The Blue Chair

Nadia Owusu always worshipped her father, and his death when she was just 13 turned her world upside down. Fifteen years later, a bitter argument with her stepmother creates a brand new fault line in her life, leaving Nadia wondering if she ever really knew her father at all.

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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. My guest today

(00:24):
is writer Nadia Awusu, whose debut memoir After Shocks was
recently published. Nadia's story is about secrets and that very
close first cousin to secrets, lies or potential lies. I
think it's safe to say that where there are secrets,

(00:44):
there are almost inevitably lies, lies, either told to cover
up or to protect, or to defend, or sometimes to
exact revenge. Nadia's story is also about learning to live
with the fact that we might just never the whole truth,
and maybe that's okay. So, Nadia, I always begin by

(01:10):
asking my guest this question, but in your case, it's
actually an even more interesting question than usual, which is,
tell me about the landscape of your childhood. So I
was born in Dar Sala, Tanzania, and I was born
there because my father worked for you an agency. My
father was from Ghana and my mother is Armenian American,

(01:33):
and they met in Massachusetts, where my mother grew up
and my father was there for graduate school, so right
from the very beginning I had a very sort of
international upbringing. UM. My mother left when I was two
years old. She left Tanzania and moved back to the
United States, where she very quickly remarried and had two
other children. So I was largely raised by my father

(01:56):
versus a single parent. My sister and I were sent
to live with my aunt Harriet for a little while
while he sort of got his life together to parent
two girls on his own. My sister is a year
younger than me, and then my father remarried Uh and
we all moved together to Rome, Italy, where the headquarters

(02:17):
of the agency he worked for was. And so I
spent my childhood moving back and forth between Italy and
largely East Africa. I lived in Ethiopia, Uganda, UM, Tanzania,
spent a lot of time in Ghana with my father's family,
and in the UK, where my father's sisters, UM and
all my cousins lived, and had a really sort of

(02:40):
hop scotched upbringing, always sort of straddling cultures and languages.
And you know, just as we settled into a new home,
my father would tell us that it was time to
leave again, and we pack up and move on to
the next place. And in some ways, this is a
really wonderful way to grow up because I grew up

(03:00):
among so many people, um, so many different kinds of people,
so many different cultures, and got to see so much
of the world from a very young age, and especially
because of who my father was, he was always deeply
engaged in what was going on in the world around him.
I got to learn a lot about the world and
about people and places. But on the other hand, there

(03:20):
was always sort of this sense of longing to really
belong to a place in a in a clearer way,
and sort of a anxiety about, you know what else
I might lose, having lost my mother so young and
her absence was very palpable in my life, and then
when I was thirteen my father passed away. I'm always curious,

(03:45):
um because I grew up in one home, in one
neighborhood and really basically never left until I went to
college and then didn't go far and never had that
experience of being the new kid again and again and again.
And I always I wonder about like what that does,
like both what muscles it builds, and also as you

(04:05):
as you describe kind of that, you know, the longing
that it can also produce. You know, there are many
of us around the world who live this kind of childhood,
and in fact, were often called third culture kids, you know,
kids who grew up kind of in between their parents
cultures and sort of straddling borders and boundaries. And I
think because I went to international schools my whole life

(04:29):
largely with kids like me who were moving around a lot.
Their parents worked for you and agencies or for embassies,
and so all of us lived this very transient life,
which I think sort of made it more normal than
if you're moving into a community that you know is
already established. But at the same time, I think that
because we were moving to different countries and having to

(04:53):
sort of adapt to you know, even though our international
school international schools are pretty consistent where where you are,
but everything around us changed, including sort of the language
that we communicated in. It was always really important to
my father that we learned the language, and so I
guess that's one of the sort of muscles that we
sort of flexed as I was growing up. Um And

(05:16):
I think that you get to know people differently when
you're speaking their language, so and I think languages come
easier to children at a young age. And so I
was able to move pretty easily, you know, in and
out of different worlds, and also to discern sort of
what was expected of me in different environments. I was
a very observant child, and I think a lot of

(05:36):
kids who go up the way that I did are
as well. And we're very adaptable in a lot of ways.
But we also, um, I think from talking to other,
you know, people who are third culture kids, many of
us have this sense of anxiety about sort of doing
something wrong or making a misstep or um sort of

(05:56):
being judged for not clearly but longing to a place,
um or having sort of a stable identity. Our identities
tend to be pretty fluid, and we moved in and
out of them, and in some ways that's a wonderful
thing because it's sort of a celebration of multiplicity. But
on the other hand, we can sometimes be seen as
sort of not trustworthy or sort of have this fear

(06:20):
that people are going to sort of accuse us of
sort of faking a sense of self in some ways,
and there's you know, there's often a demand on all
of us that we should choose, you know, or that
we should see our identities as fixed. And I think
for kids who grew up like I did, that's really
difficult to do because, you know, in my case, for example,

(06:42):
I didn't speak my father's language tree, and so although
I was raised to sort of when people asked me
to say that I was gunn in, and I was
raised among the gunny inside of my family, I didn't
feel like I could claim that in an uncomplicated way.
And even when I met a gunny and they would
sort of question because my mother's why and because of
my appearance, because I don't speak the language, they would

(07:02):
sort of question my gunnyan nous. And you know, I
felt that about sort of all of the identities that
I have inhabited and tried to sort of own and
belong to. And I have come to a place where
I claim, you know, a lot of the places and
people that I've lived among and loved and tried to

(07:23):
belong to. But it has never been simple. It's always
been very complicated. So your your mother left when you
were two, Yes, and there was a real a bright
line around her leaving. It wasn't she didn't she didn't
move around the corner. She left and started another family.

(07:43):
Do you have memories of her from pre her leaving?
You know, I feel as though I do, Like I
feel like I can remember these images or you know,
her smell. There's this sense that I have of her
being there. I've had that sense in these sort of
images in my mind for a long time. But of

(08:04):
course I was so young, and it's difficult to sort
of tell to what extent those memories are real and
to what extent they're sort of constructed memories from the
photographs that we had in our house, or you know,
from later memories. Um. I did spend a lot of
time thinking about her and sort of gazing at photographs
of her, So it's really hard for me to to

(08:25):
know to what extent I can trust my memories of
her before she left. So often we searched photographs for clues,
especially when we can't remember, and we read into those
photographs for meaning when the memory of the people in
the photograph carries with it a whiff of trauma. This

(08:45):
is even more true when Nadia is seven, she's living
in Rome with her father and stepmother, and out of
seemingly nowhere, her mother pays a surprise visit. Her father
hadn't wanted to tell Nadia that her mother was coming
because he didn't know if she would actually show up.
The day kind of started like a normal day. I

(09:08):
came down. It was a weekend. I came down for breakfast,
and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my father.
My father always made pancakes on the weekend, and so
we were eating pancakes, and my father was listening to
the radio, and I have a very clear memory of,
you know, the my father listened to the BBC World Service,
and I have a really clear memory of the broadcaster

(09:29):
talking about the possibility of aftershocks and about this earthquake
that had destroyed a city in Armenia. And you know,
my mother being Armenian American, I kind of and my
father didn't really like to talk about my mother very much.
I always got the sense that it sort of made
him uncomfortable and sad, and yet I was always really

(09:50):
curious about her. And so since this you know, person
on the radio had said that there was an earthquake
in Armenia, I sort of grasped onto the opportunity to
ask my father about my mother's family, and I asked him,
you know she had family in Armenia, because I knew
that she had grown up in the in the United States,
and my father said, no, her family are mostly in

(10:11):
the United States now summer in Argentina. They moved all
over the world, and I kind of vaguely knew that
my mother's family had left what was then the Ottoman
Empire because of a genocide. I didn't fully understand what
that meant, but I knew that there was some violent
history that had sort of sent them to America and
to other parts of the world. But you know, we

(10:32):
sort of left it at that. And then there was
this knock on the door and there was my mother
with these red balloons in her hand. Um, and my
father came to the door and said, you know, your
mother is going to take you to lunch. And so
my sister and I went to lunch with my mother.
She was in Italy on vacation with her husband, her

(10:55):
then husband, and so he drove us to Piazza and Avona,
and the three of us got out and walked around,
and you know, my mother took us to a restaurant.
She talked about my half sisters you know, back in
the States, and how she would bring them next time,
and she asked us about school. But it wasn't, you know,

(11:16):
this deep, meaningful conversation at all. But I remember feeling
this this sense that I wanted to say something important
to her that she would remember or that would make
her come back. Um, even though she was mostly a
stranger and I was like both nervous around her because
I was always shy around strangers, and I had this
sort of big idea of what it was to have

(11:37):
a mother, because everyone, all of the other children I knew,
had mothers that were very central in their lives. After lunch,
she dropped us back at our house, and you know,
I watched her walk away, and I think because I
was so young when she left the first time, this
was the first time that I had really watched her

(11:58):
walk away, So it sort of stayed with me, that
image of the back of her head and seeing her
get into the car and drive away again. And you know,
her arrival on the same day as an earthquake in
our Medea. I think that the idea of the earthquake
and the way that I sort of felt uneasy and

(12:19):
shaken by her arrival kind of combined in me and
I sort of constructed this story and became sort of
obsessed in some ways with with earthquakes and held on
too that for a very long time. So at this point,
your stepmother, annabel has been in your life for a

(12:41):
couple of years, at the point that your that your
mother makes this visit at that time, what was your
relationship with Annabelle? Like I mean and describe annabel for
us a little bit. Annabelle was very young when she
married my father. She was in her early twenty um.
She actually finished college in Rome when she was living

(13:04):
with us. I wasn't aware of how young she was
at the time. I didn't think about it that much.
She seemed like a grown up to me, but you know,
she was twenty three, I think twenty two or twenty three.
How did they meet? So they met in Tanzania, Annabelle's
Tanzanian and you know, my father was stationed there, and
this was during the time that he had sent my

(13:25):
sister and I to live with his older sister and
my aunt Harriet in the UK because he was traveling
so much for work and he didn't like the idea
of us spending a lot of time with Nanny's and
so we spent you know, a couple of years with
my aunt. And so it was during that time that
he met Annabelle in Tanzania and fell for her. And

(13:46):
then after he moved to Rome, she came with him
a few months later to to live with us. And so,
in the early years of your relationship with Annabelle, how
would you characterize that time? Yeah, Um, I think that
I would sort of describe it as confusing. You know,
there were there all these ways in which I resented her.

(14:08):
You know, my sister and I had just been reunited
with our father, and we had lost her mom at
such an early age, and my father was already at
that time sort of the great hero of my life.
I adored him, and as much as I loved my
Aunt Harriet and loved living with her, I always wanted
to be around my father, and so Annabelle I kind

(14:30):
of saw her, you know, as competition in some ways, um,
And I think some of that was my own story
that I had made up about who she was, but
some of it also, you know, did show up in
some of her behaviors, like she seemed unsure of who
to be in relationship to me and my sister. And
sometimes she could be very fun and I enjoyed sort

(14:53):
of being around her, and she was very beautiful, and
so I liked to sort of watch her and sort
admire her in some ways. But sometimes she seemed to
resent us and to not want us around. I remember
sort of her sort of snapping at me to not
bother them when they were sleeping. I had had a nightmare,
and I, you know, was used to being able to

(15:15):
go into my father's room and he would sort of
come and tuck me back into bed. And she was
very clear that that was a boundary and that was
not going to happen. And so our relationship from a
very start was complicated. There was both sort of an
an uneasy sort of moving towards each other, but then
also just this sense that we were competitors in some way.

(15:40):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Within this fraud family dynamic, there was something else, something

(16:01):
secret going on. Not as much adored father is actually sick.
He's been diagnosed with cancer and keeps it a secret
from his two daughters until keeping it a secret is
no longer possible. He dies when she's just shy of
fourteen years old. I had long believed that my father's

(16:23):
illness was very quick. My sister and I were sent
to boarding school in England when I was in I
think it was sixth grade, and we were told that
it was because you know, we were moving again and
it was messing with our education and my father wanted
us to have more stability. But we were then, after
a term, summoned back home to Rome, and it quickly

(16:47):
became clear that we had been sent to boarding school
because my father had been diagnosed with cancer. But over
the course of that term, the cancer had spread, and
my father then to us around, you know, in case
he lost his fight with cancer. But I later learned
that he had actually been diagnosed years before, and I

(17:10):
had had sort of kept that secret from my sister
and me. So yeah, to me, the illness was really fast,
and you know, it was just you know, a year
or so between the diagnosis and him passing away. But
I'm told that he actually knew that he had cancer
for at least a year or two before that. So

(17:34):
there's sort of a its own kind of secret right there. Right.
You and your sister were very young, but the the
idea of the kind of secret that we keep in
order to protect, you know, in order to protect the
people that we love, in order to protect our children,
or protect whomever. So when did you find that out?
When did you find out that he had been diagnosed
with cancer prior? I didn't find that out until I

(17:57):
was in my twenties, And it was actually Annabelle's sister
who told me that, And during a period that I
was very angry with Annabelle for I don't remember what
the reason was now, but we were often sort of
angry with each other, but I had a good relationship
with many of the members of her family, and her
sister was sort of telling me about how hard it

(18:19):
was for annabel as well, you know, the loss of
my father and sort of finding herself alone with three
children by that point, my brother, my half brother, Flammie,
had been born by the time my father passed away,
and so she was sort of telling me a side
of the story that I didn't know or understand, and
was sort of emphasizing that annabel had lived with the
fear of his death for much longer and actually carried

(18:42):
a lot of trauma from that, And so, yeah, it
wasn't until my twenties that I learned that actually Annabelle
had kept that secret from from my sister and me
as well, which I see sort of as an act
of protection. As you said, So your dad dies when
you're almost fourteen, and in that situation, what would be

(19:03):
most logical or typical would be for you and your
sister to go to your mother. But that's not what happens, right, Yeah,
So after our father passed away, UM, I called my mother,
and you know, we had visited her a couple of
times after her visit to Rome, but eventually those visits

(19:26):
ended and the letters stopped as well. We stopped receiving
letters and phone calls, and my mother had sort of
disappeared from my wife for a number of years, and
I didn't really know why, and had sort of accepted
that that was going to be the way that it was.
But then after my father died, UM, everyone, my father's

(19:47):
family and friends and even Annabelle said, you know, you
have to call your mother and talk to her, and
so we did. I called her, and what I remember
most about that phone call was that my mother didn't
immediately say I'm coming to get you, or even I'm coming,
and I actually had to ask her, and she said

(20:09):
that she was living in Arizona at the time. She
couldn't leave, she had other children, she had work, and
that you know, maybe down the line my sister and
I could come to her and we could talk about
the future. And I just took that as such a rejection,
and I told her that I would, you know, never

(20:29):
speak to her again. And I sort of hung up
the phone and kept that promise for a decade. So
then Annabelle becomes you're de facto guardian. How did you
think of her over those next few years? You know,
you were fourteen and then you're eighteen when you moved
to New York, But in those few years where you're

(20:52):
living with her, how did you see her? Our relationship
has always been so complicated, and um, you know, there
were offers from other members of my father's family and
my father's sisters, some of my father's extended family in
Germany and Canada who had offered from my sister and
I to come and live with them as well. But

(21:13):
you know, we we sort of felt that we were
a family, you know, we were a complicated family, but
we didn't want to lose any any more of our
life as it was than we already had. And Annabelle
sort of made this very sort of heartfelt offer and
sort of told us that she had promised our father

(21:33):
that she would take care of us. And there was
a lot of tenderness between us, even you know, as
my father was really ill. You know, there were moments
of anger, we thought, but there were also these moments
where we really felt like we were in this together
and that we were family and we loved each other
despite the complications, and she was in many ways a

(21:54):
mother to me, you know, she was she was there
when I was so young and had long been a
part of my life. And then with this offer that
she would continue to raise my sister and I until
we graduated from college, that sort of cemented this sense
of us sort of being a family and being linked
through our love for for my father, definitely, but also

(22:16):
just through the relationship that that we had forged over
the years. But at the same time, sort of the
shape of our relationship had already been established, this sense
that we were competitors. The resentments, many resentments that had
sort of um bubbled up and then dissipeted over the
years still existed between us and continued to fuel some

(22:39):
pretty vicious fights, you know, over the several years that
we continue to live together, and we had this sort
of pattern of you know, there would be a blow
up and she would become very angry, and you know,
I would be sort of seething, and we would retreat
to our separate rooms and not speak for a period
of time, and she would some times throw things, or

(23:01):
she would declare that my sister and I were no
longer allowed to eat food in the house, you know,
that we were to take our meals at school. And
there were all sorts of ways that we punished each other.
You know, I would I would give her the silent treatment,
and then we would sort of without talking about it,
just move back into a sort of detante. And that

(23:23):
was sort of a pattern that continued, you know, after
I turned eighteen and graduated and moved to the United
States as well. Young adulthood is such an incredibly vulnerable age.
You're legally technically an adult, and yet, as any neurobiologists
will tell you, our brains don't reach their full adult
maturity until the age of twenty five. All the while

(23:46):
we're wrestling with some of life's biggest questions. Nadias In
school in the States, she's under a lot of pressure,
she's not doing well, and then she finds out that
her tuition bill, which Annabe was supposed to be taken
care of, hasn't been paid. So she finds herself applying
for student loans. She's staring at a box on the application,

(24:09):
the kind that asks you to define yourself, and there's
this box that says orphan, and it stops her cold.
You know, I moved to the United States at at eighteen,
and I was on my own because although my mother
is American, I'm a US citizen, I've never lived here before,

(24:31):
and I didn't have family here, and so I found
myself sort of on my own and for the first
time really sort of contending with what my life was
going to be like where were my roots and who
was my family? And was there a home to go
back to um if if things went wrong? And I

(24:52):
remember just being just this general sense of fear and anxiety,
and a lot of anxiety related to money. You know,
as you said, I my father had left some life
insurance that contributed to paying for me to go to college,
and there was some conversation about, because Annabelle was my

(25:12):
guardian and she at that point worked for the un
that the u N might cover some of my tuition.
But Annabelle was always sort of she would give and
then if if she was angry, she would take away,
or she would say, I'm actually not going to help
with this. So there was always this sense of am
I even going to be able to finish college? And
I was already funny, I'd always been a really good student,

(25:35):
and the first year of college, you know, when my
father's insurance was covering my tuition, I did really well
in school. But as the anxieties mounted, and I was
also feeling this sort of sense of grief and anger
that I didn't have parents who were hoping to at
least guide me to figure out how to organize my life,

(25:56):
and so I just I felt really alone. And my
conversations with Annabelle at that time we're not going anywhere. Really.
Sometimes she would make promises and then I wouldn't hear
from her, and so I was really trying to figure
out what can I do? You know, I was working
three jobs um at one point and just really struggling

(26:17):
in school. My grades spell, you know, not being American,
I didn't even or I am a US citizen, but
not having grown up here, I didn't even really fully understand,
you know, the ways that people paid for college, or
that financial aid was an option for me. I didn't
have a Social Security number when I moved here, so
I had to sort of figure out all of the

(26:38):
bureaucracy of how I was going to explain why I
had an American passport but I didn't have a Social
Security number, and all of these confusions, and I was
very shy and an introvert, and I was very intimidated
by all of the bureaucracy and having to explain myself
and have this sort of general fear that I had
done something wrong or I was going to do something

(26:59):
wrong and my whole life would fall apart. So finally, I,
you know, I figured out that I could apply for
financial aid, but that in order to apply for financial
aid without sort of having a parent attached, that I
would need to declare myself an orphan on this form.
I think that that moment really struck me because I

(27:21):
had not before I thought of myself in those terms.
You know, I did have this big, extended family on
my father's side that definitely was very loving, and you know,
they did what they could that they were so far away.
And then after my father passed away, I did have
mothering from Annabelle in some ways, even though our relationship
was complicated. But now that I was in the United States,

(27:43):
it seems like she wasn't going to be that mother
figure anymore. It was sort of like I turned eighteen
and now I was on my own, and so coming
to terms with this idea or this new story that
I was alone in the world in some ways and
that I was orphaned. That was a really difficult moment.

(28:08):
We'll be right back not yet. Does eventually finish college,
and she stays in New York for the next six
years or so. She gets by mostly on her own.

(28:31):
When she is twenty eight, she's working a few jobs
for a nonprofit and also waitressing to supplement her meager salary.
Plus she's in graduate school studying urban policy. This is
when Annabelle happens to be on a work trip to
the city. The two women go out to dinner. They're
sitting across a table from each other, and the rage

(28:53):
and tension between them grows and grows until it ignites
Annabelle becomes more and more agitated. Nadia knows that if
there's one thing annabel can't bear, it's being called crazy,
and also that if Nadia remains utterly unflappable and calm,
annabel will just will lose it. So that's what Nadia does.

(29:16):
She very calmly, with no drama, suggests to annabel that
she's acting unstable. You know that that's going to completely
get to her because she can't think of herself that way.
And she then lobbies back something which is that your
father didn't die of cancer. He died of AIDS, right,

(29:42):
So you know that argument began from something very small.
You know, she was in New York visiting, and as
was our pattern, you know that I have described despite
a year of silence, you know, we hadn't spoken in
a long time, and she showed up. It was her
expectation was that it was going to be as though

(30:05):
we were in regular contact and she was my mother
and um, so she expected me to make a lot
of time for her. And I think I was a
little bit resentful of that, but I was also I
was sort of part of that pattern too, you know,
I played along with that pattern for many years. And
so we had dinner and we just were talking about

(30:25):
normal things. It was a perfectly nice dinner, and then
she wanted to go do something else afterwards, and I
had plans with my friends, and to myself, I was
sort of like, I'm not going to move everything around
because she's here. She has not been around very much
for me, um, And so I, you know, told her
that I was busy, and she got angry and said,

(30:48):
how can you say that I'm busy. You're busy, I've
come to New York. I'm your mother. You have to
make time for me. And hearing her say that after
what I felt like, after the ways that I felt
like she had failed me, I felt myself sort of
the fury was sort of bubbling in me. But I

(31:10):
knew that what would annoy her. As you said, I
was very much aware of how to push your buttons
and she was aware of how to push mine. And
I knew that one way of winning this argument that
was about nothing and everything at the same time was
to sort of be detached and unbothered and to sort

(31:32):
of accuse her of being crazy and you know, over
exaggerating and unstable and making a big deal out of nothing,
and those were all things. You know. I think both
of us experienced through our grief, UM, some sort of
trauma and madness in the years after my father died,
and both of us sort of hit from that reality

(31:55):
in different ways. She sort of had a story of
herself that she was a survive ever, and that other
people who lived in their grief and spent a lot
of time talking about their feelings that they were weak,
and you know, she had come through on the other side,
and she didn't want her past struggles to be pointed
out to her in any way. And I knew that UM,

(32:17):
and I, on the other hand, was very much focused
on sort of building a life separate from my past
and constructing a story in which, you know, my father
was sort of a godlike figure and he was all
I needed. And you know, so we're both in denial
in different ways, but we knew how to use each

(32:37):
other's denial against each other, and so yeah, I did.
I pushed her buttons through, kind of calling her crazy
in so many words, and she responded by telling me
what she knew was something that would really hurt me,
which is that my father died not of cancer and

(32:59):
of AIDS. And I think her assumption as to why
would hurt me was because she knew how much I
needed that story of my father, and the story that
I had constructed for myself was that I was the
most important person in his world, and he was always
honest with me, and that I was the one who
was by his side the most when he was suffering,

(33:20):
and and I had sort of made of him a
god and a perfect person, and and she was going
to take that away from me um with that revelation,
which you know, embedded in that was was the idea
that he had a life sort of separate from who
he was to me um, and that I didn't know
him as well as I thought I did. But also

(33:41):
embedded in that was sort of a harmful story about
and a biased story that so many of us have
internalized about AIDS, and you know, people who live with
and die from AIDS, and so there was sort of
a shaming innuendo in that story as well, the idea
that my father might have had affairs or might have

(34:02):
had sort of a life in the shadows. This is
the moment that a fault line opens up her whole history,
her mother's disappearance, her father's illness and death, her a
loneness in the world catches up with Nadia. The sleeping

(34:23):
giant of trauma awakens and when long held trauma comes
out of hiding, watch out. Following that dinner with Annabel,
Nadia can't stop moving. She walks and walks the entire
length of Manhattan with no destination in mind. On one
of these walks, she encounters a blue chair that had

(34:44):
been left on the sidewalk. It was just a week
or two after, you know, I went into a deep
denial for a little while, and in order to maintain
that denial, I decided that Annabel was a liar, and
then I was not going to her to take the
story of my father away from me, which was in
many ways a sacred story to me, and it was

(35:06):
one of the few things in my life that I
felt was constant and steady. And then I could turn
to to remind myself that deep love had existed for
me in the world before and potentially could again. I
really needed that story, and I had decided. I decided
I wasn't going to allow her to take that away
from me. But I think you know, as you were

(35:27):
saying about trauma. That was sort of the way that
I had reacted as well, to my mother leaving, to
her rejecting me again after my father died. To my
father's death, you know, I had tried for so long
to just keep moving forward and to sort of cling
to this idea of my father as a saving grace

(35:49):
in my story, and to leave the trauma and the
grief behind. And I agree with you that that you
carry that in your body and you can only run
away from it for so long and it will catch
up with you. And I think I was, in some
ways very literally trying to run away from my fear
and my grief and the trauma. At that point, I

(36:10):
was taking these incredibly long walks all over Manhattan. I
lived in Chinatown at the time, and I would sort
of walk aimlessly on days when I didn't have to
work um or I didn't have classes, I would just
walk aimlessly around the city, kind of wandering around. And
I felt like I needed to keep moving because if
I sat still, that everything that I was feeling in

(36:33):
my body was going to be too much to bear.
And I kind of sensed that I wasn't going to
be able to stand up, and so I kept walking,
and I was returning from one of those long walks,
and I saw this blue It was an arm chair,
but I found that it was also a rocking chair.
And you know, in New York, nice furniture is often
left on the street, and for some reason, I felt

(36:55):
like I really needed this chair. I really wanted it,
even though I wasn't someone who often picked up furniture
on the street, but I it felt urgent that I
needed this chair, and so I carried it home and
carried it up to my apartment and found myself increasingly
wanting to sit in that chair and not go out

(37:16):
into the world. How far were you from your apartment
when you saw the chair? Where where was the chair?
I think it was it was on the border between
Tribeca and Chinatown, So it wasn't that far because I
lived in Chinatown, but it was, you know, probably over
ten blocks which carrying you know, this big bulky chair.

(37:38):
And it had started to rain, so it was it
was a little bit and so I was in a
rush because I didn't want to get drenched and for
the chair to get drenched, because then I wouldn't want
to keep the chair. And I felt like I really
needed it, and so I was sort of in a rush,
and I was puffing, and my back was sort of
bent backwards. And I'm very I'm a very petite person.
I'm a five feet tall and quite slight, and so

(38:00):
it was quite a feat for me to lug that
chair home and up the three stories to get to
my my apartment. What was it about the chair that
created in you that sense of urgency. I didn't understand
it at the time, and now, sort of when I
look back on it, I think that part of it

(38:22):
was that there was something familiar about it, especially when
I found out that it was you know, I sort
of went over and kind of touched the chair, and
I found out that it was a rocking chair. And
my father was very fond of rocking chairs, and we
always had rocking chairs in every house that I lived
in with him, and when I was very little, I
would sort of crawl into his lap and he would

(38:44):
rock me to sleep and read stories to me, and
maybe that was part of it. I also, I didn't
have a chair in my room, um, and I had
found myself increasingly not leaving my room and so sort
of lying in my bed or sitting in my bed
up against the wall, and so I kind of felt

(39:05):
like maybe I needed a chair in my room since
I was spending so much time there, But I don't know.
It was a little bit and and still is a
little bit mysterious to me. UM. I do think that
we sometimes will choose objects that we pore our our
grief into or connect with in an emotional way. In
that chair was that for me, and in ways that

(39:29):
beyond what I can really understand or explain, and it
becomes the locus of essentially really like the place in
which you really fall apart, Like you don't you don't
leave that chair for what eight days? I retreated to
that chair for um, for seven days. Um, for the

(39:50):
most part, you know, I did. I did sort of
get out of the chair to lie on For some reason,
I didn't want to get into my bed, so I
was sleeping on the floor for some of that time.
But I would get out of the chair and sort
of curl up on the floor by the chair, and
I would leave the chair to go to the bathroom
or to grab a hunk of bread from the kitchen.

(40:10):
But for the most part, for seven days, I was
sitting in that chair, just rocking and thinking, and you know,
I did some reading, I wrote furiously in in a notebook,
and I just had this fear of going back out
into the world. I didn't know who I was anymore
in some ways, and I didn't I didn't I couldn't
trust that my sacred stories, the stories that had always

(40:33):
been so important to me, And I felt like my
grief had come crashing down on me. And I didn't
know if I was going to be able to get
out of that and get out of the chair, you know,
because because the chair did become the place that that
was in some ways where I went to greet it
became both a refuge and I was also fearful that

(40:54):
I would become a prison in some ways. While in
the Blue Share Not Yet also turns to literature, to
a world of women writers who had come before her
Tony Morrison, Audre Lord, June Jordan's Zora, Neil Hurston, Tony
Kate Bambara. She's calling in the spirits, calling in what

(41:16):
she calls a council of mothers. I had long sort
of been able to locate myself in literature, and I
think because I I had for so long felt this
absence of my mother, and I had long sort of
believed that I could find this council of mothers in

(41:38):
in literature and that there was so much wisdom to
be found there. And I had turned to that wisdom
in the past, and so I felt like I could
turn to it again. And I was also thinking a
lot at that time about the stories that my father
had told me. And my father was from the Ashanti
tribe of Ghana, which is a tribe that really does
even though you know, most Ashanti people today are a Christian,

(41:59):
but the old beliefs are still part of the Ashanta
people's worldview. And the stories that my father told me
where were stories about how the ancestors are always with us,
past as present, and they are um always guiding and
influencing our lives. And I had long grown up with
this idea of being able to sort of call in

(42:21):
spirits and ancestors and that they were present, and I
had sort of thought of my father that way too,
and so I was also speaking to him, to my
memories of him and trying to recall those. And I
think both locate wisdom and a sense of possibility in
the literature that I was reading, and also to construct

(42:41):
and reconstruct a story that I could live inside of,
because the one that I had long told myself UM
was no longer working for me. That was all part
of UM. In a very sort of confused and desperate
way that I was, I was searching for all of
that while in the Blue Chair. M You also, towards

(43:02):
the end of your time in the Blue Chair turned
to jazz, which really struck me as UM, the moment
where you were able to access your father more, you know,
having sort of lost that sense of him, as having
a deep knowing of him, of you know, sort of

(43:24):
being certain of his um, you know, of the of
the place that he occupied in your world and in
the world. And there's this passage where you talk about,
you know, the music that that your father loved, and
and Coltrane in particular, and you construct a playlist and
get lost in it, you know, in this kind of

(43:45):
the instability in a way of jazz, and that seems
like it's the point where you get out of the chair. Yeah,
that's right. I had this sort of memory of my
father telling me about why he felt so connected to
jazz and part of it, and particularly the more avant

(44:05):
garde forms of jazz, and part of it was that
he believed that there was so much dissonance in the world,
and that letting go of our expectation that there was
always going to be harmony and allowing ourselves to feel
and hear and and touch the beauty in kind of

(44:26):
wildness and dissonance and the unknown. That was something that
I remembered him telling me. And you know, he would
always emphasize that that kind of jazz was really about questions,
that it was really a philosophical music form, and that
it had deep roots and including roots in in Ashanti music,

(44:46):
and that actually you can still hear ancient Ashanti rhythms
and jazz. And so for all of those reasons, I
kind of had this um desire to better understand that
music that had meant so much to my father, and
and so I created this playlist um and for the
first time, really, you know, when my father was telling
me this when I was a child, I was sort

(45:07):
of like, this is so noisy, I don't understand it.
But at this point in my life where where nothing
made sense, you know, I felt like connecting to an
art form that really was about wrestling with with dissonance
and uncertainty, and that there was something that I could
find there and maybe even locate my father in that

(45:30):
music as well. And so it really was a moment
where not only did I connect to this music that
was so important to him, and it sort of opened
something up in me and allowed me to let go
of all of this tension that I was holding, this
this sort of need for everything to make sense and
to be orderly and to have my story back exactly

(45:51):
the way that I needed it. It allowed me to
imagine that maybe there was freedom in in the unknown.
But also in some ways, I think I was able
to locate him there because it also brought back these
joyful memories of him just trying to get me to
see the world in different ways and just reminded me

(46:12):
that no matter what in terms of this revelation that
Annabel had given me about my father, that my memories
of him and who he was in my life and
the love that he had for me and my sister
and my brother, that that remained unchanged. So through listening
to this music, I could hear those lessons, and so

(46:32):
many of those lessons were about the questions and and
being comfortable with questions and following curiosities and being open
um to new possibilities in the world, and that was
so much a part of who he was, And so
I was reminded of the lessons that he tried to
teach me in the music. But also I started to

(46:54):
feel that maybe, you know, what Annabel had revealed didn't
change everything in the way that I thought it had,
and that maybe through that revelation that I could actually
come to know my father in a deeper way. Some
journeys we take without ever leaving the spot. During her

(47:14):
time in the Blue Chair, Nadia moved away from a
need to know the quote unquote truth about her father's
illness and death and toward a place of acceptance. At
some point, the journey becomes really about being able to

(47:35):
live with not knowing. You. You don't know for sure
whether Annabel was telling you the truth or whether Annabel
was hurling a lie at you to hurt you. You'll
you'll never know, So the last question I really have

(47:55):
for you is how do you hold that not knowing?
I remember when I found out that my dad, who
I have grieved very similarly to the way you grieved yours.
Um when I found out that he had not been
my biological father. In my office, I had a portrait
of his mother, my grandmother, on the wall and one

(48:16):
day I just looked at it and I needed to
take it down. I needed to take it down because
she wasn't in fact, my biological grandmother, and it was
just confusing and freaking me out every time I felt
her eyes on me, and I thought, well, what do
I replace it with? And you know, now I have
this blank wall with say nail in it. And I

(48:37):
ended up getting this piece of artwork by my friend
Debbie Millman, who's actually I was a guest on this
podcast in season one, and it was in her handwriting,
this kind of really beautiful and an inimitable handwriting that
Debbie has, and the words were this just this I
am comfortable not knowing. And to me that felt like, well,

(48:58):
that's my life's work is I've constructed a lot of
narratives in my life, and this one is going to
have to remain in that place of open endedness. Yeah,
thank you for sharing that. I feel very similarly. You know,
After all of that, I realized how rigid I had
become in my need um for the story that I

(49:20):
had constructed, and I didn't like that rigidness, and actually
that rigidness sort of this counter to all of the
lessons that my father had tried to teach me about
the world and who I should be in it. And
that's sort of what I've discovered. I thought that I
was going to do all of this research and sort
of discover the truth, and then ultimately I was going
to call family members and demand that they tell me

(49:42):
what they knew. And I actually haven't done any of that.
I haven't even now. I I still haven't spoken at
great length about this question, except with my sister. And
it's because what I realized in the research, rather than
finding the true story of my father, what I found
were things that I was uncomfortable with about myself that

(50:03):
I felt like I really needed to reckon with more
than anything else. And you know, one of those things
was this rigidness and my need to sort of make
up my father a perfect person in a god and
in that deifying of him, to reject his humanity, but
also the Annabel's humanity and my mother's humanity. And and

(50:24):
I found how like uncurious I had been about you know,
the mother's in my life and their inner lives, because
I was so afraid of what they might reveal about
my father, who mattered most of all to me. And
what I also found was this ugly bias in myself
that was about cancer being a more noble disease to

(50:47):
die of than AIDS, and that that was a really
harmful narrative. And I knew that it was ugly as
soon as I started to panic about it, about the
possibility that my father had died of AIDS, I knew
that it was an ugly story. And at the same time,
I also had to admit that it was very alive
in me, and that that sort of revealed biases within

(51:09):
myself that I needed to deal with and reckon with.
And so in the research that I that I did
about sort of people living with and people who have
died from AIDS in in Uganda and in other and
other places, you know, And we lived in Uganda at
the time that my father had in fact died of AIDS,
that that might have been where he would have contracted it,

(51:31):
and there was a huge AIDS epidemic at the time
that we were living there, and so I was doing
all of this research to see, as you said if
it would sort of bring back any memories of that
time and anything that my father might have said. Um.
But what I realized was that for so much time
against the stories that my father had told me and
the work that he did in the world, which was

(51:53):
about recognizing the responsibilities that we all had towards each
other and how to forge deeper connection and across boundaries
and borders that had been drawn in ways that did
people harm, and that I had contributed to drawing a
boundary between myself and people who lived with and died
from AIDS. And so I actually spent a lot of

(52:15):
time looking at that and sort of examining myself in
the mirror. And what I realized is that it doesn't
actually matter if my father died of cancer or of AIDS.
You know, I lost him all the same, and that
actually opening up the possibility that there were parts of
his life, which of course there were parts of his

(52:36):
life that were unknown to me as a child, but
opening up that possibility allowed me to then connect with
him as a man, you know, in the fullness of
who he was, as opposed to this very rigid story
that I had created of him, and that that was
the best way to sort of honor his life and
the lessons that he had given me. And I did

(52:56):
decide that I don't want to know. It doesn't matter
to me what he died of, and what matters to
me was the relationship that we shared, and you know,
the love that he had for all of us. Family

(53:22):
Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin
and Bethan Mcalouso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is
our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like
to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could
appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is one

(53:42):
secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook
at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter
at fami Secret Spot. And if you want to know
about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check out

(54:03):
my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts.

(54:26):
For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
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