April 4, 2019 • 33 mins
Sylvia Boorstein grew up in a loving, close-knit family. But in the background lingered a grief-filled secret. As an adult she allowed herself to explore the secret, and one day, on a hunch, visited the cemetery where her mother was buried.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
we talk about secrets, often we use the word buried.
We discover a buried secret. We bury our own secrets
in places where we think they'll never rise to the
surface again. We go to the grave with our secrets.
(00:21):
But what about when a secret actually is buried. Sylvia
Borstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, in just so
you don't have to do the math that makes her
two years old. She's been married for fifty two years
to her husband, Seymour. They have four children and seven grandchildren.
(00:43):
Sylvia is one of our country's most beloved teachers of
mindfulness meditation. Many of you may have heard of her,
and if you haven't, trust me, you should download one
of her audiobooks. Do that right now, just cause this
podcast and download one of her books. You will say
inked me later. She's also a very dear friend of mine,
(01:04):
which makes me a very lucky person. In truth, Sylvia
is the entire reason this podcast exists. As I was
grappling with my own humongous family secret, I was on
the phone with Sylvia one afternoon. As tends to happen
when we share a family secret, it prompts the listener
to think of family secrets of her own, and so
(01:26):
Sylvia began to tell me the story of a secret
that had haunted her for much of her life. As
I sat in my little office with the phone glued
to my ear, listening to my friend's story, I thought,
I wish I was recording this. Hence this podcast. I'm
(01:47):
Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets. Secrets that are
kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and secrets
we keep from ourselves. Sylvia was raised in Coney Island,
in an enclave of immigrant Jews. In her neighborhood, she
was surrounded by relatives my parents met because they lived
(02:11):
around the corner from each other. My grandparents were friends
of each other, and my mother and father married. They
moved in with my father's parents because my father didn't
yet have a job, and I was born there a
year later. A year after that, my grandfather died and
my grandmother, who was my principal caretaker as I was
(02:34):
growing up, lived with us for the rest of her life.
So I lived in a situation where I was the
only child and the only grandchild of the three people
who lived in my house with me and much loved
by all three of them. Um. We lived within the
wider community of a large family of cousins and aunts
(02:58):
and uncle's and my mother, who was a wonderful storyteller,
told me all the background about all these people, so
and I loved them. They were my favorite kind of stories,
how uncle Julius came to the United States, and how
this one did that and that one did this. So
I felt growing up that I knew most of the
things about my family. But within all this closeness and happiness,
(03:22):
Sylvia's mother was very sick. My mother's health was frail.
My mother had rheumatic heart disease, the consequence of having
had rheumatic fever as a child, And I was always
alarmed because I really didn't understand that the consequences of
what that meant for her, and I worried always because
(03:45):
she was out of breath, she couldn't walk as fast
as other people's mother's, she couldn't swim or play tennis. Um,
And I think I know that I was always frightened
that she would die. We didn't talk of that sickness
in my house because I think in the end, maybe
it was a good decision. My mother had this defective
(04:09):
mitral valve that limited what she could do, but she
was a cheerful person, so she wasn't totally undone by
the illness, and she didn't mention it. We just knew
about it. But then Sylvia learned that there was a
story she didn't know, a painful story that wasn't part
of the great and often joyous oral tradition of her family.
(04:31):
Somewhere in my adolescence, but I think before I went
to college, my mother mentioned in a conversation, maybe it
was an overheard conversation, that she had a sister who
was younger than she was, but not as younger as
my aunt Marian, and that that sister had died. So
(04:57):
let's talk about what you remember about that conversation, or
whether it was something that you overheard. I think one
of the really interesting things about those moments where one
is discovering something or hearing something that is of incredible
importance that maybe coming out in a kind of casual
(05:20):
way or overheard or just slipped into conversation, and yet
it lodges somewhere in the psyche, and it was some
offend manner. I don't remember if she said it to
me or to somebody else. There was no photograph as
pictures of my mother as a child and our cousins
(05:40):
as a as children. I think, now that you're asking
me and I'm thinking about it, the best I remember
is I thought. I remember thinking maybe I heard wrong.
And I've asked myself, since I've known your story, and
since I've learned stories of secrets from side of my friends,
(06:01):
why is it that I wouldn't say the obvious, Hey,
you had another sister. Sylvia had one aunt, her mother's
younger sister, Miriam, and her father was an only child.
So these adults comprise her entire immediate family. But now
it seemed her grandparents had had three daughters, not too
(06:22):
but Sylvia talks this information away to the point that
she barely remembers it. It's a vestige, a mirage, not
something tangible. She doesn't exactly forget all about it. It's
more like she puts it off to the side, way
off to the side. Sylvia grows up, attends Barnard College
at the age of sixteen, miss her future husband, Seymour,
(06:44):
a doctor. She's married by the time she's twenty, and
eventually she and Seymour settle in northern California. Sylvia has
all her children by the time she's twenty five, a
span of years during which her mother dies, finally succumbing
to her weak her During this time, it's almost like
Sylvia is trying to cram it all in, get as
(07:05):
much as she possibly can out of this life, since
she's grown up with a powerful internalized message that life
may be short, perhaps very short, there's always the possibility
of loss. What happened is that after she died, years
went by, during which time I became closer to her
(07:25):
than I had been to her younger sister, Miriam. I
think Miriam missed my mother very much, and I did too.
And at that time I was married, I had my
own family, was living in California, and I developed the
habit of calling my aunt every Saturday afternoon and we
will talk on the phone about everything. So we were
(07:48):
really close. And at one point, oh, I know what happened.
My grandfather came to spend time with me and lived
with me in California. He was years old and in
very good health and um sound memory, and we became
very close, sharing old stories and one day just having
(08:10):
a walk together. I said, by the way, I once
heard that you actually had three daughters and that there
was somebody born after Gladys and before Miriam. And I
remember him looking at me and squinting over at me,
say I could I could almost imitate his tone of voice.
(08:31):
He would say, what wasn't matter with you? One word,
wasn't matter with you? Why did you hear that story?
That's not true, that never happened, that wasn't true. No, no, no,
why did you get that? So it was the end
of that. I let it go. Sometime later, after I
developed this relationship with my with my aunt, I'm one
(08:51):
of our Saturday phone calls, I said, by the way, Miriam, uh,
I heard, and I told the whole story, And I said,
I asked Grandpa, who had then by then died, said
I asked Grandpa about it, and he said no. She
said no, no, no, there was for any other child. No,
never any other child. I said, Okay, time went by.
(09:14):
How did you feel during the time that was going by?
Did you accept that was it? Was it a sense
of maybe I was wrong, maybe I misheard. Did you
doubt yourself? Well? It was really it was like maybe
I had a dream. Maybe I had a dream. Oh yeah,
and you know that any one of the things about me,
because I don't like to be wrong. So if I,
if I, if I had developed something which was so
(09:37):
to speak, quote unquote stupid, I wouldn't have admitted it
to people. I've had this idea, and I'm sure of
it from my grandfather had said, it's not true. I've
never seen any artifact of that. Time went by. My
grandfather had died. I was in New York, and of
course my mother had died long before I was in
New York, probably somewhere in my late fift these early sixties,
(10:02):
and my husband's Seymore was with me. I think I
was teaching and I had a day free, and I said,
you know, I'd like to go out to the cemetery.
I'd like to go to the cemetery where my mother
was buried. And so he said okay, and we went out.
Then anybody who knows cemeteries in Queens knows that there's endless,
endless acreage of cemeteries and Queens. But I had the
(10:27):
name of the cemetery, and what was the cemetery called?
Do you remember Mount Hebron? Mount Hebron so it was
a Jewish cemetery. Was absolutely a Jewish cemetery, which brings
me back to buried secrets. I know these cemeteries on
the outskirts of New York City. My dad's family plot,
(10:47):
the Shapiro family plot, is in one of them. They
aren't pastoral final resting places, you know, with pretty benches
and shady trees. They tend to be massive, crumbling places
to stones crammed up against one another, like crooked teeth
in the mouth of the world. And I knew that
my mother was buried in a burial area that was
(11:11):
bought by the first men's Atonia Society of my grandfather's
Austrian town. What people did is they came as immigrants
and among other things, they pulled their money and they
bought acreage or acreage, they bought a plot in Jewish cemetery,
and you paid your cemetery dues to pay for the plot,
(11:34):
and then whenever you died twenty or thirty or forty
years later, you have placed in that plot. So that
so it's like the village from the old country was
transported to this cemetery plot where you would all be
together again, no kidding, and there's a there's anyway story
never want comes to visit a friend of his who
(11:55):
is in the hospital, and very we ill apparently in
the conversation in Yiddish is about how you're doing and
whether or not you might die, and he the visitor
tells the patient in the hospital, you know who died
last week, so and so and tells him. And this
person's response is not I'm sorry that so and so died,
(12:18):
but oh dear, if I die now, I'm gonna have
to lie next to so and so forever. Uh so
all the jokes that they made about that, but that's
what you did. My mother is not, so to speak,
lying next to my grandparents. She is in the order
that she died as part of the village, as part
of the village. It's not even my mother is village.
(12:40):
It's my father's parents village. An irresistible side note here.
My dad died in a car crash when I was
twenty three, and my mom died almost two decades later.
When my mother was dying, she informed me that she
was not going to be buried in my father's family
plot in one. Instead, she planned to be buried in
(13:02):
southern Jersey. I mean way down the Jersey Turnpike, which,
if you don't know it is one of the least
fun roads in the country, with her family and away
from all of those people who she had fought with
her whole married life. I feel sorry for you, she said,
though I knew she didn't. You'll have to visit your
parents in two different cemeteries. Any who, Charle malecham Irene Shapiro.
(13:29):
Generations come and go and not much changes. We're going
to take a quick break. We'll be back in a moment.
(13:50):
It's a miserable day, cold and wet when Sylvia and
Seymour make the swept from Manhattan to the cemetery in Queens.
So we win. And we found those two tombstones, and
I looked at them, and you know, I put a
requisite rock on the top of each one, which signifies
(14:10):
all kinds of things, but the people going by it
means someone was there and someone visited. And then we
walked back to the entrance and there's a little hot
or a house or very small office at the bottom
of them where you can go in and ask where
it is so and so buried, and they give you
the plot map. And when we went in there, I said,
(14:33):
you know, I said to see more on the way back.
You know, this was my father's father's plot. My mother's
family also had a plot in this cemetery. Um, and
my grandmother's Trasia and must be buried there. Let's find
(14:54):
out where. So we go into the cemetery. I'm all
of a sudden, really, I seem that as I'm telling
you the story, I'm a little choking up about it.
So we take your breath and out, getting a little
bit teary about it. We go into this office and
I said, my grandfather's last name, and and then just
(15:17):
suddenly I'm kind of a whim. I said, you know,
I'm also interested in a child that might be buried
in that same community's burial place. And I know that
she was a child about five years old, and that
she died in about Remember this is the mid nineteen nineties.
(15:45):
The small cemetery office is not equipped with WiFi or internet.
In fact, they're in the midst of transferring all their
files from a rolodex a rolodex to a computer. So
finding a child with Sylvia's grandfather's name Fuchs is slow going,
if not impossible. He looked and looking through names, says,
(16:09):
we have a lot of folks this here. What was
her first name? Uh, what was the first name? And
of course Sylvia doesn't know the child's first name because
the child was a secret. And I said, I don't know,
but I think maybe it was Sylvia. He looks, he said, yeah,
(16:34):
this is Sylvia. Folks that died in nineteen twenty one.
And I said, well, I go back, show me on
the map where to look and know what to say. Really,
he said, well, you would be able to find it
because um children were buried not in a regular plot.
(16:57):
They were buried in a corner of plot that their
community owned, and they were just buried next to each other.
When they have young children, they're buried next to each other.
And they didn't have granite headstones. They had limestone headstones.
The children. Yeah, they just the oral grouped in the corner.
There's a children's area for young children and newborns. And
(17:21):
they're just limestone. Marco's mounds name. And it's been so
many years in the rains, the limestone washes off. You'll
never find it. So we walk out of that place
and I say more, says, let's go back. Meantime it's
the end of the long day, and it's a long
(17:42):
walk up there, and I'm kind of blown away by
the whole thing, and it's becoming overcast and it looks
like it's going to rain, and I said, well, he says, well,
we won't find it. He said, let's go. We're going
to take a quick break. Sylvia is overcome with a
(18:04):
desire to flee the cemetery. She's suddenly exhausted. It has
been a very long day. But Seymour and this totally
gets to me. Seymour pushes her. He knows it's probably
the only time she'll ever be able to get to
the bottom of this question she's always had, so, he insists.
So we walk back up, we find that plot. Then
(18:28):
we see in the corners there are these like clumps
of limestone. Marker's all very washed off, so you really
can't read the names. And by this time I'm really
feeling undone in the weather, and I just I said,
let's go. That can't do this anymore. And sans, I know,
(18:50):
keeping looking, with keeping looking, this is making me cry
as well. And all of a sudden, he said, here
it is. And it isn't limestone. It's a dark gray,
beautiful granites down and it says Sylvia folks daughter official folks.
(19:12):
It's my grandfather's child. So when we came over from
the trip, I called my aunt Miriam. You know, as
I'm telling you the story, it's not easy. I have
all goose pimples all over me. I called my aunt Miriam,
and we talked about one thing or another. And I said, Miriam,
(19:34):
I was in New York. Yeah I know, I said, Merriwell,
I was in New York. I went to the cemetery
and I went to look at graves, my mother's grave,
and then I went over to where your mother is
buried with Rajah is buried, and I found the gravestone
(19:58):
for Sylvia folks. And she didn't say anything, so I said,
I was I was really upset, Miriam. I said, it's
really upset because I thought I had such a close
relationship with with myanpa official. You know, we were so close,
and he lied to me. And she said, you know
(20:20):
he didn't lie to Merriam. What do you mean you
didn't lie? I found with toolstone. She said, you forgot.
I said, Marriam, you don't forget it if you have
a six year old child that dies. She said, if
it's too horrible for you, you forget it. And you know,
(20:40):
I thought it'd be easier to tell this story, but
it's not. It's a very loving thing that Seymour did.
It was it was I think about it now, I
think about it in that moment, and I was that
really it was he who said no, no, we're here,
let's go. No, no, no, not finished looking the look.
(21:02):
And after we discovered it, I remember, you know, I
was physically upset and crying, I think, but I remember
he was saying to me, tell me what's so upsetting,
and I said, um, they lied to me, all those people.
The end of the phone call with Aunt Miriam is
(21:23):
he forgot as this said, Miriam, tell me, did you
forget you? Did you remember her at all? Uh? Because
Miriam was between two and three when her sister Sylvia died,
she said, you know, I only have one memory. I
remember I was sitting on the floor in the sun
(21:48):
porch of the apartment where I lived with my parents.
I was sitting on the floor and watching the light
patterns of sunshine on the wooden floor of that sun porch,
and my mother was sitting in a rocking chair behind me,
and all of a sudden I heard my mother crying,
(22:11):
and I became upset because she was crying. And my
mother picked me up right away, and she said, mine, dish, fine, dish,
mine kin, don't cry my child, And room said, I
never saw her cry again, and we don't. Don't tell
you that story. I'm thinking how painful it is to
(22:35):
not be able to talk about it ever, not be
able to cry to your children, or cry to anybody.
I'm sure it never goes away if you have a
child who's six years old and dies. One thing I
find myself wondering. Sylvia is a person who has spent
much of her adult life coming to know the inner
(22:56):
workings of her own mind. She's gone on silent meditation
rich treats for months, months at a time. She's taught
mindfulness all over the world. I remember when I was
first getting to know her work. I read a few
sentences from one of her books. Allowed to my husband.
Why is this so good? I asked him. He answered,
(23:16):
because it's the product of an unconfused mind. How was
it that the original conversation or overheard moment way back
when with her mother never drifted into Sylvia's unconfused mind
in all those periods of silence and contemplation. I mean,
one of the things that's interesting to me is there
(23:36):
was that overheard conversation or she or she straight out
told you and I don't know, and you put it somewhere.
I think this is what we do. Um. I'm understanding
that more and more as I'm in my own process
of discovering what I knew, what I didn't know. You
(23:57):
know about my own family secrets. Um, but where do
we put you? Know? You you have lived a very
examined life more than most. You're you're a Buddhist, you're
a teacher, you're a writer, you're a storyteller, you're a psychologist.
For God to say, and so there was this this
(24:23):
piece of knowledge that just kind of wedged itself somewhere
while you were busy becoming a psychologist and getting a
doctorate and going to school and having four children and
raising a family and living a life and going on
you know, month long meditation retreats, and it never emerged again.
(24:44):
I've thought several times, and often I think in my
life that there's been something very dependable about my psyche,
depending on what situation I would be in, I would
say about my psyche or about my heart, but where
my psyche or my heart did not let me know
things at a time that I couldn't have handled them well.
(25:09):
And later on I thought to myself, that was so
really thoughtful of my mind and my heart to tell me, well,
you don't have to take care of this now, we'll
be back when you can handle it. I don't know
that you ever finished Anny when I told you that
story before. I was surprised to find that still gives
(25:31):
me goose pet flush and I still feel like crying
about it. So here's a question for you. In that
moment in the in the cemetery office, when you were
asked the question what was her first name? And out
of your mouth came maybe it was Sylvia. Where did
(25:54):
that come from? You know, I don't know you were
named for her. I don't know that's what I figured,
but you know, um, that's why I offered the name.
Had you ever had that thought before before that moment
that it came out of your mouth? I think I
(26:17):
must have known, really on some level, and I think
I'm on the spot there. I don't remember thinking beforehand
that she would be Sylvia. But phasebook, what do you
think her name was? Coming from Jews who named for
people who died. I figured I must be Sylvia and
she must be Sylvia. I mean, this is on the
(26:45):
one hand, it's a doozy of a secret. It's also
very far back in the reaches of history in terms
of a life you know, um, and yet there's some
way in which it seems like it has hovered over
the course of of your life without knowing it. Um.
(27:10):
I remember when you first told me the story. What
I was so struck by was that moment where you said,
where you just decided today, I'm going to go to
the cemetery. We're gonna go, We're gonna take buses and trains,
We're going to get there in the rain. We're gonna
have this kind of day. How did you reconcile? I
(27:31):
think a lot of people who discover a secret well
are are at the same time realizing that they were
lied to. Um. There's a betrayal there in some way
to exactly the word. I just was thinking that in
the moment of finding out uh Semol was really asking
(27:51):
me about what particularly was so upsetting to me, and
I said, everybody lied, and I asked and they lied,
So it was it was stricken from the record. I
think my sense from Miriam, from friends of mine who
have had similar stories is that they were so unable
(28:12):
to even they were so frightened of even feeling the
intensity of their distress. You know what else, I've seen
Danny as a meditation guide and confidant for so many
people people have come on retreat and uh, when I've
(28:33):
seen them in an individual meetings during a retreat. Retreats
are always silent, so they don't get to talk to
each other, and since they're asked not to read or
to write or two talk during the retreats, they have
nothing but their own minds to pay attention to. And
it's universally true that when people uh stop stimuli from
(28:57):
coming in and spend a lot of the time sitting
walking back and forth, trying to just be present in
this moment, that they're herd of mind, of psyche or
whatever tells them what they haven't heard before. For me, certainly,
it presents a moral inventory. You know, you left this
(29:17):
really undone, and you heard so and those feelings and
you never such a really I'm happy for that, because
h I feel like after the initial oh dear, my
mind feels slightly unburdened because I had been keeping the
secret from myself and I fixed it. My friend Donna Massini,
(29:44):
a poet, wrote a beautiful poem years ago called I
Have the Skull that I've Never forgotten. In it, the
poem is a narrator. A woman has just visited the dentist.
She said, cavities filled with novacaine. Obviously I As she
walks down the street afterwards, she wonders, where does the
pain go? She had been numbed, but did that mean
(30:07):
she hadn't on some level felt the pain. So that
the numbing or the the impossibility or the seeming impossibility
of being able to handle something that that painful, doesn't
mean that it disappears. You think of something that startles,
hurts the mind that goes ah, I don't think that.
(30:29):
And that's really what I'm teaching people these days. That's
the all gis of what I'm teaching. It's not to
be able to so calm your mind that you rise
above your stuff, whether you actually see that it's ephemeral
and it's empty and therefore really isn't significant. It's none
of those things to be able to recognize this is
what's happening. This is a feeling that's arising in me.
(30:53):
This is either it's it's frightening, or it's startling, or
it's this thing or it's stadding. And I see that
that's happening, and I can stay here. I can stay
here and I can know it, and it will pen
that I can feel it. I love that you don't
have to get out of the way, you can be here. Yeah,
I thought that, as I remember years ago, I was
(31:15):
saying to a psychotherapy pageant of mine, the same as
I would say to a meditation student, don't duck, don't duck.
Oh yeah, you can do this, don't duck. I'd like
(31:39):
to thank my guest, Sylvia Borstein, for sharing her words
of wisdom with us today. You can find out more
about Sylvia and her teachings at Sylvia borstein dot com.
Family Secrets as an i Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan
is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are
the audio engineers, and Julie doug This is the executive producer.
(32:02):
If you have a family secret you'd like to share.
You can get in touch with us at listener mail
at Family Secrets Podcast dot com. You can also find
us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod That's FAMI Secrets Pod.
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
(32:40):
My last question is do you wish that you hadn't known?
Do you wish that you would never have found out? Oh? No,
I knew you were going to say that, but I
didn't want to answer it for you. Um oh no, no, no, no.
I like knowing. I like knowing
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
we talk about secrets, often we use the word buried.
We discover a buried secret. We bury our own secrets
in places where we think they'll never rise to the
surface again. We go to the grave with our secrets.
(00:21):
But what about when a secret actually is buried. Sylvia
Borstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, in just so
you don't have to do the math that makes her
two years old. She's been married for fifty two years
to her husband, Seymour. They have four children and seven grandchildren.
(00:43):
Sylvia is one of our country's most beloved teachers of
mindfulness meditation. Many of you may have heard of her,
and if you haven't, trust me, you should download one
of her audiobooks. Do that right now, just cause this
podcast and download one of her books. You will say
inked me later. She's also a very dear friend of mine,
(01:04):
which makes me a very lucky person. In truth, Sylvia
is the entire reason this podcast exists. As I was
grappling with my own humongous family secret, I was on
the phone with Sylvia one afternoon. As tends to happen
when we share a family secret, it prompts the listener
to think of family secrets of her own, and so
(01:26):
Sylvia began to tell me the story of a secret
that had haunted her for much of her life. As
I sat in my little office with the phone glued
to my ear, listening to my friend's story, I thought,
I wish I was recording this. Hence this podcast. I'm
(01:47):
Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets. Secrets that are
kept from us, secrets we keep from others, and secrets
we keep from ourselves. Sylvia was raised in Coney Island,
in an enclave of immigrant Jews. In her neighborhood, she
was surrounded by relatives my parents met because they lived
(02:11):
around the corner from each other. My grandparents were friends
of each other, and my mother and father married. They
moved in with my father's parents because my father didn't
yet have a job, and I was born there a
year later. A year after that, my grandfather died and
my grandmother, who was my principal caretaker as I was
(02:34):
growing up, lived with us for the rest of her life.
So I lived in a situation where I was the
only child and the only grandchild of the three people
who lived in my house with me and much loved
by all three of them. Um. We lived within the
wider community of a large family of cousins and aunts
(02:58):
and uncle's and my mother, who was a wonderful storyteller,
told me all the background about all these people, so
and I loved them. They were my favorite kind of stories,
how uncle Julius came to the United States, and how
this one did that and that one did this. So
I felt growing up that I knew most of the
things about my family. But within all this closeness and happiness,
(03:22):
Sylvia's mother was very sick. My mother's health was frail.
My mother had rheumatic heart disease, the consequence of having
had rheumatic fever as a child, And I was always
alarmed because I really didn't understand that the consequences of
what that meant for her, and I worried always because
(03:45):
she was out of breath, she couldn't walk as fast
as other people's mother's, she couldn't swim or play tennis. Um,
And I think I know that I was always frightened
that she would die. We didn't talk of that sickness
in my house because I think in the end, maybe
it was a good decision. My mother had this defective
(04:09):
mitral valve that limited what she could do, but she
was a cheerful person, so she wasn't totally undone by
the illness, and she didn't mention it. We just knew
about it. But then Sylvia learned that there was a
story she didn't know, a painful story that wasn't part
of the great and often joyous oral tradition of her family.
(04:31):
Somewhere in my adolescence, but I think before I went
to college, my mother mentioned in a conversation, maybe it
was an overheard conversation, that she had a sister who
was younger than she was, but not as younger as
my aunt Marian, and that that sister had died. So
(04:57):
let's talk about what you remember about that conversation, or
whether it was something that you overheard. I think one
of the really interesting things about those moments where one
is discovering something or hearing something that is of incredible
importance that maybe coming out in a kind of casual
(05:20):
way or overheard or just slipped into conversation, and yet
it lodges somewhere in the psyche, and it was some
offend manner. I don't remember if she said it to
me or to somebody else. There was no photograph as
pictures of my mother as a child and our cousins
(05:40):
as a as children. I think, now that you're asking
me and I'm thinking about it, the best I remember
is I thought. I remember thinking maybe I heard wrong.
And I've asked myself, since I've known your story, and
since I've learned stories of secrets from side of my friends,
(06:01):
why is it that I wouldn't say the obvious, Hey,
you had another sister. Sylvia had one aunt, her mother's
younger sister, Miriam, and her father was an only child.
So these adults comprise her entire immediate family. But now
it seemed her grandparents had had three daughters, not too
(06:22):
but Sylvia talks this information away to the point that
she barely remembers it. It's a vestige, a mirage, not
something tangible. She doesn't exactly forget all about it. It's
more like she puts it off to the side, way
off to the side. Sylvia grows up, attends Barnard College
at the age of sixteen, miss her future husband, Seymour,
(06:44):
a doctor. She's married by the time she's twenty, and
eventually she and Seymour settle in northern California. Sylvia has
all her children by the time she's twenty five, a
span of years during which her mother dies, finally succumbing
to her weak her During this time, it's almost like
Sylvia is trying to cram it all in, get as
(07:05):
much as she possibly can out of this life, since
she's grown up with a powerful internalized message that life
may be short, perhaps very short, there's always the possibility
of loss. What happened is that after she died, years
went by, during which time I became closer to her
(07:25):
than I had been to her younger sister, Miriam. I
think Miriam missed my mother very much, and I did too.
And at that time I was married, I had my
own family, was living in California, and I developed the
habit of calling my aunt every Saturday afternoon and we
will talk on the phone about everything. So we were
(07:48):
really close. And at one point, oh, I know what happened.
My grandfather came to spend time with me and lived
with me in California. He was years old and in
very good health and um sound memory, and we became
very close, sharing old stories and one day just having
(08:10):
a walk together. I said, by the way, I once
heard that you actually had three daughters and that there
was somebody born after Gladys and before Miriam. And I
remember him looking at me and squinting over at me,
say I could I could almost imitate his tone of voice.
(08:31):
He would say, what wasn't matter with you? One word,
wasn't matter with you? Why did you hear that story?
That's not true, that never happened, that wasn't true. No, no, no,
why did you get that? So it was the end
of that. I let it go. Sometime later, after I
developed this relationship with my with my aunt, I'm one
(08:51):
of our Saturday phone calls, I said, by the way, Miriam, uh,
I heard, and I told the whole story, And I said,
I asked Grandpa, who had then by then died, said
I asked Grandpa about it, and he said no. She
said no, no, no, there was for any other child. No,
never any other child. I said, Okay, time went by.
(09:14):
How did you feel during the time that was going by?
Did you accept that was it? Was it a sense
of maybe I was wrong, maybe I misheard. Did you
doubt yourself? Well? It was really it was like maybe
I had a dream. Maybe I had a dream. Oh yeah,
and you know that any one of the things about me,
because I don't like to be wrong. So if I,
if I, if I had developed something which was so
(09:37):
to speak, quote unquote stupid, I wouldn't have admitted it
to people. I've had this idea, and I'm sure of
it from my grandfather had said, it's not true. I've
never seen any artifact of that. Time went by. My
grandfather had died. I was in New York, and of
course my mother had died long before I was in
New York, probably somewhere in my late fift these early sixties,
(10:02):
and my husband's Seymore was with me. I think I
was teaching and I had a day free, and I said,
you know, I'd like to go out to the cemetery.
I'd like to go to the cemetery where my mother
was buried. And so he said okay, and we went out.
Then anybody who knows cemeteries in Queens knows that there's endless,
endless acreage of cemeteries and Queens. But I had the
(10:27):
name of the cemetery, and what was the cemetery called?
Do you remember Mount Hebron? Mount Hebron so it was
a Jewish cemetery. Was absolutely a Jewish cemetery, which brings
me back to buried secrets. I know these cemeteries on
the outskirts of New York City. My dad's family plot,
(10:47):
the Shapiro family plot, is in one of them. They
aren't pastoral final resting places, you know, with pretty benches
and shady trees. They tend to be massive, crumbling places
to stones crammed up against one another, like crooked teeth
in the mouth of the world. And I knew that
my mother was buried in a burial area that was
(11:11):
bought by the first men's Atonia Society of my grandfather's
Austrian town. What people did is they came as immigrants
and among other things, they pulled their money and they
bought acreage or acreage, they bought a plot in Jewish cemetery,
and you paid your cemetery dues to pay for the plot,
(11:34):
and then whenever you died twenty or thirty or forty
years later, you have placed in that plot. So that
so it's like the village from the old country was
transported to this cemetery plot where you would all be
together again, no kidding, and there's a there's anyway story
never want comes to visit a friend of his who
(11:55):
is in the hospital, and very we ill apparently in
the conversation in Yiddish is about how you're doing and
whether or not you might die, and he the visitor
tells the patient in the hospital, you know who died
last week, so and so and tells him. And this
person's response is not I'm sorry that so and so died,
(12:18):
but oh dear, if I die now, I'm gonna have
to lie next to so and so forever. Uh so
all the jokes that they made about that, but that's
what you did. My mother is not, so to speak,
lying next to my grandparents. She is in the order
that she died as part of the village, as part
of the village. It's not even my mother is village.
(12:40):
It's my father's parents village. An irresistible side note here.
My dad died in a car crash when I was
twenty three, and my mom died almost two decades later.
When my mother was dying, she informed me that she
was not going to be buried in my father's family
plot in one. Instead, she planned to be buried in
(13:02):
southern Jersey. I mean way down the Jersey Turnpike, which,
if you don't know it is one of the least
fun roads in the country, with her family and away
from all of those people who she had fought with
her whole married life. I feel sorry for you, she said,
though I knew she didn't. You'll have to visit your
parents in two different cemeteries. Any who, Charle malecham Irene Shapiro.
(13:29):
Generations come and go and not much changes. We're going
to take a quick break. We'll be back in a moment.
(13:50):
It's a miserable day, cold and wet when Sylvia and
Seymour make the swept from Manhattan to the cemetery in Queens.
So we win. And we found those two tombstones, and
I looked at them, and you know, I put a
requisite rock on the top of each one, which signifies
(14:10):
all kinds of things, but the people going by it
means someone was there and someone visited. And then we
walked back to the entrance and there's a little hot
or a house or very small office at the bottom
of them where you can go in and ask where
it is so and so buried, and they give you
the plot map. And when we went in there, I said,
(14:33):
you know, I said to see more on the way back.
You know, this was my father's father's plot. My mother's
family also had a plot in this cemetery. Um, and
my grandmother's Trasia and must be buried there. Let's find
(14:54):
out where. So we go into the cemetery. I'm all
of a sudden, really, I seem that as I'm telling
you the story, I'm a little choking up about it.
So we take your breath and out, getting a little
bit teary about it. We go into this office and
I said, my grandfather's last name, and and then just
(15:17):
suddenly I'm kind of a whim. I said, you know,
I'm also interested in a child that might be buried
in that same community's burial place. And I know that
she was a child about five years old, and that
she died in about Remember this is the mid nineteen nineties.
(15:45):
The small cemetery office is not equipped with WiFi or internet.
In fact, they're in the midst of transferring all their
files from a rolodex a rolodex to a computer. So
finding a child with Sylvia's grandfather's name Fuchs is slow going,
if not impossible. He looked and looking through names, says,
(16:09):
we have a lot of folks this here. What was
her first name? Uh, what was the first name? And
of course Sylvia doesn't know the child's first name because
the child was a secret. And I said, I don't know,
but I think maybe it was Sylvia. He looks, he said, yeah,
(16:34):
this is Sylvia. Folks that died in nineteen twenty one.
And I said, well, I go back, show me on
the map where to look and know what to say. Really,
he said, well, you would be able to find it
because um children were buried not in a regular plot.
(16:57):
They were buried in a corner of plot that their
community owned, and they were just buried next to each other.
When they have young children, they're buried next to each other.
And they didn't have granite headstones. They had limestone headstones.
The children. Yeah, they just the oral grouped in the corner.
There's a children's area for young children and newborns. And
(17:21):
they're just limestone. Marco's mounds name. And it's been so
many years in the rains, the limestone washes off. You'll
never find it. So we walk out of that place
and I say more, says, let's go back. Meantime it's
the end of the long day, and it's a long
(17:42):
walk up there, and I'm kind of blown away by
the whole thing, and it's becoming overcast and it looks
like it's going to rain, and I said, well, he says, well,
we won't find it. He said, let's go. We're going
to take a quick break. Sylvia is overcome with a
(18:04):
desire to flee the cemetery. She's suddenly exhausted. It has
been a very long day. But Seymour and this totally
gets to me. Seymour pushes her. He knows it's probably
the only time she'll ever be able to get to
the bottom of this question she's always had, so, he insists.
So we walk back up, we find that plot. Then
(18:28):
we see in the corners there are these like clumps
of limestone. Marker's all very washed off, so you really
can't read the names. And by this time I'm really
feeling undone in the weather, and I just I said,
let's go. That can't do this anymore. And sans, I know,
(18:50):
keeping looking, with keeping looking, this is making me cry
as well. And all of a sudden, he said, here
it is. And it isn't limestone. It's a dark gray,
beautiful granites down and it says Sylvia folks daughter official folks.
(19:12):
It's my grandfather's child. So when we came over from
the trip, I called my aunt Miriam. You know, as
I'm telling you the story, it's not easy. I have
all goose pimples all over me. I called my aunt Miriam,
and we talked about one thing or another. And I said, Miriam,
(19:34):
I was in New York. Yeah I know, I said, Merriwell,
I was in New York. I went to the cemetery
and I went to look at graves, my mother's grave,
and then I went over to where your mother is
buried with Rajah is buried, and I found the gravestone
(19:58):
for Sylvia folks. And she didn't say anything, so I said,
I was I was really upset, Miriam. I said, it's
really upset because I thought I had such a close
relationship with with myanpa official. You know, we were so close,
and he lied to me. And she said, you know
(20:20):
he didn't lie to Merriam. What do you mean you
didn't lie? I found with toolstone. She said, you forgot.
I said, Marriam, you don't forget it if you have
a six year old child that dies. She said, if
it's too horrible for you, you forget it. And you know,
(20:40):
I thought it'd be easier to tell this story, but
it's not. It's a very loving thing that Seymour did.
It was it was I think about it now, I
think about it in that moment, and I was that
really it was he who said no, no, we're here,
let's go. No, no, no, not finished looking the look.
(21:02):
And after we discovered it, I remember, you know, I
was physically upset and crying, I think, but I remember
he was saying to me, tell me what's so upsetting,
and I said, um, they lied to me, all those people.
The end of the phone call with Aunt Miriam is
(21:23):
he forgot as this said, Miriam, tell me, did you
forget you? Did you remember her at all? Uh? Because
Miriam was between two and three when her sister Sylvia died,
she said, you know, I only have one memory. I
remember I was sitting on the floor in the sun
(21:48):
porch of the apartment where I lived with my parents.
I was sitting on the floor and watching the light
patterns of sunshine on the wooden floor of that sun porch,
and my mother was sitting in a rocking chair behind me,
and all of a sudden I heard my mother crying,
(22:11):
and I became upset because she was crying. And my
mother picked me up right away, and she said, mine, dish, fine, dish,
mine kin, don't cry my child, And room said, I
never saw her cry again, and we don't. Don't tell
you that story. I'm thinking how painful it is to
(22:35):
not be able to talk about it ever, not be
able to cry to your children, or cry to anybody.
I'm sure it never goes away if you have a
child who's six years old and dies. One thing I
find myself wondering. Sylvia is a person who has spent
much of her adult life coming to know the inner
(22:56):
workings of her own mind. She's gone on silent meditation
rich treats for months, months at a time. She's taught
mindfulness all over the world. I remember when I was
first getting to know her work. I read a few
sentences from one of her books. Allowed to my husband.
Why is this so good? I asked him. He answered,
(23:16):
because it's the product of an unconfused mind. How was
it that the original conversation or overheard moment way back
when with her mother never drifted into Sylvia's unconfused mind
in all those periods of silence and contemplation. I mean,
one of the things that's interesting to me is there
(23:36):
was that overheard conversation or she or she straight out
told you and I don't know, and you put it somewhere.
I think this is what we do. Um. I'm understanding
that more and more as I'm in my own process
of discovering what I knew, what I didn't know. You
(23:57):
know about my own family secrets. Um, but where do
we put you? Know? You you have lived a very
examined life more than most. You're you're a Buddhist, you're
a teacher, you're a writer, you're a storyteller, you're a psychologist.
For God to say, and so there was this this
(24:23):
piece of knowledge that just kind of wedged itself somewhere
while you were busy becoming a psychologist and getting a
doctorate and going to school and having four children and
raising a family and living a life and going on
you know, month long meditation retreats, and it never emerged again.
(24:44):
I've thought several times, and often I think in my
life that there's been something very dependable about my psyche,
depending on what situation I would be in, I would
say about my psyche or about my heart, but where
my psyche or my heart did not let me know
things at a time that I couldn't have handled them well.
(25:09):
And later on I thought to myself, that was so
really thoughtful of my mind and my heart to tell me, well,
you don't have to take care of this now, we'll
be back when you can handle it. I don't know
that you ever finished Anny when I told you that
story before. I was surprised to find that still gives
(25:31):
me goose pet flush and I still feel like crying
about it. So here's a question for you. In that
moment in the in the cemetery office, when you were
asked the question what was her first name? And out
of your mouth came maybe it was Sylvia. Where did
(25:54):
that come from? You know, I don't know you were
named for her. I don't know that's what I figured,
but you know, um, that's why I offered the name.
Had you ever had that thought before before that moment
that it came out of your mouth? I think I
(26:17):
must have known, really on some level, and I think
I'm on the spot there. I don't remember thinking beforehand
that she would be Sylvia. But phasebook, what do you
think her name was? Coming from Jews who named for
people who died. I figured I must be Sylvia and
she must be Sylvia. I mean, this is on the
(26:45):
one hand, it's a doozy of a secret. It's also
very far back in the reaches of history in terms
of a life you know, um, and yet there's some
way in which it seems like it has hovered over
the course of of your life without knowing it. Um.
(27:10):
I remember when you first told me the story. What
I was so struck by was that moment where you said,
where you just decided today, I'm going to go to
the cemetery. We're gonna go, We're gonna take buses and trains,
We're going to get there in the rain. We're gonna
have this kind of day. How did you reconcile? I
(27:31):
think a lot of people who discover a secret well
are are at the same time realizing that they were
lied to. Um. There's a betrayal there in some way
to exactly the word. I just was thinking that in
the moment of finding out uh Semol was really asking
(27:51):
me about what particularly was so upsetting to me, and
I said, everybody lied, and I asked and they lied,
So it was it was stricken from the record. I
think my sense from Miriam, from friends of mine who
have had similar stories is that they were so unable
(28:12):
to even they were so frightened of even feeling the
intensity of their distress. You know what else, I've seen
Danny as a meditation guide and confidant for so many
people people have come on retreat and uh, when I've
(28:33):
seen them in an individual meetings during a retreat. Retreats
are always silent, so they don't get to talk to
each other, and since they're asked not to read or
to write or two talk during the retreats, they have
nothing but their own minds to pay attention to. And
it's universally true that when people uh stop stimuli from
(28:57):
coming in and spend a lot of the time sitting
walking back and forth, trying to just be present in
this moment, that they're herd of mind, of psyche or
whatever tells them what they haven't heard before. For me, certainly,
it presents a moral inventory. You know, you left this
(29:17):
really undone, and you heard so and those feelings and
you never such a really I'm happy for that, because
h I feel like after the initial oh dear, my
mind feels slightly unburdened because I had been keeping the
secret from myself and I fixed it. My friend Donna Massini,
(29:44):
a poet, wrote a beautiful poem years ago called I
Have the Skull that I've Never forgotten. In it, the
poem is a narrator. A woman has just visited the dentist.
She said, cavities filled with novacaine. Obviously I As she
walks down the street afterwards, she wonders, where does the
pain go? She had been numbed, but did that mean
(30:07):
she hadn't on some level felt the pain. So that
the numbing or the the impossibility or the seeming impossibility
of being able to handle something that that painful, doesn't
mean that it disappears. You think of something that startles,
hurts the mind that goes ah, I don't think that.
(30:29):
And that's really what I'm teaching people these days. That's
the all gis of what I'm teaching. It's not to
be able to so calm your mind that you rise
above your stuff, whether you actually see that it's ephemeral
and it's empty and therefore really isn't significant. It's none
of those things to be able to recognize this is
what's happening. This is a feeling that's arising in me.
(30:53):
This is either it's it's frightening, or it's startling, or
it's this thing or it's stadding. And I see that
that's happening, and I can stay here. I can stay
here and I can know it, and it will pen
that I can feel it. I love that you don't
have to get out of the way, you can be here. Yeah,
I thought that, as I remember years ago, I was
(31:15):
saying to a psychotherapy pageant of mine, the same as
I would say to a meditation student, don't duck, don't duck.
Oh yeah, you can do this, don't duck. I'd like
(31:39):
to thank my guest, Sylvia Borstein, for sharing her words
of wisdom with us today. You can find out more
about Sylvia and her teachings at Sylvia borstein dot com.
Family Secrets as an i Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan
is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are
the audio engineers, and Julie doug This is the executive producer.
(32:02):
If you have a family secret you'd like to share.
You can get in touch with us at listener mail
at Family Secrets Podcast dot com. You can also find
us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fam Secrets Pod That's FAMI Secrets Pod.
For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
(32:40):
My last question is do you wish that you hadn't known?
Do you wish that you would never have found out? Oh? No,
I knew you were going to say that, but I
didn't want to answer it for you. Um oh no, no, no, no.
I like knowing. I like knowing
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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