18:58.840 Yeah, I was in their early twenties when I moved 0:18:58.840 --> 0:19:01.280 out west. It kind of like, Okay, I'm just gonna 0:19:01.320 --> 0:19:03.800 do the whole thing. I'm going to take my birth name, 0:19:03.840 --> 0:19:07.040 my beautiful birth name back, and I left the Gagnes. 0:19:07.040 --> 0:19:10.119 They're all back on the East Coast and I'm my 0:19:10.240 --> 0:19:13.119 own self here and there we go. I'm going to 0:19:13.240 --> 0:19:16.200 just take that name back and like you know, putting 0:19:16.240 --> 0:19:18.720 them all in a bottle in the sea, like goodbye. 0:19:19.040 --> 0:19:21.159 And of course we can't do that. Of course we 0:19:21.160 --> 0:19:24.680 can't do that. So my biological sister still has the 0:19:24.840 --> 0:19:29.240 last name by wing Gagne, and my other siblings kept 0:19:29.240 --> 0:19:32.040 that name. But they were my I don't call them 0:19:32.040 --> 0:19:32.880 my step siblings. 0:19:32.960 --> 0:19:34.240 Well, and they were your cousins. 0:19:34.520 --> 0:19:39.680 They were my cousins. They were my first cousins. Yeah. 0:19:40.080 --> 0:19:43.280 As often happens, when we open one door, other doors 0:19:43.320 --> 0:19:46.760 open too. Sarah changes her name back to the name 0:19:46.840 --> 0:19:50.520 she was born with, and she also meets her future husband, Doug. 0:19:51.560 --> 0:19:55.840 She's studying to become an aikido, a Japanese martial arts instructor, 0:19:56.160 --> 0:20:01.280 in Boulder, Colorado. Doug is practicing martial arts too. They 0:20:01.280 --> 0:20:05.159 have shared interests and an immediate connection. They get married. 0:20:05.200 --> 0:20:08.159 Within a couple of years, they moved to California to 0:20:08.200 --> 0:20:12.320 start a family. Things seem to be going smoothly for Sarah. 0:20:12.800 --> 0:20:15.920 She feels far from her childhood, which have been defined 0:20:15.960 --> 0:20:21.240 by secrecy, tragedy, and grief, but her grief returns and reverberates, 0:20:21.760 --> 0:20:23.160 because that's what grief does. 0:20:25.000 --> 0:20:27.120 I was still running hard ahead of the grief, I think, 0:20:27.200 --> 0:20:30.879 and numb and pretty excited about a new baby. And 0:20:31.480 --> 0:20:34.040 I think the first big wake up call was that 0:20:34.080 --> 0:20:38.000 when my you know, there's that book bussel Vandercock's The 0:20:38.000 --> 0:20:40.920 Body keeps the Score. I also think the body keeps 0:20:40.960 --> 0:20:45.840 the clock. And at eighteen months. I only put this 0:20:45.920 --> 0:20:49.080 together about six months ago, Danny. Eighteen months is when 0:20:49.119 --> 0:20:50.600 I started not to be able to sleep. 0:20:50.920 --> 0:20:52.520 When your son was eighteen months old. 0:20:52.960 --> 0:20:55.920 Yeah, when he was eighteen months old, that's when sleep 0:20:55.960 --> 0:20:59.159 got very challenging for me. And later on I realized. 0:21:00.280 --> 0:21:03.920 We left California. We left and fran I moved to California. 0:21:03.960 --> 0:21:06.320 We decided all to move there together. You know, I'll 0:21:06.359 --> 0:21:09.440 move there. Let's do it at the same time, her 0:21:09.560 --> 0:21:14.159 second husband had family there. And I put this also 0:21:14.240 --> 0:21:17.399 together about six months ago. Is that when my daughter 0:21:17.480 --> 0:21:21.239 turned eighteen months old, I also left fran behind and 0:21:21.359 --> 0:21:26.000 moved up to Washington State from California. Even though I 0:21:26.160 --> 0:21:30.280 had told people in California, I had said, I finally 0:21:30.280 --> 0:21:33.200 have the mommy I've been looking for. Brand was there 0:21:33.240 --> 0:21:36.400 all the time for us. It was a beautiful thing. 0:21:36.560 --> 0:21:40.359 And yet, and yet I wanted to move back to 0:21:40.400 --> 0:21:42.280 the mountains, my safe place. 0:21:45.400 --> 0:21:49.200 As Sarah enters midlife, she can no longer outrun her grief. 0:21:49.960 --> 0:21:53.280 She sinks into a depression that seems, on the surface 0:21:53.280 --> 0:21:56.119 of things at odds with the beautiful life she has 0:21:56.200 --> 0:21:58.480 created with her family in this beautiful place. 0:22:00.720 --> 0:22:03.000 It's one other thing I wanted to say about orphaning 0:22:03.400 --> 0:22:07.679 being an orphan and orphaning others and orphaning yourself, orphaning 0:22:07.680 --> 0:22:11.160 your own feelings from yourself. I orphaned my grief when 0:22:11.160 --> 0:22:14.160 I looked up you know, secrets. As in family secrets, 0:22:14.240 --> 0:22:17.640 it also means to separate. I really kind of thought 0:22:17.680 --> 0:22:18.200 about that. 0:22:18.760 --> 0:22:21.119 To separate, surely it does that. 0:22:21.840 --> 0:22:23.720 Yeah, and all of this, I mean, there was just 0:22:24.240 --> 0:22:29.560 separation and secretivity everywhere the ocean. Secreted my parents away, 0:22:29.960 --> 0:22:34.200 people secreted their guilt, their grief. We separated ourselves. I mean, 0:22:34.240 --> 0:22:36.919 I think that was the biggest tragedy of this is 0:22:36.960 --> 0:22:40.800 that it didn't bring you know, grief to heal has 0:22:40.840 --> 0:22:45.240 to bring a community together. It blew us apart till recently, really, 0:22:45.840 --> 0:22:48.480 until my book was done and we could kind of 0:22:48.480 --> 0:22:51.680 all see the map of the grief, because grief can 0:22:51.720 --> 0:22:55.359 be horizonless, kind of like the sea, and for my 0:22:55.400 --> 0:22:58.639 sibs to see their pain on the page and my pain, 0:22:59.480 --> 0:23:02.800 we could find finally drop it. But meanwhile we just 0:23:02.840 --> 0:23:06.600 separated from each other and kept orphaning ourselves from one another. 0:23:07.560 --> 0:23:10.639 Well, in the process of writing your book, you do 0:23:10.720 --> 0:23:14.000 a lot of research, but part of the story are 0:23:14.080 --> 0:23:18.360 the interviews that you do with your siblings, with Eileen 0:23:18.480 --> 0:23:22.320 and with your two cousins slash siblings. You grew up 0:23:22.320 --> 0:23:25.880 with them all of your remembered childhood, and you give 0:23:25.960 --> 0:23:29.720 them really space and a chance in your book to 0:23:30.520 --> 0:23:34.160 allow for their own feelings and their own reality, which 0:23:34.200 --> 0:23:37.080 is I would imagine part of what ended up being 0:23:37.080 --> 0:23:39.199 so healing about the book for all of you. 0:23:39.720 --> 0:23:43.120 Yeah, that's one of the things I recommend to everybody's 0:23:43.240 --> 0:23:46.840 interview your siblings and you know those big touchstones in 0:23:46.880 --> 0:23:50.919 your family history. How did they experience it? Because you 0:23:50.920 --> 0:23:54.320 will learn a lot and it just diminishes any self 0:23:54.320 --> 0:23:58.440 involvement because everybody he'll surround you is suffering as well. 0:23:59.160 --> 0:24:01.679 I think it's a really important thing to do. We 0:24:01.720 --> 0:24:04.640 are meaning makers as we go through life. We're story makers, 0:24:04.840 --> 0:24:09.480 and stories can also use us. And the fact that 0:24:09.560 --> 0:24:12.960 this tragedy blew our family apart meant that people were 0:24:12.960 --> 0:24:16.640 making up stories about each other. And if you ask 0:24:16.720 --> 0:24:19.800 any dysfunctional you know, anybody who's not getting along with 0:24:19.840 --> 0:24:22.399 somebody in their family, they have a story about that 0:24:22.440 --> 0:24:26.200 other person. So we had these stories about each other 0:24:26.880 --> 0:24:31.399 that couldn't get underneath the pain. And that's why I 0:24:31.440 --> 0:24:35.439 think interviewing your family so important. But stories can be 0:24:35.520 --> 0:24:39.920 so dangerous. They're important when they work for you, when 0:24:39.920 --> 0:24:42.960 they work for another person. But boy, and we've all 0:24:43.000 --> 0:24:45.399 experienced this thing where somebody tells you just a little 0:24:45.400 --> 0:24:48.720 something about somebody you haven't met. By the time you 0:24:48.760 --> 0:24:53.000 meet that person, it's tainted already. And this is like 0:24:53.080 --> 0:24:57.840 one hundredfold with your family. So it's the unwriting of 0:24:57.920 --> 0:25:00.879 the fictions that we have about each other. And I 0:25:00.960 --> 0:25:04.280 also felt like I had to unwrite my own fiction. 0:25:04.760 --> 0:25:06.800 First I was Sarah Conover, and then I grew up 0:25:06.800 --> 0:25:10.280 as Leslie Gagney, and then I wanted to drop the 0:25:10.359 --> 0:25:14.480 Leslie Gagney because she had had this kind of chaotic childhood, 0:25:15.200 --> 0:25:18.320 and so I became Sarah Conover. But those things are 0:25:18.359 --> 0:25:21.880 all inside you. So all of that for me had 0:25:21.920 --> 0:25:25.320 to get untangled, and I had to unwrite those fictions 0:25:25.359 --> 0:25:30.119 as well. 0:25:30.280 --> 0:25:34.920 Fifty eight years after the accident, after the vanishing, Sarah's 0:25:34.960 --> 0:25:38.000