Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Only recently did my father Larry appear in a dream.
Speaker 2: We were together in a small harbor, crowded with sailboats,
Speaker 2: tied one to the other in a web of lines,
Speaker 2: hopping from one deck to the next. Despite their jostling
Speaker 2: by waves, the holes didn't bump. The water sounded alive,
Speaker 2: proud that I would finally take up ocean sailing. My
Speaker 2: father wanted to help me choose the best boat. His
Speaker 2: words of encouragement were brief, but his smile was ripe
Speaker 2: with paternal love. Perhaps the imprint of my parents exists
Speaker 2: in the truthful tale of my genes. The color of
Speaker 2: my hair, my mother's dark brows, my conover wide smile,
Speaker 2: my father's easy laugh, my small muscled body that loves
Speaker 2: to dance a wild streak, as I'm told my mother did.
Speaker 2: And two whatever I experienced as an infant must also
Speaker 2: be within me. The tethered gaze between my mother and me,
Speaker 2: her voice that I surely recognized straight from the womb.
Speaker 2: My father's touch as he stroked the tiny wings of
Speaker 2: my shoulder blades, the smell of my parents, the taste
Speaker 2: of her milk, my primal known world.
Speaker 3: That's Sarah Conover, author of the recent memoir Set Adrift.
Speaker 3: Sarah's is the story of a family tragedy that occurred
Speaker 3: when she was a very young child, so young, in fact,
Speaker 3: that she has no memory of it. She's left with
Speaker 3: a lifetime of questions, of longing, and of the profound
Speaker 3: desire to understand all that has been lost? What can
Speaker 3: we piece together even when the pieces have been shattered
Speaker 3: beyond recognition. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
Speaker 3: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 3: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a complicated map my childhood. So my
Speaker 2: parents and grandparents vanished on January eighth, nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 2: My grandfather spent a lot of winters down in the
Speaker 2: tropics sailing. He was one of the most trophied ocean
Speaker 2: racing yachtsmen of his time, commodoer of the Cruising Club
Speaker 2: of America, publisher of Voting Industry, on the board of
Speaker 2: Yachting Magazine, and my father was a contender for the
Speaker 2: Olympic Trials, and they had invited my parents down. My
Speaker 2: grandfather and grandmother to join them. Right after Christmas. January first,
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty eight is when they left the Florida Keys
Speaker 2: headed extensively to Miami, but actually by way of the Bahamas,
Speaker 2: and they ran into the worst unpredicted storm in the
Speaker 2: Miami Weather Bureau's history at that time, where the day
Speaker 2: started out as you know, life breeze is expected, and
Speaker 2: then like within six hours, there were seventy mile an
Speaker 2: hour winds and forty foot waves. Many boats foundered, many
Speaker 2: many and my family's voat was the only one that
Speaker 2: didn't return. And because of my grandfather's renowned in the
Speaker 2: yachting and business worlds, it was probably one of the
Speaker 2: most extensive private searches, private and public searches of the time.
Speaker 2: The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Cuban Navy, all sorts.
Speaker 2: They combed twenty four thousand square miles looking for them,
Speaker 2: truly needle in a haystack, and one of the problems
Speaker 2: was that the weather state stormy for a number of days.
Speaker 2: They were reported missing on a Saturday, and the search
Speaker 2: couldn't start till a Tuesday, and that might have been
Speaker 2: the only window where they could have been saved. They
Speaker 2: were seen by a fishing boat nineteen hours after the
Speaker 2: storm almost capsized five people hanging off the lines what
Speaker 2: are called drogues by the end of the boat sea anchors.
Speaker 2: But the boat that saw them was also foundered. Their
Speaker 2: motor had cut out, so there was a search that
Speaker 2: went on for quite a bit, and the dinghy of
Speaker 2: the boat, the kind of the little lifeboat, washed ashore
Speaker 2: on north of Miami about eighty miles five days later
Speaker 2: or so, and nothing else was found. Pieces were put
Speaker 2: together of maybe what happened, but really, you know, forty
Speaker 2: forty five foot wave, seventy mile an hour winds, it
Speaker 2: tells a lot, and there might have been a mechanical
Speaker 2: fil on the boat. We don't know.
Speaker 3: You were eighteen months old, your sister Eileen was almost three.
Speaker 3: At what point did you have any sense of anything
Speaker 3: about the story of knowing that you have lost your parents.
Speaker 2: It's a funny question because you know, back then with
Speaker 2: doctor stock era, you don't talk to kids about these
Speaker 2: kind of things, right, They can't understand it. Really, adults
Speaker 2: can't understand it either. So my sister, who was older,
Speaker 2: she was the one who was told. My grandmother said
Speaker 2: your parents are dead, and I know, my grandmother must
Speaker 2: have said it a number of times. But this is
Speaker 2: the weird thing about early childhood loss is one of
Speaker 2: the things you mourn is that you just know your
Speaker 2: world vanished, and you don't you don't have those stages
Speaker 2: of recognizing cognitively, Oh, I lost my parents. You know,
Speaker 2: it was almost preverbal and all that, so you don't
Speaker 2: have those stages of grief. There was no in a
Speaker 2: way to recognize it. My sister seemed to. She remembers
Speaker 2: people coming into her room and she was in her
Speaker 2: crib and it was like a big black cloud that
Speaker 2: came over the hole. Everything the world just stopped.
Speaker 3: But after the world stops, it also must go on.
Speaker 3: When Sarah and her sister are orphaned by this mysterious
Speaker 3: boating accident, they're sent to live with their aunt, their
Speaker 3: father's sister, fram and her husband, who have two children
Speaker 3: of their own. But Sarah and Eileen's maternal grandmother puts
Speaker 3: up a fight, a long fight. A custody battle persists
Speaker 3: for ten years, during which Sarah and Eileen are required
Speaker 3: to see their grandmother every other weekend. The atmosphere in
Speaker 3: their aunt's home and their grandmothers could not be more different.
Speaker 2: She was the one who was fighting for custody for
Speaker 2: a decade and filled me with vitriol about the family
Speaker 2: with majority custody. They aren't your real family, Those aren't
Speaker 2: your parents. You're not one of them. My father's sister's family,
Speaker 2: the way they had to respond to the grief was
Speaker 2: fran My father's sister couldn't talk about the accident at all.
Speaker 2: She lost her favorite brother, she lost her hero, her mother,
Speaker 2: her father. She just couldn't talk about it. So there
Speaker 2: was one family that just couldn't talk about it and
Speaker 2: wouldn't despite all the sailing trophies on the India hutch.
Speaker 2: And then the other family, the other one fighting for custody,
Speaker 2: would only talk about it and would say that those
Speaker 2: conivers they killed my daughter.
Speaker 3: You have this phrase in your book that really struck me,
Speaker 3: which was that you were schooled in dissociation and numbness.
Speaker 3: And we've talked a lot about dissociation on this podcast
Speaker 3: as sometimes a healthy defense mechanism degree you know, that
Speaker 3: protects us until we don't need protecting. Obviously, it can
Speaker 3: also be unhealthy. I mean, one of the things that
Speaker 3: also really strikes me is the way that and you
Speaker 3: as so many kids in that era in particular, where
Speaker 3: there was a tragedy in a family or something difficult
Speaker 3: in a family, were left to piece it together for themselves, right,
Speaker 3: And you know, in a way you're dissociating, but at
Speaker 3: the same time you're working overtime to try to piece
Speaker 3: it together between what your grandmother, who you don't really trust,
Speaker 3: is saying to you and what your adoptive parents were
Speaker 3: raising you are saying or not saying to you because
Speaker 3: they don't really want to talk about it, especially Fran.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the tragic things is that the family
Speaker 2: that a majority custody was really blown apart, and Fran,
Speaker 2: my mother there just you know, she had four kids
Speaker 2: and she just couldn't give me the attention that my
Speaker 2: grandmother could. And so you know, in certain ways I
Speaker 2: gravitated like this person could give me all the attention
Speaker 2: I need. And my sister and I we would visit
Speaker 2: my grandmother and she was rather an amazing artist and
Speaker 2: had oil paintings that she'd done of my mother and
Speaker 2: had professional photographs of my mother, no conovers, but of
Speaker 2: my mother all over her house in Connecticut. And she
Speaker 2: moved from Fresno to be close to us and to
Speaker 2: try to rest us from the other family. And the
Speaker 2: weird thing was, you know, there were pictures of her
Speaker 2: mother all over the house, but it was that era
Speaker 2: where people didn't smile in photographs, and my sister and
Speaker 2: were like, that's our mother. I mean, you did not
Speaker 2: want to attach to these photographs, and it just it
Speaker 2: just did not really compute that this could be our mother.
Speaker 2: My grandmother was complicated and fascinating too. You know, she
Speaker 2: lost her mother and her sister in the nineteen eighteen flu,
Speaker 2: so she had a tragedy behind her and I think
Speaker 2: her losing her daughter just center over the edge and
Speaker 2: she would do anything to get custody of us.
Speaker 3: Why was she so against your aunt and uncle, who
Speaker 3: became your adoptive parents.
Speaker 2: I think it was existential for her. And she was
Speaker 2: a bit of a kookie character. She was always weirdly
Speaker 2: ended up as a single not weirdly, I think very
Speaker 2: intentionally ended up as a single parent and married in
Speaker 2: the end about five times. And she had sort of
Speaker 2: amazing perseverance and as a single mom, but she would
Speaker 2: divorce whatever guy she got married to pretty fast.
Speaker 3: And your mother was her only child.
Speaker 2: No, she also had a son by a different father,
Speaker 2: and that when she kept her son laying very close
Speaker 2: in ways that you know, I'm sure could be psychologized
Speaker 2: very easily in terms of the Oedipus something. You know,
Speaker 2: he never got his own career. She always supported him.
Speaker 2: He was actually very very smart guy and a great
Speaker 2: flamenco guitar player. She kept him close, and I think
Speaker 2: it was existential for her after losing her daughter that
Speaker 2: she didn't lose him. So in a way, she made
Speaker 2: everybody's life miserable between the two families. And on another hand,
Speaker 2: she taught me to see beauty. In some ways she
Speaker 2: really saved my life. She would set up an easel
Speaker 2: for both my sister and I and a beautiful still
Speaker 2: life on her breakfast table. The weekends we were with
Speaker 2: her and teach us to paint watercolor and oil colors,
Speaker 2: and she played the piano and danced. You know. It
Speaker 2: was she would let us have the run of the
Speaker 2: house and that was pretty fun.
Speaker 3: She also didn't want you to call her grandma right.
Speaker 2: Right, so that was another thing, so she had us
Speaker 2: call me mayor, which means mother in French. We did
Speaker 2: not know that, and it also ironically means the sea
Speaker 2: in French.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back buck. Memory is such a puzzle.
Speaker 3: We need witnesses, especially in circumstances like Sarah's. As she writes,
Speaker 3: orphans not only lose their parents but also the historians
Speaker 3: of their early years. And in Sarah's case, she's on
Speaker 3: the receiving end of contradictory stories from her aunt and
Speaker 3: her grandmother. So pieces of the story of the truth
Speaker 3: come to her over time, like bits of buried treasure.
Speaker 3: She begins to be able to assemble, little by little
Speaker 3: the truths of who she is and where she belongs.
Speaker 2: There's different stages where you can think, oh no, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, wait, I look like her. But when you're little,
Speaker 2: you're just trying to land somewhere. And the whole family,
Speaker 2: everybody was set adrift by this accident, and where do
Speaker 2: I belong? I think orphans have the ability to you know,
Speaker 2: they're kind of a desperate figure, but they also can
Speaker 2: remake themselves. And at some point I just decided that's
Speaker 2: what I'm going to do. I watched the Sound of
Speaker 2: Music probably twenty times, and you know, decided that mountains
Speaker 2: weren't going to be my thing. I just couldn't go
Speaker 2: near the water, and so completely left the whole sailing
Speaker 2: business behind and pretty young, went out to rocky mountains
Speaker 2: and took a mountaineering course. And you know, I was
Speaker 2: probably maybe seventeen or eighteen when I walked across Switzerland
Speaker 2: by myself after having watched the Sound of Music, not
Speaker 2: realizing that that movie was in Austria, thinking it was
Speaker 2: in Switzerland. But I orphaned myself. I orphaned the grief,
Speaker 2: and you know, it seemed okay. I was restless, but
Speaker 2: I also looked around me and I saw alcoholism. You know,
Speaker 2: by the time I was a teenager, my sister, Eileen,
Speaker 2: the other orphan, she had really disengaged from my grandmother,
Speaker 2: and my grandmother had shown me a lot of favoritism
Speaker 2: by then, and so that wasn't really a refuge anymore
Speaker 2: at all. And I didn't I couldn't trust my grandmother
Speaker 2: then either. You know, my father's siblings, except for Friend,
Speaker 2: really dove into alcohol and very troubled lives. And that
Speaker 2: nobody would talk about the elephant in the living room.
Speaker 2: You know, I understand that that generation, the greatest generation.
Speaker 2: They had no tools. Nobody was talking about post traumatic anything.
Speaker 2: Nobody knew what to do with grief. So I understand
Speaker 2: it now. But you know, I had that group not
Speaker 2: talking about it, and the other group who was so skewed,
Speaker 2: my my grandmother. I just thought, nobody's telling the truth here,
Speaker 2: and I need to know. I need truth. There has
Speaker 2: to be some authenticity. So at a very young age,
Speaker 2: I became, you know, a religious seeker. At first, it
Speaker 2: was through nature. When I was walking through Switzerland, I
Speaker 2: happened to walk into the tent where the great Indian
Speaker 2: saint Christiana Murdy was teaching of all people, and that
Speaker 2: started to open other doors, and I became a religious
Speaker 2: studies major. Fran used to call me the biggest why
Speaker 2: kids she ever met, And I think I've been asking,
Speaker 2: you know, what is the question we've been asking our
Speaker 2: whole lives. One of them is why? Why? And what?
Speaker 2: And are we loved and by whom? And so there
Speaker 2: was a lot of why for me, why and where
Speaker 2: is truth? Where's our foundation? I left home when I
Speaker 2: was seventeen. I graduated early from high school, went out west,
Speaker 2: went to a commune. But you know, along with the
Speaker 2: hippie era, there was a lot of spiritual banqueting around
Speaker 2: as well, and I guess I, you know, religious studies
Speaker 2: certainly gave me a view of it, and I had
Speaker 2: to just keep searching. There was a time when I
Speaker 2: was hiking in Nepal and I was hiking by myself.
Speaker 2: I was trekking in Nepaul and a Tibetan monk came
Speaker 2: in the opposite direction and smiled at me in a
Speaker 2: way that I'd never seen a human being smile in
Speaker 2: my life. And this was right before college, and I
Speaker 2: felt like, Okay, that is my compass, whatever that is,
Speaker 2: that's my compass.
Speaker 3: I can so picture that encounter with the monk on
Speaker 3: the path. I can picture that smile. I really, I
Speaker 3: can just see it. And you know, I wonder. I mean,
Speaker 3: you were, on the one hand, trying to stay ahead
Speaker 3: of what was haunting you as you were making these tracks,
Speaker 3: these trips and searching for something that you weren't sure
Speaker 3: what you were searching for. You quote the Buddhist psychologist
Speaker 3: Tara Brock as saying that trauma is severed belonging, and
Speaker 3: that really really struck me. It struck me as a
Speaker 3: deep truth. And it seems that your sense of belonging
Speaker 3: was ripped away from you as an eighteen month old.
Speaker 3: And if that's your story, then it would seem that
Speaker 3: life becomes to some degree at some point about finding
Speaker 3: a way for that belonging to become a whole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I do think that's what you know. Sometimes
Speaker 2: I call it the mother whole, but it could be
Speaker 2: the God hole. It could be what makes this steel whole.
Speaker 2: I think orphans is a noun and a verb. We
Speaker 2: are orphans, but we are also or in others that
Speaker 2: you know as a protective mechanism. And it gets mixed
Speaker 2: up with that horrible thing of you know, independence in
Speaker 2: American culture, but we orphan ourselves from one another. And yes,
Speaker 2: the need for belonging is so fundamental, and I was
Speaker 2: looking for that, whether spiritual nature. I was looking so
Speaker 2: hard for that. I was looking for bedrock. So I
Speaker 2: decided the Gagnes, my eventually adoptive family. I'd already been
Speaker 2: told by my grandmother forever, they're not really your family,
Speaker 2: And you know, your name is Sarah Conover and their Gagne.
Speaker 2: Even though I grew up as a Gagne. I think
Speaker 2: that I just was looking hard and working hard for
Speaker 2: that sense of belonging. What do I belong to? What
Speaker 2: do we all belong to? Which is our bedrock?
Speaker 3: How old were you when you changed your name back
Speaker 3: to Conover.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in their early twenties when I moved
Speaker 2: out west. It kind of like, Okay, I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: do the whole thing. I'm going to take my birth name,
Speaker 2: my beautiful birth name back, and I left the Gagnes.
Speaker 2: They're all back on the East Coast and I'm my
Speaker 2: own self here and there we go. I'm going to
Speaker 2: just take that name back and like you know, putting
Speaker 2: them all in a bottle in the sea, like goodbye.
Speaker 2: And of course we can't do that. Of course we
Speaker 2: can't do that. So my biological sister still has the
Speaker 2: last name by wing Gagne, and my other siblings kept
Speaker 2: that name. But they were my I don't call them
Speaker 2: my step siblings.
Speaker 3: Well, and they were your cousins.
Speaker 2: They were my cousins. They were my first cousins. Yeah.
Speaker 3: As often happens, when we open one door, other doors
Speaker 3: open too. Sarah changes her name back to the name
Speaker 3: she was born with, and she also meets her future husband, Doug.
Speaker 3: She's studying to become an aikido, a Japanese martial arts instructor,
Speaker 3: in Boulder, Colorado. Doug is practicing martial arts too. They
Speaker 3: have shared interests and an immediate connection. They get married.
Speaker 3: Within a couple of years, they moved to California to
Speaker 3: start a family. Things seem to be going smoothly for Sarah.
Speaker 3: She feels far from her childhood, which have been defined
Speaker 3: by secrecy, tragedy, and grief, but her grief returns and reverberates,
Speaker 3: because that's what grief does.
Speaker 2: I was still running hard ahead of the grief, I think,
Speaker 2: and numb and pretty excited about a new baby. And
Speaker 2: I think the first big wake up call was that
Speaker 2: when my you know, there's that book bussel Vandercock's The
Speaker 2: Body keeps the Score. I also think the body keeps
Speaker 2: the clock. And at eighteen months. I only put this
Speaker 2: together about six months ago, Danny. Eighteen months is when
Speaker 2: I started not to be able to sleep.
Speaker 3: When your son was eighteen months old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when he was eighteen months old, that's when sleep
Speaker 2: got very challenging for me. And later on I realized.
Speaker 2: We left California. We left and fran I moved to California.
Speaker 2: We decided all to move there together. You know, I'll
Speaker 2: move there. Let's do it at the same time, her
Speaker 2: second husband had family there. And I put this also
Speaker 2: together about six months ago. Is that when my daughter
Speaker 2: turned eighteen months old, I also left fran behind and
Speaker 2: moved up to Washington State from California. Even though I
Speaker 2: had told people in California, I had said, I finally
Speaker 2: have the mommy I've been looking for. Brand was there
Speaker 2: all the time for us. It was a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2: And yet, and yet I wanted to move back to
Speaker 2: the mountains, my safe place.
Speaker 3: As Sarah enters midlife, she can no longer outrun her grief.
Speaker 3: She sinks into a depression that seems, on the surface
Speaker 3: of things at odds with the beautiful life she has
Speaker 3: created with her family in this beautiful place.
Speaker 2: It's one other thing I wanted to say about orphaning
Speaker 2: being an orphan and orphaning others and orphaning yourself, orphaning
Speaker 2: your own feelings from yourself. I orphaned my grief when
Speaker 2: I looked up you know, secrets. As in family secrets,
Speaker 2: it also means to separate. I really kind of thought
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 3: To separate, surely it does that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and all of this, I mean, there was just
Speaker 2: separation and secretivity everywhere the ocean. Secreted my parents away,
Speaker 2: people secreted their guilt, their grief. We separated ourselves. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think that was the biggest tragedy of this is
Speaker 2: that it didn't bring you know, grief to heal has
Speaker 2: to bring a community together. It blew us apart till recently, really,
Speaker 2: until my book was done and we could kind of
Speaker 2: all see the map of the grief, because grief can
Speaker 2: be horizonless, kind of like the sea, and for my
Speaker 2: sibs to see their pain on the page and my pain,
Speaker 2: we could find finally drop it. But meanwhile we just
Speaker 2: separated from each other and kept orphaning ourselves from one another.
Speaker 3: Well, in the process of writing your book, you do
Speaker 3: a lot of research, but part of the story are
Speaker 3: the interviews that you do with your siblings, with Eileen
Speaker 3: and with your two cousins slash siblings. You grew up
Speaker 3: with them all of your remembered childhood, and you give
Speaker 3: them really space and a chance in your book to
Speaker 3: allow for their own feelings and their own reality, which
Speaker 3: is I would imagine part of what ended up being
Speaker 3: so healing about the book for all of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the things I recommend to everybody's
Speaker 2: interview your siblings and you know those big touchstones in
Speaker 2: your family history. How did they experience it? Because you
Speaker 2: will learn a lot and it just diminishes any self
Speaker 2: involvement because everybody he'll surround you is suffering as well.
Speaker 2: I think it's a really important thing to do. We
Speaker 2: are meaning makers as we go through life. We're story makers,
Speaker 2: and stories can also use us. And the fact that
Speaker 2: this tragedy blew our family apart meant that people were
Speaker 2: making up stories about each other. And if you ask
Speaker 2: any dysfunctional you know, anybody who's not getting along with
Speaker 2: somebody in their family, they have a story about that
Speaker 2: other person. So we had these stories about each other
Speaker 2: that couldn't get underneath the pain. And that's why I
Speaker 2: think interviewing your family so important. But stories can be
Speaker 2: so dangerous. They're important when they work for you, when
Speaker 2: they work for another person. But boy, and we've all
Speaker 2: experienced this thing where somebody tells you just a little
Speaker 2: something about somebody you haven't met. By the time you
Speaker 2: meet that person, it's tainted already. And this is like
Speaker 2: one hundredfold with your family. So it's the unwriting of
Speaker 2: the fictions that we have about each other. And I
Speaker 2: also felt like I had to unwrite my own fiction.
Speaker 2: First I was Sarah Conover, and then I grew up
Speaker 2: as Leslie Gagney, and then I wanted to drop the
Speaker 2: Leslie Gagney because she had had this kind of chaotic childhood,
Speaker 2: and so I became Sarah Conover. But those things are
Speaker 2: all inside you. So all of that for me had
Speaker 2: to get untangled, and I had to unwrite those fictions
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: Fifty eight years after the accident, after the vanishing, Sarah's
Speaker 3: sister Eileen, has the idea that the family should come
Speaker 3: together for a proper memorial to honor their parents and grandparents.
Speaker 2: I had asked, fran why didn't you have a memorial?
Speaker 2: I mean, they had been finally declared dead by the
Speaker 2: insurance company, and she said, we just thought we'd discovered
Speaker 2: them on a deserted island in the Caribbean. I kind
Speaker 2: of blamed Gilligan's Island for this or something, you know,
Speaker 2: But also that generation didn't have the tools to say, what,
Speaker 2: you know, what are the constellations of grief? You know,
Speaker 2: it's not just sadness, it's all this other stuff. And
Speaker 2: she had to bunker her own grief. So we fifty
Speaker 2: eight years after my sister and I held a memorial
Speaker 2: and it was beautiful, and Fran was there, and my
Speaker 2: cousins slash siblings. I grew up with the two. They
Speaker 2: didn't come out for it, but Fran really stood tall.
Speaker 2: And we had a memorial benchmad saying Pops and Dan,
Speaker 2: Larry and Laurie's sail on and looking at golden gardens
Speaker 2: out on Puget Sound. There just happened to be a
Speaker 2: sailing regatta going on, with the boats, the horns coming
Speaker 2: off the I forget what you call those boats, and
Speaker 2: a beautiful, beautiful day. And it was lovely to hear
Speaker 2: Fran and talk about what a gift we had been
Speaker 2: when she lost her parents, that she was able to
Speaker 2: adopt us and to raise us. And yeah, there was
Speaker 2: finally some closure around that.
Speaker 3: Here's Sarah reading one last passage from her powerful and
Speaker 3: probing memoir.
Speaker 2: Orphan. Every year I passed the moment when the sea
Speaker 2: held and turned you, when exhausted, you surrendered. You lie
Speaker 2: in wool, silks and taffetas heavy with water at the
Speaker 2: bottom of my ceed or trunk. You hang on the wall,
Speaker 2: crooked chipped, waiting to be straightened. How surprised I am
Speaker 2: at your face is growing into my son and daughter.
Speaker 2: Perhaps you are coming back to me now, given back
Speaker 2: by the ocean in the bits left on the sand
Speaker 2: you wash ashore, and I'd pick through the sea, lifting
Speaker 2: shells to my ear and listening, fingering the sea scour
Speaker 2: and colored beach glass, resting the fragile carpses of the
Speaker 2: long dead in my palm. Little nothings to anyone else,
Speaker 2: but we know better. Blood is our private See my
Speaker 2: covenant with the two of you, my parents, remembering you.
Speaker 2: I won't throw anything back.
Speaker 3: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accurr is
Speaker 3: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance.
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