Bonus: Listener Stories, Episode 6

In this bonus episode we hear from listeners in the Family Secrets community.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. As I tore

(00:23):
the nation from my book Inheritance, I've heard from so
many about your own family secrets and realize that what
we are creating for each other on this podcast is
a community, a community for those who are looking for
a safe and supportive space to unburden themselves. To that end,
we've created a number for listeners to call in to

(00:43):
record stories to share here in this space. This week,
I'd like to share a few of those stories from
our community. Thanks for listening. Hi, I have let to
podcasts no one to leave my family secrets. In brief,
it's kind of two different secrets, but kind of revolved
around the same people. I lost my dad in May

(01:09):
of two seventeen, and ten months later my mom was killed.
Um my dad overdosed, which had been his own personal secret.
We actually to know he was even using. There were
no signs, nothing. And then ten months later my mom
was actually hit by a car while she was walking
on a sidewalk and killed, and it kind of opened

(01:29):
up big secrets in my mom's side of a family
that almost everybody that had died before I've known were
killed in strange ways. I have great uncles that were
struck by lightning, and another one was killed by a snowmobile.
Um ones that drowned. It seems like in my family,

(01:51):
you don't really live past the age of sixty, and
you die in really strange ways. Then I never knew
about it till my mom passed, and then on my
dad time. UM his dad, so my paternal grandfather I'd
only met three times in my life, but when my
dad died, I felt like I need to reach out
to him, just to let him know that his son

(02:11):
had passed. And UM, I knew he lived in the
same city, and so my mom and I before she passed,
did some research and tried to find him, and we
cannot find him anywhere, and we don't know what happened
to him. And then we found out that his girlfriend
moved to Texas and I ended up finding her phone

(02:31):
number and calling her, and she's actually has some sort
of dementia and they she said he was put into
a nursing home for alcoholism and has dementia too, and
she can't remember what nursing home he was put into.
So at this point we're still trying to look into it.
And I was always told that his family there wasn't

(02:53):
anybody else. And then I come to find out that
actually my paternal grandfather had six siblings, and now I
did my ancestry DNA and I actually connect it with
one of my second cousins on that side, and it
turns out that I have probably another like family members
through there that I've never met, and we're all starting

(03:14):
to reconnect. And so that's pretty much where my story
is right now. Thank you, bye, good morning. I had
an interesting experience occur last week and then listening to
your podcasts since it began and has been enjoying very
much all of the stories of all the different types

(03:36):
of secrets families came from keep and completely unaware that
there was a family secret in my life. And I
got a phone call, ironically while I was listening to
one of your podcasts from my uncle asking me for
the photos of my mother had before she passed, of
the known family my grandpa had, which was to sisters.

(04:00):
The story had always been that he had been left
in Missouri, that he had a mother, my great grandmother,
Um had contracted tuberculosis and had gone off to the Southwest.
His father ended up um an alcoholic and was incapable

(04:21):
of taking care of his youngest son. So his oldest daughters,
my great aunts, took their little brother, my grandpa, and
moved to Oregon. And that was always a story I
grew up around. My whole family were very, very close.

(04:42):
I thought there was no secrets, And I got a
phone call from my uncle asking for these photos of
the hierarchy, saying that he had just gotten a phone
call film a cousin he didn't know he had. And
turns out my grandpa had a live being mother and
father and two brothers. That we're all living within a

(05:05):
hundred miles of us my entire life. And it made
me think of a time that I was about nineteen
years old and in a town different than the one
I had grown up in, and a young man walked
by me and he looked just like my cousins. So
I called from my cousin and this man turned around
and was not him. And I never mentioned the last name.

(05:30):
I'm kind of wishing I had now because I believe
that was probably one of my great uncles kids or
grandkids that could have been a cousin. And I had
no idea. None of us had any idea, And there's
over a hundred and sixty of us. So just when
you think your family can't hide anything, coplomo, everything changes. Hi.

(06:03):
I stumbled on the family secret by accident. Um All
I had meant to do was fact heck mom's family
story to figure out why she'd been such a critical
mother to me. I figured that something must have happened
to her when she was a child that had traumatized
her and perhaps made her unable to be emotionally supportive.
Maybe it was because her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.

(06:26):
So I requested grandma's patient record from the state hospital
where she had been a patient for over a decade.
When I got my hands on it, the secrets just
spilled out. Three other women in Grandma's family had also
been patients there, and I got their records to her sister,
her mother, and her mother's sister. I had two generations

(06:46):
and records full of the social history of the family.
The most shocking secret was the Grandma had been sexually
abused by another member of the family, her aunt's husband,
right around the time that Mom was born. When I
found this out, I had just retired from a career
as a research librarian. So I did what a librarian
naturally does. I followed the clues in Grandma's record, and

(07:09):
I visited the homes where she had lived and the
cemeteries where my ancestors were buried. I took a DNA test,
and I determined that Grandpa was not Mom's biological father.
I found cousins I never knew I had, and some
of them were accepting of my discoveries, but others were not.

(07:30):
Um I just finished writing a book about what happened
in Mom's family. I feel like the trauma of the
past has been passed down to my generation, and the
only way that I can stop that from continuing to
happen is to bring the story to life. I think
there's a lesson in my family story that can benefit others,
and that's also why I think a podcast such as

(07:53):
yours is so important, So I want to thank you
for doing it. If you'd like to share your story,
call one eight eight eight secret zero and record your story.

(08:16):
We won't be able to run all the stories, but
we do want to shine a light on as many
as we can. The number again is one eight eight
eight Secret and then the numeral zero for more podcasts

(08:38):
for my Heart Radio