July 3, 2025 • 43 mins
What does it mean to be a family of one? Steven examines his search for belonging in the wake of disappearance, loss, and profound mystery.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains discussion of substance abuse.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Listener discretion is advised. A river is a body running.
The first time I found my brother overdosed, he looked holy,
a thing not to be touched. Yellow halo of last
night's dinner, his skin blanched, blue fresco patron saint of smack.
(00:33):
A cop flustered, tugged up his shorts, plunged a needle
into a pale thigh. He hissed awake like a soda can.
The paramedic spoke softly in his ear like a lover,
asked him what color yellow and red make? What is
(00:54):
the difference between a lake and a river? In the
corner I whittle, You've syringe into an instrument only I
can play.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
That's Stephen Espada Dawson, poet, editor, teacher of creative writing,
and poet Laureate of the State of Wisconsin. His first
collection of poems, Late to the Search Party, was recently published.
Stephens is a story of the legacy of a disappearance,
an absence, and the ways we can rebuild our own
(01:31):
sense of self and purpose in the face of unresolved loss.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:52):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape of your childhood, your early life in East.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
La So East l A. I still consider to be
one of my two homes, and it was a little
chaotic for the most part. I was with my mom,
a single mom, and my brother, and we were bouncing
around a lot from place to place, either because we
(02:32):
couldn't afford something anymore, or we were evicted or these
kinds of things. A very unstable place to grow up.
I remember we were once living in someone's garage, and honestly,
you know how nostalgia operates. It's sometimes a little confusing.
You can feel very fond of memories that were objectively difficult.
(02:56):
But the kind of closeness that a garage sort of
states is that you and your mother and your brother
basically sleeping on top of each other while the owner
of the house is warming up his car in the morning,
and your willed side of the garage isn't entirely sealed
from the top, so you have just exhaust pouring from
(03:19):
the top of the wall into your living space every morning.
And I think that is an image that really sticks
with me from my childhood. But also just like these
intense moments of transition, they really just resonate with me.
Gas stations and hotels and airports, these places that are
(03:40):
the in between. When thinking about my family, at the
fringe of their existing, they always feel very like a
bell that is a familiar sound for me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Did you have a sense when you were a little
kid that is moving around and the precarity oft did
it feel like this is the way life is, this
is the way that everybody lives, or did it feel
like distinctly yours?
Speaker 1 (04:08):
It definitely felt like mine because I was constantly being
introduced to characters and neighbors that had more histories on
the block than we did. But it also necessitated being
able to make friends really quickly, and in that way,
we were bouncing around, but also like continually building our community.
(04:31):
My mom was often working two or three jobs, and
she would either employ my brother to babysit me. My
brother who's significantly older than me in nine years, or
the community. I was very much a latch key kid.
I sometimes even though food was an issue. Maybe at home,
(04:52):
I was sometimes eating two or three dinners around the neighborhood.
So there can be a lot of abundance in a
childhood where there is some instability to and i'd point
back to the community for that.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
So your mom was a teenager when she had your brother.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Right, Yes, Yeah, she was very young, and she had
him at this home in California that I still think exists.
It's called Saint Lucie's Home for Unwed Mothers or something
like that. This is a very Catholic institution where your
family sends you when you are pregnant before marriage or
(05:33):
they're trying to hide you away from the community. A
pretty dark place for her in her memory. But yeah,
she actually gave birth to him in the parking lot
of that place before going to the hospital. I think
that I was always jealous of their closeness. They had
a very precarious relationship, and as you can see, it
(05:55):
started out precarious, but also he got in a lot
of trouble growing up. Trouble can also lead to closeness
because there's a kind of like reaching out that has
to happen.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, and trouble also has a kind of energy to
it that draws people to it in a way, I
think totally.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah. And despite that, especially in my younger years, we
were all close. I remember mom. One of my again
those memories that feel like a sort of anchor point
in my childhood is her growing out her hair very
long and then selling it so that she could afford
Christmas for us. And she brought us super soakers, which
(06:38):
was the thing that we wanted more than anything. And
I remember, and this is children are children, and they
don't see the work and the labor and the value
of these tendernesses. But I remember we filled them with
soda so that they would get really sticky when we
sprayed the neighbor kids. And what happens when you do
(07:00):
that is that they break really quickly because you're coming
up the insides, right. But yeah, that is also like
a fond, complicated memory of us not understanding the way
that she cared for us, with this sort of like
labor that was involved. He didn't know his father. I
didn't know my father. And I think that when you
(07:21):
don't have an immediate father figure, you start to see
father figures in your older brother or in any kind
of boy role model for you, which I think can
be complicated, especially when your older brother starts becoming an
addict and you want it to be just like him.
I think that when I was very young and he
(07:43):
was still young, I really looked up to him. He
was known in the neighborhoods where we lived. He was infamous.
He got into a lot of trouble. He was known
in the court systems there. The funniest thing is because
our last name is Dawson, which was a very uncommon
name for our neighborhoods, especially in East Los Angeles. The
(08:04):
neighborhood always referred to him as Jawson, and they would
refer to me as Dawson's brother. I think it's funny
but also points to the fact that we are. I'm
living in his shadow a little bit in these neighborhoods,
and I didn't really see a problem there yet. He
was definitely one of my first sort of role models,
(08:27):
and he was one of my first teachers. He taught
me so much, but also just how to be scrappy
in a scrappy world. I remember one of our first
gigs together was pretending to be guests at hotels. Again,
this theme of transition here a guest at hotels so
(08:48):
that we could get free continental breakfast. Right, So we
would go in and take the elevator up and then
walk around and take the stairs back down, wave to
the front desk people who are certainly not paid enough
to care about this at all, and then we would
get free breakfast in the morning. She taught me a
lot about confidence and how to feed yourself and get
(09:11):
what you needed from where you're at. One of the
lifts that my brother taught us was you could get
unlimited free samples at a Sam's Club or Costco. You
just have to find a family that looked like you
and nobody could stop you. Right, you are just skateboarding
outside of Sam's Club or Costco, waiting for some group
(09:33):
to blend in with, and you'd go inside with them,
take a tour around the whole facility and get your
ten samples of whatever food they were offering, go back
outside and rinse, and repeat. Two hours later, and it
was a whole sort of group of kids that all
look different, and we'd all just wait and be like, hey, Alejandro,
(09:54):
they kind of look like you. You should go with them now. Yeah,
and again, very fond, harmless, highly recommend.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
It's striking me too listening to you that there's a
theme of belonging and not belonging, like when you're talking
about Sam's Club and being like, just nobody's going to
really pay attention. We can just we can tag along,
we can blend in with these people, but we're not
actually of them totally.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, And that was again a big part of the
neighborhoods that we grew up in, is that this is
a big thing in Mexican culture too, which is just
you have ten cousins and only two of them are
your blood cousins, right, or another aid ar just from
the neighborhood, or your family goes to church with their
family or whatever it is. But it feels like blood right,
(10:44):
And when you are constantly losing folks in your family,
it VECs to question what family even means really. I
did have another sort of father figure growing up, a stepfather, Santiago.
He grew up with fourteen brothers and sisters in very rorld, Mexico,
(11:05):
and so he was over children because of that, and
we were never close. Him and my brother were never close.
And it's difficult to say, but by the time that
we are done talking today, Danny. It will probably be
more words than him and I ever said to each other.
So even though he was this sort of important factor
(11:29):
in my life, he was also not very present.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
How old were you when Santiago entered your life?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
I think I was three or four. He was actually
one of our maintenance men at some building that we
lived in, and yeah, him and my mom fell in love.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
And he also was the person that started to move
to Colorado because he had another family and that family
was moving to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's we're also more work, was so he started that
and we followed him.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Stephen is twelve when his family moves to Colorado. Brian,
his brother, is a young adult, and in his young adulthood,
Brian's behaviors have gone from basically harmless and fun to
fairly insidious and worrying. Sometimes often he simply flees.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
He starts disappearing for days, weeks, sometimes a couple months
at a time, and he keeps on getting in more trouble,
now going to jail for the things that he's doing.
He starts stealing cars and things like that, and he's
really good at it, but he's still again struggling to survive.
(12:47):
I remember catching him, the sucking down calories from like
condiment packets that he had in his coat and things
like that. I remember there were these programs at the
local mall where you could go in and you could
volunteer to be like a test subject for a supplement
or like a skincare or whatever, and they would pay
(13:11):
you one hundred dollars to report back in a week
or whatever. And he would do this at three, four
or five different malls, and he would look awful, like
he was just this guinea pig, like his skin would
be turning purple, and just terrible things. I would run
into him in the wild. I remember my mom and
(13:32):
I we would walk to go get groceries, and we
saw him sleeping under a loading dog, and my mom
pulled me away and we kept on walking and we
took a different route home, and we never talked about it.
It was the silences that we never really acknowledged, still
to this day and again that is also one of
(13:55):
the reasons I was jealous of their closeness because her
and I never really had that. We had a lot
of silences and trying to make some meaning of implication,
like what is implied here?
Speaker 2 (14:07):
What do you think that was about for your mom.
Was she trying to protect you. Did it feel like
in a way she was trying to hold that silence
or that secret kind of at bay or was she
also trying to hold it at bay from herself.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that
a little bit of both. I think she really regrets
having my brother, not necessarily when she was young, but
when she didn't have the resources to really help him
grow up or the stability right to help him grow up.
So I think that a lot of his things, like
(14:45):
his addiction and him getting in trouble, were things that
sometimes she puts on herself. And so I think that
turning away is sure to protect me in that moment,
but also to shield her a little bit. And yeah,
it's a complicated little thing.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Well, and she also she lied about your brother's whereabouts
to people and soft pedaled what was going on understandably,
But was that out of a kind of protection or
what do you think that was?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, my brother when he was either away for a
long time or when he was spending time in jail
or spending time in rehab, my mom would tell the
neighbors or tell the family that he was off doing
various things. Maybe he was at a trade school working
(15:41):
to be common electrician, or he had joined the military,
or all these weird everything that wasn't the truth. Honestly,
this is.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So often what families do to protect ourselves. We keep secrets.
We lie in the name of love. We believe there
are things better left unsaid than to tell the unvarnished,
difficult truth. We ask ourselves what would that serve? After all,
maybe things will get better, Maybe no one needs to
know during this period of time, when you're twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
(16:17):
there are these long periods where he's gone. What did
that feel like and what did you know at that point?
At one point you mentioned that he'd come back and
leave gifts for you, like he'd leave offerings or a
trace of himself in some way. But you're a kid
and you had been so deeply connected to him. What
did it feel like when he would vanish and when
he would return.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, it became fairly normal in my life for him
to leave and come back. But again, I am still
trying to figure out what it means to be a
person and a man in the world, and so I
am really eager for still for something that looks like
a father. And so when he makes a return, either
(17:01):
I wake up and he's sleeping on my bedroom floor,
or I wake up and I find that he's been
there because he leaves gifts for me. I'm really excited,
honestly to see him. It really does, upon looking back
at it, feel like that narrative that you see in
popular media where you have this like deadbeat dad that
(17:22):
the kids are really excited to see because they don't
understand the sort of like insidiousness in the gaps right.
It does feel like that now, But in real time
I was just happy to have him when I did,
and he would leave me things. And this is actually
like more significant than it seems, because at one point
(17:43):
he was fully addicted to heroin, and he's giving me
things that he could otherwise sell to get more heroin.
So this is still significant. I knew he loved me
because he stole things for me, because he gave me
things he could have used to fuel his addiction. I
remember one birthday he admitted that he stole this telescope
(18:07):
from a kiosk at a mall, and that sort of
makes its way into the posh collection. All these things
that my brother have given me. But most often they
were trinkets of a teenage life. Right, you'd have like fireworks,
or you'd have loose cigarettes, or you have playboys and
hustlers and silly things that he thought that a teenage
(18:30):
boy must need. Sometimes just really random things like these were,
by the way, always in my dresser, So whenever i'd
wake up and I knew he'd be in my room,
I would go to my dresser, and sometimes just there
were a bunch of scribbled notes in cursive that just
made no sense. They are barely sentences. One time, which
(18:53):
was an especially traumatic and eye opening morning, he's in
the room, he's not waking up. I rushed the dresser
and it's entirely full of empty glass bottles, and they
were obviously liquor bottles, and I couldn't make sense of them.
But I knew that my mom would be really upset
(19:14):
if she had found them, So I snucked downstairs to
grab a trash bag, and I very carefully, really methodically
so they wouldn't clink together, put them in this trash
bag and went to throw them in the community dumpster.
And when I came back, I was so proud of
myself for having saved him from my mom's anger over
(19:38):
that that I was trying to wake him up and
even shake him awake because he wasn't responsive to me,
and he just sprung up and he hit me in
the face, and I was knocked out for a period
of time. And when I woke up, he was in
the shower, and I was really upset and angry, and
(19:59):
I wanted to unleash my mom's wrath at that point
on him, so I immediately go to her room and
wake her up and tell her everything that had happened.
And we come back to my room and he is
climbing out of the window with just a towel around
his body, and he jumped off the two story window
(20:21):
onto the ground, and you can see his wet and
bloody and dirty footprints trail behind him, and he just disappears.
And I think that was a really major That was
a major turning point in my teenage years, because I
knew that there was a problem that we couldn't deny anymore,
(20:42):
and I knew that the family wasn't enough to help
him on a path towards being himself again.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
At that point. Do you think you knew that he
was an addict, or could you have named it, or
you just knew that that you didn't know how to that.
No one need seemed to be on help.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I was a teenager, and of course I had experience
with drugs and things like that, and my own life
and my friend groups and things like that. But I
couldn't point out heroin or I couldn't point out the
other things that he was taking. So I knew he
had a drug problem, but I didn't know what it
(21:26):
was or to what extent. Really. I was there though,
in the living room, we'd get a phone call on
the landline and he was calling to tell my mom
happy Birthday or Happy Mother's Day, or Merry Christmas, and
they were on the wrong dates, like just months apart.
I was there when we got those halls from the jails,
(21:47):
and I was there when I remember a sheriff coming
to our door with my brother and it was raining
and dark outside, and I will never forget this sort
of silhouette of them and the door as he forced
my brother to take off his shoes so he could
point to my brother's toes where he had been injecting
(22:10):
between his toes, which is a thing that attics do
so that you can hide the injection spot so it's
not so obvious in the crook of your arm. And yeah,
I remember this, sheriff wanted to date my mom. And
I remember how proud, how he felt like a superhero
for not arresting my brother and for showing us how
(22:32):
bad of shape he was in. That's an image definitely
that sticks out.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And at this point, is Santiago still in your lives
or yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
He is actually at this point, at this exact point,
he's working in Steamboat Springs, which is far away, so
he basically stays there all week and then comes and
lives with us on the weekend. So he's present, but
he's not. And again we don't talk. Him and my
brother would sometimes get into fights, fist fights and things
(23:03):
like that. It was not a healthy sort of situation.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Stephen's time in high school is impacted not only by
Brian's frequent disappearances, but by a diagnosis his mother receives
(23:32):
when he's a software.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
So my mom discovers that she has breast cancer. This
is two thousand and seven. This is October, right before Halloween.
I remember, and I remember being too old for tricker treating,
but doing it anyway. And I had this scream mask
and the mask was very cool because it had a
(23:57):
little pump that you could pump by hand and sort
of blood would like rain down the face of it.
I remember just weeping uncontrollably while I'm going to people's
houses that Halloween asking for candy and all they see
is this two tall kid coming to them for candy
bars and doing this sort of a face mask blood
(24:20):
pump thing, while actually just crying underneath that. This was
just a year after my grandfather died from cancer. When
you hear a cancer diagnosis right after that, you think
that you don't have any time left, when in fact,
she survives, but it takes a huge toll on her.
(24:43):
She develops other cancers, the cancer moves from her breast
to her ovaries, and then right now she has a
small tumors in her brain. But she has every single time,
through chemo and radiation, able to get into remission. And
(25:03):
she has outlasted every single estimate from every doctor. And
I am lucky for that. And also this is someone
that is continually for the last two decades at the
fringes of their existence, which is a hard place to be,
a hard place to be for her, a hard place
(25:25):
to be for myself too.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And she had been told that it was terminal. Yeah,
so that's a kind of all through nobody's terminal for
twenty years. But it becomes like this dagger or this
sword that's kind of hanging over everything that I imagine
just never went away, even in the years where she
wasn't quite so much on the fringes.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Yes, in the same way that I was constantly waiting
to get a phone call about my brother, about his
body being discovered or from him, even I was also
waiting to get a call that my mom had died.
And it still happens. The way that technology even has
made its way into this kind of trauma is you
(26:11):
just either have to laugh at it or you have
to cry because spam callers these days. I live in
Wisconsin now, which is a six TOZA area code, but
I have my Colorado phone number still, and spammers they
will take your current phone number, they'll use area codes
like that to call you. So I can't tell you.
(26:33):
Every single day, every week I get calls from my
mom's area code, and it's just spam, But for a
split second, I'm sure that it's the call. Right now,
my mom is in palliative care. She's at the end
of her journey, and she's living in a facility because
she needs twenty four hour care. I actually found out recently,
(26:57):
certainly after writing this book, that my mom has been
incubating this rumor that she has eight sons. And the
reason she's doing this is because they give her sort
of special treatment, and that is like her sort of
mythos around the facility. But it also suggests that she
(27:19):
has eight people that will be there taking care of
her and sending her money when she needs it and
talking to her case manager. And it's just me.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
You are eight sons.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I am not, and I do not have seven brothers.
And this was kind of a wild new thing that
I learned just this year, and I'm thinking about who
my seven brothers are.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Well, it's like another group that you don't belong.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
To exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Stephen graduates high school in two thousand and nine. He's
the first of his family to finish high school.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Day Money graduation was the last time I saw my brother,
and you know, if I'm being really generous about it.
And writing has been so important to me, writing through
these feelings, coming to understand how I really feel, and
what the shape of my family is and what it
could be, and things like that. I've come to sort
(28:19):
of understand it as a kind of sweetness, even maybe
like he just had to wait until I could accomplish
the thing that no one else could in our Obviously
from circumstance and challenge and things like that, I was
the stable one because of their hard work and also
(28:40):
their teachings and things like this. I was the first
to graduate high school. I was the first to go
to college and graduate college. I was the first to
go to grad school and graduate school. But he disappeared
in two thousand and nine, and this was not unique
to us until he didn't come back until the summer ended,
(29:01):
and there was no word, no sign until the summer ended,
and we'd make phone calls to people that she knew
in the neighborhood or even the drug dealers and things
like that, and no one had heard from him. I
want to say that I was not a star student.
So yes, I did graduate high school, but not without
(29:23):
my own unique struggles. I missed class a lot, and
my high school was actually a closed campus unless you
had above a certain GPA. I did not go to
a very good school. It was the kind of school
where there was metal detectors and you'd have to get
your back searched for weapons upon entering. It's a school
(29:45):
actually that has its own Wikipedia page for the amount
of fighting that was in the school every year. But
I have this art teacher who would let us use
her door that reached the outside to leave for lunch,
which was not allowed. But she was the first person
I think that was an authority figure at that school
(30:08):
that treated us like adults. Right. She didn't care if
we didn't go to her class as long as the
art projects that we did were done when they needed
to be done right. We would go to Kmart, which
was the closest store to the school, and we would
steal spray paint and we would try to get really
(30:31):
good at graffiti and take photos of it for art class.
And she would allow that kind of thing because she
had a more of a nuanced perspective of what art
could be for people and what it might look like.
And when we left out of her door for lunch,
we would go to only the places in the neighborhood
that only spoke Spanish, because the dean of security would
(30:55):
go out in his little golf cart to try to
catch kids like us that we're leaving school, but he
would never go into the places that we went because
he could not speak Spanish. And anyway, I did graduate
high school, but I graduated in my own way. I
came home before anybody else so that I could erase
(31:16):
the messages from school saying I hadn't been There's a
way that I did adopt some things from my brother,
and I just became better at it than him. Though
I wanted to live a different life, and it was
certainly not poetry that I had in mind. In fact,
I wanted to be a doctor since my mom had
(31:39):
her diagnosis. I was going to throw myself into cancer
research and be the person that makes the cure. I
was naive but well intentioned, and I wanted to do that.
But the creative world really called to me. It started
in high school when I would sneak into the library,
which now I feel like our safe havens. Every library
(32:01):
I've ever been to has been just another home for me.
There's such an important place but where I went to school,
you could get jumped afterwards for going into the library.
And I would sneak in and I would lift lines
from Neruda, from other poets. I love poets especially, and
(32:22):
I would incorporate them into love letters and just bold
face lie to the people that I gave them to,
just oh, yeah, that's that's from me, that's from my
heart to you, that you're the one, you know. And
I did that until I saw this poster in the library.
There wasn't even a poster from school, because that school
would never fund this kind of thing. But it was
(32:44):
just from the libraryan himself. It was a contest, a
poetry contest where you could win an iPod and an
iPod these things had just come out, and they were
like hundreds of dollars, like two hundred and fifty three
hundred dollars, something I could never afford. And I did
my best. I wrote a poem. I don't remember what
(33:05):
the poem was, but I remember rhyming shoulders with boulders
and feeling like incredible about myself, like this is apex poetry.
And I won the competition, and I found out that
I was the only one in the school that submitted
in the competition. So yeah, that sort of evolved into
(33:27):
sneaking out and doing open mics around the city and
including again, this is my brother sneaking into sort of
even the lighter aspects of my life. But we would
steal my then girlfriend's sisters car, her camaro and we
would go in the middle of the night to these
late night adult only open mics around downtown Denver, and
(33:52):
it was a really healing thing. And I was also
again treated like an adult for the first time. I
was not an adult, but it really felt like it
called to me. There's another instance of that when I
felt like this thing called to me, and that is
I'm in college now and I am making an hour
(34:14):
and a half commute to get to college, so about
three hours of traveling every day. And at this point
I know I want to be a writer. I am
not necessarily sure I wanted to be a poet. I
didn't even know what that looked like. I thought that
poetry is just something you do on the side, it's
a hobby. But I knew that there were novelists. I
(34:35):
knew that there were people that could somehow magically make
a living by writing books and I wanted to be
that person. I wanted to be the next best American novelists.
And I convinced myself, I can read all these books
on the way on the train, but I suddenly get
a lot of motion sickness. I developed that immediately, and
(34:58):
it ruins my plan. But I learned that I could
read poetry on the train because I could very quickly
read half a page poem a page poem, and I
could look into the horizon and I could resettle myself
while thinking about what I just read, and then read
(35:20):
the next page, which was not actually possible for pros
because it takes up the whole page. Lines are as
long as possible. And suddenly I'm reading two hundred books
of poems a year and learning about where my voice
fits into the discussion of poetry. Who else is talking
(35:41):
about what I want to write about.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
It's such a beautiful example of the happy accidents in life,
the gift of motion sickness.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, and also just thinking about me being scrappy and
in high school and thinking about if I could see
my eighteen nineteen twenty year old self getting motion sick
and choosing and how I would bully myself at that age,
but I do feel like it called to me. And
I learned that a poem could contain so much in
(36:10):
such a small package, and that was really an illuminating thing.
A poem did not have to be a Hallmark card,
it did not have to be a shakespeareance on it.
It could be so many different things.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
We'll be right back. Vanishing is its own very particular
kind of absence. There's no closure, no answer. Grappling with this,
(36:54):
along with the fact that his mother has been told
time and time again that she's terminally ill, my central
question comes to define Stephen's life. How do you become
a family of one?
Speaker 1 (37:09):
When thinking about the question of how to be a
family of one, I have come to the conclusion that
there's no need to be as long as you can
really develop your idea of what family is. And I
think it has actually been under my nose this whole time,
(37:29):
which is the neighbor that feeds me dinner when I'm
a kid and I don't have anywhere to go, and
the friends that are not blood that I've made along
the way, that have been often there for me more
than blood. My brother and I are only half related
like blood, just doesn't matter that much. I have been
(37:50):
in this incredibly privileged position to build communities wherever I go,
and to make life long friends and my partner well,
and just this is the family that you get to choose.
And when your family is vanishing, you have to ask
(38:10):
yourself how important blood really is. The book has an
epigraph that starts the collection, which is a whole is
nothing but what remains around it. And so I'm constantly
asking myself what is left when the hole persists? And
I've just decided that's love and it doesn't have to
(38:34):
come from the people that you were born with.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Stephen lives in Madison, Wisconsin now, where he teaches and
writes and has a rich, full life. And yet there
is of course something unfinished, something that may always remain unfinished.
His brother's absence is something he carries. Sometimes he sees
someone who looks like Brian and feels the inner earthquake
(39:02):
of what if. But he is no longer searching. He
considers Brian's disappearance a closed investigation. He's not seeking answers
to unanswerable questions.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
I still see him. I found myself really gravitating towards works. Unfortunately,
there aren't a ton of poetry collections or novels or
memoirs about missing people, especially in this specific context when
you really don't know if he is missing by his
(39:37):
choice or not. But there are unfortunately many of those
same genres about people that have taken their own life,
and it is a sort of similar outcome where you
have this sort of sudden disappearance that leaves more questions
(39:58):
than answers. If I this being different, there's no suicide letter,
there's nothing like that. I do feel again a lot
of resonance with those stories, and similar to people who
experienced that kind of loss, that kind of whole I
do still see in my community people that sort of
vaguely look like my brother, or look like my memory
(40:21):
of him, which really gets more dull as the years
go by. Logically I understand that, let's see, he would
be forty three now and he wouldn't look at all
like the person I remember, but it happens. I do
see him in passers by, and I do see him
as the bus driver, and I do see him watering
(40:41):
the garden, and one time actually at a coffee shop
here where I had just moved here. As a poetry
fellow at the university, and I'm having a really great
little work date with my fellow fellows, and one of
my friends, Yalitza, her landlord, comes into the coffee shop
(41:03):
and he looks so much like my brother that I
literally start uncontrollably weeping in public, and people are just like,
what's going on. So it does happen. But along with
the working out that comes with the book is also
therapy and psychiatry and things like that. And I've come
(41:25):
to understand that the brother that I knew, whether or
not his physical body is alive or not, or here
or not, that person is dead. And I am learning
to grieve late that death. And that's another reason why
(41:49):
I have named the collection Late to the Search Party,
because this is how grieving works, is it happens on
its own timeline.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Here's Stephen reading from a poem in his extraordinary collection
Late to the Search Party.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
When you die, I'm convinced a bell will ring in
some far place inside me. You said you'd like to
run one day in a field of baby's breath. In
your dreams, all the cellos are near and out of tune.
In my dreams, wind chimes spell a word I can't
(42:38):
pronounce your death. The wind.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
I cannot point to it. I can point to everything
it moves.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(43:21):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(43:52):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains discussion of substance abuse.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Listener discretion is advised. A river is a body running.
The first time I found my brother overdosed, he looked holy,
a thing not to be touched. Yellow halo of last
night's dinner, his skin blanched, blue fresco patron saint of smack.
(00:33):
A cop flustered, tugged up his shorts, plunged a needle
into a pale thigh. He hissed awake like a soda can.
The paramedic spoke softly in his ear like a lover,
asked him what color yellow and red make? What is
(00:54):
the difference between a lake and a river? In the
corner I whittle, You've syringe into an instrument only I
can play.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
That's Stephen Espada Dawson, poet, editor, teacher of creative writing,
and poet Laureate of the State of Wisconsin. His first
collection of poems, Late to the Search Party, was recently published.
Stephens is a story of the legacy of a disappearance,
an absence, and the ways we can rebuild our own
(01:31):
sense of self and purpose in the face of unresolved loss.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:52):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about
the landscape of your childhood, your early life in East.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
La So East l A. I still consider to be
one of my two homes, and it was a little
chaotic for the most part. I was with my mom,
a single mom, and my brother, and we were bouncing
around a lot from place to place, either because we
(02:32):
couldn't afford something anymore, or we were evicted or these
kinds of things. A very unstable place to grow up.
I remember we were once living in someone's garage, and honestly,
you know how nostalgia operates. It's sometimes a little confusing.
You can feel very fond of memories that were objectively difficult.
(02:56):
But the kind of closeness that a garage sort of
states is that you and your mother and your brother
basically sleeping on top of each other while the owner
of the house is warming up his car in the morning,
and your willed side of the garage isn't entirely sealed
from the top, so you have just exhaust pouring from
(03:19):
the top of the wall into your living space every morning.
And I think that is an image that really sticks
with me from my childhood. But also just like these
intense moments of transition, they really just resonate with me.
Gas stations and hotels and airports, these places that are
(03:40):
the in between. When thinking about my family, at the
fringe of their existing, they always feel very like a
bell that is a familiar sound for me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Did you have a sense when you were a little
kid that is moving around and the precarity oft did
it feel like this is the way life is, this
is the way that everybody lives, or did it feel
like distinctly yours?
Speaker 1 (04:08):
It definitely felt like mine because I was constantly being
introduced to characters and neighbors that had more histories on
the block than we did. But it also necessitated being
able to make friends really quickly, and in that way,
we were bouncing around, but also like continually building our community.
(04:31):
My mom was often working two or three jobs, and
she would either employ my brother to babysit me. My
brother who's significantly older than me in nine years, or
the community. I was very much a latch key kid.
I sometimes even though food was an issue. Maybe at home,
(04:52):
I was sometimes eating two or three dinners around the neighborhood.
So there can be a lot of abundance in a
childhood where there is some instability to and i'd point
back to the community for that.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
So your mom was a teenager when she had your brother.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Right, Yes, Yeah, she was very young, and she had
him at this home in California that I still think exists.
It's called Saint Lucie's Home for Unwed Mothers or something
like that. This is a very Catholic institution where your
family sends you when you are pregnant before marriage or
(05:33):
they're trying to hide you away from the community. A
pretty dark place for her in her memory. But yeah,
she actually gave birth to him in the parking lot
of that place before going to the hospital. I think
that I was always jealous of their closeness. They had
a very precarious relationship, and as you can see, it
(05:55):
started out precarious, but also he got in a lot
of trouble growing up. Trouble can also lead to closeness
because there's a kind of like reaching out that has
to happen.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yeah, and trouble also has a kind of energy to
it that draws people to it in a way, I
think totally.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah. And despite that, especially in my younger years, we
were all close. I remember mom. One of my again
those memories that feel like a sort of anchor point
in my childhood is her growing out her hair very
long and then selling it so that she could afford
Christmas for us. And she brought us super soakers, which
(06:38):
was the thing that we wanted more than anything. And
I remember, and this is children are children, and they
don't see the work and the labor and the value
of these tendernesses. But I remember we filled them with
soda so that they would get really sticky when we
sprayed the neighbor kids. And what happens when you do
(07:00):
that is that they break really quickly because you're coming
up the insides, right. But yeah, that is also like
a fond, complicated memory of us not understanding the way
that she cared for us, with this sort of like
labor that was involved. He didn't know his father. I
didn't know my father. And I think that when you
(07:21):
don't have an immediate father figure, you start to see
father figures in your older brother or in any kind
of boy role model for you, which I think can
be complicated, especially when your older brother starts becoming an
addict and you want it to be just like him.
I think that when I was very young and he
(07:43):
was still young, I really looked up to him. He
was known in the neighborhoods where we lived. He was infamous.
He got into a lot of trouble. He was known
in the court systems there. The funniest thing is because
our last name is Dawson, which was a very uncommon
name for our neighborhoods, especially in East Los Angeles. The
(08:04):
neighborhood always referred to him as Jawson, and they would
refer to me as Dawson's brother. I think it's funny
but also points to the fact that we are. I'm
living in his shadow a little bit in these neighborhoods,
and I didn't really see a problem there yet. He
was definitely one of my first sort of role models,
(08:27):
and he was one of my first teachers. He taught
me so much, but also just how to be scrappy
in a scrappy world. I remember one of our first
gigs together was pretending to be guests at hotels. Again,
this theme of transition here a guest at hotels so
(08:48):
that we could get free continental breakfast. Right, So we
would go in and take the elevator up and then
walk around and take the stairs back down, wave to
the front desk people who are certainly not paid enough
to care about this at all, and then we would
get free breakfast in the morning. She taught me a
lot about confidence and how to feed yourself and get
(09:11):
what you needed from where you're at. One of the
lifts that my brother taught us was you could get
unlimited free samples at a Sam's Club or Costco. You
just have to find a family that looked like you
and nobody could stop you. Right, you are just skateboarding
outside of Sam's Club or Costco, waiting for some group
(09:33):
to blend in with, and you'd go inside with them,
take a tour around the whole facility and get your
ten samples of whatever food they were offering, go back
outside and rinse, and repeat. Two hours later, and it
was a whole sort of group of kids that all
look different, and we'd all just wait and be like, hey, Alejandro,
(09:54):
they kind of look like you. You should go with them now. Yeah,
and again, very fond, harmless, highly recommend.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
It's striking me too listening to you that there's a
theme of belonging and not belonging, like when you're talking
about Sam's Club and being like, just nobody's going to
really pay attention. We can just we can tag along,
we can blend in with these people, but we're not
actually of them totally.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, And that was again a big part of the
neighborhoods that we grew up in, is that this is
a big thing in Mexican culture too, which is just
you have ten cousins and only two of them are
your blood cousins, right, or another aid ar just from
the neighborhood, or your family goes to church with their
family or whatever it is. But it feels like blood right,
(10:44):
And when you are constantly losing folks in your family,
it VECs to question what family even means really. I
did have another sort of father figure growing up, a stepfather, Santiago.
He grew up with fourteen brothers and sisters in very rorld, Mexico,
(11:05):
and so he was over children because of that, and
we were never close. Him and my brother were never close.
And it's difficult to say, but by the time that
we are done talking today, Danny. It will probably be
more words than him and I ever said to each other.
So even though he was this sort of important factor
(11:29):
in my life, he was also not very present.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
How old were you when Santiago entered your life?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
I think I was three or four. He was actually
one of our maintenance men at some building that we
lived in, and yeah, him and my mom fell in love.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
And he also was the person that started to move
to Colorado because he had another family and that family
was moving to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's we're also more work, was so he started that
and we followed him.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Stephen is twelve when his family moves to Colorado. Brian,
his brother, is a young adult, and in his young adulthood,
Brian's behaviors have gone from basically harmless and fun to
fairly insidious and worrying. Sometimes often he simply flees.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
He starts disappearing for days, weeks, sometimes a couple months
at a time, and he keeps on getting in more trouble,
now going to jail for the things that he's doing.
He starts stealing cars and things like that, and he's
really good at it, but he's still again struggling to survive.
(12:47):
I remember catching him, the sucking down calories from like
condiment packets that he had in his coat and things
like that. I remember there were these programs at the
local mall where you could go in and you could
volunteer to be like a test subject for a supplement
or like a skincare or whatever, and they would pay
(13:11):
you one hundred dollars to report back in a week
or whatever. And he would do this at three, four
or five different malls, and he would look awful, like
he was just this guinea pig, like his skin would
be turning purple, and just terrible things. I would run
into him in the wild. I remember my mom and
(13:32):
I we would walk to go get groceries, and we
saw him sleeping under a loading dog, and my mom
pulled me away and we kept on walking and we
took a different route home, and we never talked about it.
It was the silences that we never really acknowledged, still
to this day and again that is also one of
(13:55):
the reasons I was jealous of their closeness because her
and I never really had that. We had a lot
of silences and trying to make some meaning of implication,
like what is implied here?
Speaker 2 (14:07):
What do you think that was about for your mom.
Was she trying to protect you. Did it feel like
in a way she was trying to hold that silence
or that secret kind of at bay or was she
also trying to hold it at bay from herself.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that
a little bit of both. I think she really regrets
having my brother, not necessarily when she was young, but
when she didn't have the resources to really help him
grow up or the stability right to help him grow up.
So I think that a lot of his things, like
(14:45):
his addiction and him getting in trouble, were things that
sometimes she puts on herself. And so I think that
turning away is sure to protect me in that moment,
but also to shield her a little bit. And yeah,
it's a complicated little thing.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Well, and she also she lied about your brother's whereabouts
to people and soft pedaled what was going on understandably,
But was that out of a kind of protection or
what do you think that was?
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Yeah, my brother when he was either away for a
long time or when he was spending time in jail
or spending time in rehab, my mom would tell the
neighbors or tell the family that he was off doing
various things. Maybe he was at a trade school working
(15:41):
to be common electrician, or he had joined the military,
or all these weird everything that wasn't the truth. Honestly,
this is.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
So often what families do to protect ourselves. We keep secrets.
We lie in the name of love. We believe there
are things better left unsaid than to tell the unvarnished,
difficult truth. We ask ourselves what would that serve? After all,
maybe things will get better, Maybe no one needs to
know during this period of time, when you're twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
(16:17):
there are these long periods where he's gone. What did
that feel like and what did you know at that point?
At one point you mentioned that he'd come back and
leave gifts for you, like he'd leave offerings or a
trace of himself in some way. But you're a kid
and you had been so deeply connected to him. What
did it feel like when he would vanish and when
he would return.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, it became fairly normal in my life for him
to leave and come back. But again, I am still
trying to figure out what it means to be a
person and a man in the world, and so I
am really eager for still for something that looks like
a father. And so when he makes a return, either
(17:01):
I wake up and he's sleeping on my bedroom floor,
or I wake up and I find that he's been
there because he leaves gifts for me. I'm really excited,
honestly to see him. It really does, upon looking back
at it, feel like that narrative that you see in
popular media where you have this like deadbeat dad that
(17:22):
the kids are really excited to see because they don't
understand the sort of like insidiousness in the gaps right.
It does feel like that now, But in real time
I was just happy to have him when I did,
and he would leave me things. And this is actually
like more significant than it seems, because at one point
(17:43):
he was fully addicted to heroin, and he's giving me
things that he could otherwise sell to get more heroin.
So this is still significant. I knew he loved me
because he stole things for me, because he gave me
things he could have used to fuel his addiction. I
remember one birthday he admitted that he stole this telescope
(18:07):
from a kiosk at a mall, and that sort of
makes its way into the posh collection. All these things
that my brother have given me. But most often they
were trinkets of a teenage life. Right, you'd have like fireworks,
or you'd have loose cigarettes, or you have playboys and
hustlers and silly things that he thought that a teenage
(18:30):
boy must need. Sometimes just really random things like these were,
by the way, always in my dresser, So whenever i'd
wake up and I knew he'd be in my room,
I would go to my dresser, and sometimes just there
were a bunch of scribbled notes in cursive that just
made no sense. They are barely sentences. One time, which
(18:53):
was an especially traumatic and eye opening morning, he's in
the room, he's not waking up. I rushed the dresser
and it's entirely full of empty glass bottles, and they
were obviously liquor bottles, and I couldn't make sense of them.
But I knew that my mom would be really upset
(19:14):
if she had found them, So I snucked downstairs to
grab a trash bag, and I very carefully, really methodically
so they wouldn't clink together, put them in this trash
bag and went to throw them in the community dumpster.
And when I came back, I was so proud of
myself for having saved him from my mom's anger over
(19:38):
that that I was trying to wake him up and
even shake him awake because he wasn't responsive to me,
and he just sprung up and he hit me in
the face, and I was knocked out for a period
of time. And when I woke up, he was in
the shower, and I was really upset and angry, and
(19:59):
I wanted to unleash my mom's wrath at that point
on him, so I immediately go to her room and
wake her up and tell her everything that had happened.
And we come back to my room and he is
climbing out of the window with just a towel around
his body, and he jumped off the two story window
(20:21):
onto the ground, and you can see his wet and
bloody and dirty footprints trail behind him, and he just disappears.
And I think that was a really major That was
a major turning point in my teenage years, because I
knew that there was a problem that we couldn't deny anymore,
(20:42):
and I knew that the family wasn't enough to help
him on a path towards being himself again.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
At that point. Do you think you knew that he
was an addict, or could you have named it, or
you just knew that that you didn't know how to that.
No one need seemed to be on help.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I was a teenager, and of course I had experience
with drugs and things like that, and my own life
and my friend groups and things like that. But I
couldn't point out heroin or I couldn't point out the
other things that he was taking. So I knew he
had a drug problem, but I didn't know what it
(21:26):
was or to what extent. Really. I was there though,
in the living room, we'd get a phone call on
the landline and he was calling to tell my mom
happy Birthday or Happy Mother's Day, or Merry Christmas, and
they were on the wrong dates, like just months apart.
I was there when we got those halls from the jails,
(21:47):
and I was there when I remember a sheriff coming
to our door with my brother and it was raining
and dark outside, and I will never forget this sort
of silhouette of them and the door as he forced
my brother to take off his shoes so he could
point to my brother's toes where he had been injecting
(22:10):
between his toes, which is a thing that attics do
so that you can hide the injection spot so it's
not so obvious in the crook of your arm. And yeah,
I remember this, sheriff wanted to date my mom. And
I remember how proud, how he felt like a superhero
for not arresting my brother and for showing us how
(22:32):
bad of shape he was in. That's an image definitely
that sticks out.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And at this point, is Santiago still in your lives
or yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
He is actually at this point, at this exact point,
he's working in Steamboat Springs, which is far away, so
he basically stays there all week and then comes and
lives with us on the weekend. So he's present, but
he's not. And again we don't talk. Him and my
brother would sometimes get into fights, fist fights and things
(23:03):
like that. It was not a healthy sort of situation.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Stephen's time in high school is impacted not only by
Brian's frequent disappearances, but by a diagnosis his mother receives
(23:32):
when he's a software.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
So my mom discovers that she has breast cancer. This
is two thousand and seven. This is October, right before Halloween.
I remember, and I remember being too old for tricker treating,
but doing it anyway. And I had this scream mask
and the mask was very cool because it had a
(23:57):
little pump that you could pump by hand and sort
of blood would like rain down the face of it.
I remember just weeping uncontrollably while I'm going to people's
houses that Halloween asking for candy and all they see
is this two tall kid coming to them for candy
bars and doing this sort of a face mask blood
(24:20):
pump thing, while actually just crying underneath that. This was
just a year after my grandfather died from cancer. When
you hear a cancer diagnosis right after that, you think
that you don't have any time left, when in fact,
she survives, but it takes a huge toll on her.
(24:43):
She develops other cancers, the cancer moves from her breast
to her ovaries, and then right now she has a
small tumors in her brain. But she has every single time,
through chemo and radiation, able to get into remission. And
(25:03):
she has outlasted every single estimate from every doctor. And
I am lucky for that. And also this is someone
that is continually for the last two decades at the
fringes of their existence, which is a hard place to be,
a hard place to be for her, a hard place
(25:25):
to be for myself too.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And she had been told that it was terminal. Yeah,
so that's a kind of all through nobody's terminal for
twenty years. But it becomes like this dagger or this
sword that's kind of hanging over everything that I imagine
just never went away, even in the years where she
wasn't quite so much on the fringes.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Yes, in the same way that I was constantly waiting
to get a phone call about my brother, about his
body being discovered or from him, even I was also
waiting to get a call that my mom had died.
And it still happens. The way that technology even has
made its way into this kind of trauma is you
(26:11):
just either have to laugh at it or you have
to cry because spam callers these days. I live in
Wisconsin now, which is a six TOZA area code, but
I have my Colorado phone number still, and spammers they
will take your current phone number, they'll use area codes
like that to call you. So I can't tell you.
(26:33):
Every single day, every week I get calls from my
mom's area code, and it's just spam, But for a
split second, I'm sure that it's the call. Right now,
my mom is in palliative care. She's at the end
of her journey, and she's living in a facility because
she needs twenty four hour care. I actually found out recently,
(26:57):
certainly after writing this book, that my mom has been
incubating this rumor that she has eight sons. And the
reason she's doing this is because they give her sort
of special treatment, and that is like her sort of
mythos around the facility. But it also suggests that she
(27:19):
has eight people that will be there taking care of
her and sending her money when she needs it and
talking to her case manager. And it's just me.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
You are eight sons.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
I am not, and I do not have seven brothers.
And this was kind of a wild new thing that
I learned just this year, and I'm thinking about who
my seven brothers are.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Well, it's like another group that you don't belong.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
To exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Stephen graduates high school in two thousand and nine. He's
the first of his family to finish high school.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Day Money graduation was the last time I saw my brother,
and you know, if I'm being really generous about it.
And writing has been so important to me, writing through
these feelings, coming to understand how I really feel, and
what the shape of my family is and what it
could be, and things like that. I've come to sort
(28:19):
of understand it as a kind of sweetness, even maybe
like he just had to wait until I could accomplish
the thing that no one else could in our Obviously
from circumstance and challenge and things like that, I was
the stable one because of their hard work and also
(28:40):
their teachings and things like this. I was the first
to graduate high school. I was the first to go
to college and graduate college. I was the first to
go to grad school and graduate school. But he disappeared
in two thousand and nine, and this was not unique
to us until he didn't come back until the summer ended,
(29:01):
and there was no word, no sign until the summer ended,
and we'd make phone calls to people that she knew
in the neighborhood or even the drug dealers and things
like that, and no one had heard from him. I
want to say that I was not a star student.
So yes, I did graduate high school, but not without
(29:23):
my own unique struggles. I missed class a lot, and
my high school was actually a closed campus unless you
had above a certain GPA. I did not go to
a very good school. It was the kind of school
where there was metal detectors and you'd have to get
your back searched for weapons upon entering. It's a school
(29:45):
actually that has its own Wikipedia page for the amount
of fighting that was in the school every year. But
I have this art teacher who would let us use
her door that reached the outside to leave for lunch,
which was not allowed. But she was the first person
I think that was an authority figure at that school
(30:08):
that treated us like adults. Right. She didn't care if
we didn't go to her class as long as the
art projects that we did were done when they needed
to be done right. We would go to Kmart, which
was the closest store to the school, and we would
steal spray paint and we would try to get really
(30:31):
good at graffiti and take photos of it for art class.
And she would allow that kind of thing because she
had a more of a nuanced perspective of what art
could be for people and what it might look like.
And when we left out of her door for lunch,
we would go to only the places in the neighborhood
that only spoke Spanish, because the dean of security would
(30:55):
go out in his little golf cart to try to
catch kids like us that we're leaving school, but he
would never go into the places that we went because
he could not speak Spanish. And anyway, I did graduate
high school, but I graduated in my own way. I
came home before anybody else so that I could erase
(31:16):
the messages from school saying I hadn't been There's a
way that I did adopt some things from my brother,
and I just became better at it than him. Though
I wanted to live a different life, and it was
certainly not poetry that I had in mind. In fact,
I wanted to be a doctor since my mom had
(31:39):
her diagnosis. I was going to throw myself into cancer
research and be the person that makes the cure. I
was naive but well intentioned, and I wanted to do that.
But the creative world really called to me. It started
in high school when I would sneak into the library,
which now I feel like our safe havens. Every library
(32:01):
I've ever been to has been just another home for me.
There's such an important place but where I went to school,
you could get jumped afterwards for going into the library.
And I would sneak in and I would lift lines
from Neruda, from other poets. I love poets especially, and
(32:22):
I would incorporate them into love letters and just bold
face lie to the people that I gave them to,
just oh, yeah, that's that's from me, that's from my
heart to you, that you're the one, you know. And
I did that until I saw this poster in the library.
There wasn't even a poster from school, because that school
would never fund this kind of thing. But it was
(32:44):
just from the libraryan himself. It was a contest, a
poetry contest where you could win an iPod and an
iPod these things had just come out, and they were
like hundreds of dollars, like two hundred and fifty three
hundred dollars, something I could never afford. And I did
my best. I wrote a poem. I don't remember what
(33:05):
the poem was, but I remember rhyming shoulders with boulders
and feeling like incredible about myself, like this is apex poetry.
And I won the competition, and I found out that
I was the only one in the school that submitted
in the competition. So yeah, that sort of evolved into
(33:27):
sneaking out and doing open mics around the city and
including again, this is my brother sneaking into sort of
even the lighter aspects of my life. But we would
steal my then girlfriend's sisters car, her camaro and we
would go in the middle of the night to these
late night adult only open mics around downtown Denver, and
(33:52):
it was a really healing thing. And I was also
again treated like an adult for the first time. I
was not an adult, but it really felt like it
called to me. There's another instance of that when I
felt like this thing called to me, and that is
I'm in college now and I am making an hour
(34:14):
and a half commute to get to college, so about
three hours of traveling every day. And at this point
I know I want to be a writer. I am
not necessarily sure I wanted to be a poet. I
didn't even know what that looked like. I thought that
poetry is just something you do on the side, it's
a hobby. But I knew that there were novelists. I
(34:35):
knew that there were people that could somehow magically make
a living by writing books and I wanted to be
that person. I wanted to be the next best American novelists.
And I convinced myself, I can read all these books
on the way on the train, but I suddenly get
a lot of motion sickness. I developed that immediately, and
(34:58):
it ruins my plan. But I learned that I could
read poetry on the train because I could very quickly
read half a page poem a page poem, and I
could look into the horizon and I could resettle myself
while thinking about what I just read, and then read
(35:20):
the next page, which was not actually possible for pros
because it takes up the whole page. Lines are as
long as possible. And suddenly I'm reading two hundred books
of poems a year and learning about where my voice
fits into the discussion of poetry. Who else is talking
(35:41):
about what I want to write about.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
It's such a beautiful example of the happy accidents in life,
the gift of motion sickness.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, and also just thinking about me being scrappy and
in high school and thinking about if I could see
my eighteen nineteen twenty year old self getting motion sick
and choosing and how I would bully myself at that age,
but I do feel like it called to me. And
I learned that a poem could contain so much in
(36:10):
such a small package, and that was really an illuminating thing.
A poem did not have to be a Hallmark card,
it did not have to be a shakespeareance on it.
It could be so many different things.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
We'll be right back. Vanishing is its own very particular
kind of absence. There's no closure, no answer. Grappling with this,
(36:54):
along with the fact that his mother has been told
time and time again that she's terminally ill, my central
question comes to define Stephen's life. How do you become
a family of one?
Speaker 1 (37:09):
When thinking about the question of how to be a
family of one, I have come to the conclusion that
there's no need to be as long as you can
really develop your idea of what family is. And I
think it has actually been under my nose this whole time,
(37:29):
which is the neighbor that feeds me dinner when I'm
a kid and I don't have anywhere to go, and
the friends that are not blood that I've made along
the way, that have been often there for me more
than blood. My brother and I are only half related
like blood, just doesn't matter that much. I have been
(37:50):
in this incredibly privileged position to build communities wherever I go,
and to make life long friends and my partner well,
and just this is the family that you get to choose.
And when your family is vanishing, you have to ask
(38:10):
yourself how important blood really is. The book has an
epigraph that starts the collection, which is a whole is
nothing but what remains around it. And so I'm constantly
asking myself what is left when the hole persists? And
I've just decided that's love and it doesn't have to
(38:34):
come from the people that you were born with.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Stephen lives in Madison, Wisconsin now, where he teaches and
writes and has a rich, full life. And yet there
is of course something unfinished, something that may always remain unfinished.
His brother's absence is something he carries. Sometimes he sees
someone who looks like Brian and feels the inner earthquake
(39:02):
of what if. But he is no longer searching. He
considers Brian's disappearance a closed investigation. He's not seeking answers
to unanswerable questions.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
I still see him. I found myself really gravitating towards works. Unfortunately,
there aren't a ton of poetry collections or novels or
memoirs about missing people, especially in this specific context when
you really don't know if he is missing by his
(39:37):
choice or not. But there are unfortunately many of those
same genres about people that have taken their own life,
and it is a sort of similar outcome where you
have this sort of sudden disappearance that leaves more questions
(39:58):
than answers. If I this being different, there's no suicide letter,
there's nothing like that. I do feel again a lot
of resonance with those stories, and similar to people who
experienced that kind of loss, that kind of whole I
do still see in my community people that sort of
vaguely look like my brother, or look like my memory
(40:21):
of him, which really gets more dull as the years
go by. Logically I understand that, let's see, he would
be forty three now and he wouldn't look at all
like the person I remember, but it happens. I do
see him in passers by, and I do see him
as the bus driver, and I do see him watering
(40:41):
the garden, and one time actually at a coffee shop
here where I had just moved here. As a poetry
fellow at the university, and I'm having a really great
little work date with my fellow fellows, and one of
my friends, Yalitza, her landlord, comes into the coffee shop
(41:03):
and he looks so much like my brother that I
literally start uncontrollably weeping in public, and people are just like,
what's going on. So it does happen. But along with
the working out that comes with the book is also
therapy and psychiatry and things like that. And I've come
(41:25):
to understand that the brother that I knew, whether or
not his physical body is alive or not, or here
or not, that person is dead. And I am learning
to grieve late that death. And that's another reason why
(41:49):
I have named the collection Late to the Search Party,
because this is how grieving works, is it happens on
its own timeline.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Here's Stephen reading from a poem in his extraordinary collection
Late to the Search Party.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
When you die, I'm convinced a bell will ring in
some far place inside me. You said you'd like to
run one day in a field of baby's breath. In
your dreams, all the cellos are near and out of tune.
In my dreams, wind chimes spell a word I can't
(42:38):
pronounce your death. The wind.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
I cannot point to it. I can point to everything
it moves.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(43:21):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(43:52):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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