The Lobster Shift

Even as a young child, Michael Hainey could sense that there was more to the story of his father’s death. But it wasn’t until he stumbled upon a small detail in an obituary—that his father died “after visiting friends”—that he began to understand the lengths those friends went to protect his father’s reputation, and to protect his family from the truth.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio Icarus. Sons.
Sons are roped to fathers. Fathers. Well, are we sure
they're tied to sons? Sons need fathers fathers. Sons take

(00:27):
years from fathers. Honest fathers. Know this picture an hourglass,
two globes, one filled, the other empty. Now in your mind,
turn it over. The top of the globe, the father,
the grains of sand, his years. The bottom of the globe.
That's the son. See the years slipping away from the father,

(00:50):
filling up the son. Father's flow into sons. Think of Icarus.
Father and son exist on an isle. At some point.
The father longs to escape and the son he doesn't
want to be left behind, abandoned. And fathers they always

(01:10):
have plans. What sons should remember that the plans of
their fathers often have holes. A father is no shield
for a son. That's Michael Haney reading a passage from
his Beautiful book after visiting Friends. A Son's story. What

(01:32):
happens when a boy loses his father at a tender age,
an age so young that he hardly remembers him, and
that boy grows up to become a journalist digging for
answers to questions he's always had about the nature of
his father's death, questions that have formed him, questions that
beg for answers. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,

(02:10):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I feel like I remember nothing before a and that
was the morning, shortly after I turned six years old,

(02:32):
that I learned my father was dead, and h up
until then, I think. I mean as I say, I
don't remember much, but I don't have reason to remember
anything bad. It was a pretty pleasant childhood, I think
I was. I just turned six. I have had an
older brother, Chris, who was eight. My mother was thirty

(02:53):
three at the time, my father was thirty five, and
we were living in a suburb of Chicago, right on
the border of Chicago, out near the Airport O'Hare. And
it was I think, probably pleasant by all accounts and um,
but you know, it was that formative moment which I

(03:14):
think has defined my life, when that was my father's death.
When you say that you have no memories before that moment,
do you really mean no memories like I would say,
in the excavation and looking back over my life, I
would see when I was when I was working on
searching for this story. I would remember moments where I

(03:35):
would be sort of flipping through photo album from you
know that my mother had kept and I could remember, Oh,
that was Christmas when I was four, or that I
think I remember taking that trip. But you know, I
think also developmentally from what I've known in my time
spending a lot of time on the couch, is children
often don't remember much until age five. Really there's a reason,

(04:00):
and they sort of developed and sort of that's when
kindergarten begins, and that's when one sort of memory sort
of locks in. And so um, I shouldn't certainly don't
mean to be dramatic and say I don't remember much,
but I really it's was as though that was when,
you know, the curtain went up on my life. So
tell me about that moment, what you remember. My brother

(04:22):
and I shared a small bedroom in a small house
sort of row house townhouse, and my father was a
newspaper editor. He worked what was called the lobster shift,
which meant you worked from six pm until three am
closing the morning edition. And my brother and I shared
this room, and I was in kindergarten and my brother

(04:44):
was in second grade. So it was very common that
we would wake up and come downstairs for breakfast, and
my father would be there already, having just come home,
and he would wait up for us at breakfast and
then usually sort of go to sleep. But it was
a beautiful sunny morning. I remember it because the sun
was kind of searing the edges of the shade that

(05:06):
was drawn in our bedroom. And our mother came in
to wake us up, and I always remember she was
just very happy. And as she was waking us up,
we slept in these twin beds side by side. The
doorbell rang, which was unusual. My mother went to the
shade and in our bedroom and she raised the shade,
and she remember standing on my brother's bed with him

(05:31):
with my mother and looking down and seeing my grandparents,
my mother's parents, and my father's brother on the back porch.
And the next thing I remember is my mother had
gone downstairs, and my brother and I standing on the
top of the staircase and we could hear her crying,
and my brother and I went downstairs, stood on the

(05:52):
edge of the kitchen and I and my uncle turning
to my mother, who was sitting on the chair and saying,
the boys are here. And at that point she pulled
us together and said, your father's dead. And that was
the morning. Describe your father for me. Describe him as
you remember him in you know, in the brief time

(06:15):
that you had with him. I don't think you answer
for asked me that question. I have two memories. One
is I remember he loved to wrestle with my brother
and me, And by that I mean I can remember
after dinner on the living room floor just doing what
a father does, who's letting two boys sort of crawl

(06:38):
over him and, you know, sort of test your strength
against him. And I also remember, you know, after dinner,
he would be at the table and he'd usually often
have happen some of him holding up a palm for
each of us, my brother and myself, sitting in his

(06:58):
kitchen chair. Yeah, and one poem in front of my brother,
one palm in front of me, and each of us
making little fists and sort of punching at his open palm,
and him sort of exaggerated like, oh, it's so strong,
you guys are so strong. I also remember him teaching
me to write a two wheel blake. So I remember

(07:20):
those things, small moments like that, vivid, you know, concrete,
But I don't remember any words. And how about your
mother from that time? I mean with your mother, you
have a before and you haven't after your father, you
only have a before. Two memories, I'd say have ur
I was. I was also a boy who seems to

(07:40):
have gotten into a number of scrapes. By that, I
mean I once knocks to teeth out. They had to
take me to a hospital for stitches. I once fell
and sort of cut my head open. And it seems
like my my memories of my mother were always kind
of scooping me up and take me to the hospital
for stitches and um. But I again, I don't really

(08:03):
I don't remember words. I couldn't tell you anything that
they ever really said to me until that morning. And
you do remember the words from that morning. But it's
interesting too that what have you remember the weather? Because
I have this theory about trauma and the weather and memory,
and there's just something about or even I mean for me,

(08:27):
like what I was wearing in woman's like that, or
everything becomes very very vivid in a in a kind
of sensory way and just becomes sort of imprinted. You're
exactly right, and and forever I've not like the Spring
and which is married now, but when I used to date,

(08:47):
and I'll be like, oh my god, Spring, it's so fun.
It's as I could never pinpoint why I would sink
into some kind of depression worse than usual in springtime.
And I think it's some deep vibration that it's just there.
You then you and your brother and your mother go

(09:09):
on with your lives and she's now a single mom,
and you and your brother are growing up without a dad.
What did you as you were growing up understand about
your father's death? We were told that he had been
working late, as he always does, and that he when

(09:30):
he had left the office of the newspaper was walking
to his car and had a heart attack and died
on the street and some police found him, and that's
what happened to him. And in those years of your
childhood and being a teenager, how did that sit with you?

(09:51):
Did you question that story at all? All the time?
And I think this is what if you've had traum,
you will understand it. If and if you haven't, maybe
you will too. But seven, eight nine years old idea
and I just you know, you will tell me again, mom,
what happened? Right? And I think this is even informed

(10:12):
by the basic watching TV shows when you're a kid
and you see how the police work, and beginning with
i'd say, but I don't understand why did Uncle Dick
come and tell us? Why didn't the police come and
tell us? Because that's what happens in the TV shows.
My mom would say, Oh, I don't know, that's just
the way it was. I mean, I you know, she
was not I think, actively deceiving me. It's just like, well,

(10:35):
that's just she didn't think either, But it was it
just I think part of it was I would hear like, well,
he died on the street, and I would just, being
like I said, eight nine, ten years old, I would
just lay in bed a night and picture him dead
on a street in Chicago and the police finding him,
and then okay, so then why do they call Uncle Dick?
Why wouldn't they call the house? And beginning at that age,

(10:58):
it's just then square with me. I think about it
all the time, and yet my house was a house
of enormous silence, and so I never really asked my
mother that much whim. Every so often I'd find the
courage to ask her, why do you think? Or why
what about this? But I lived in such through the

(11:20):
mind of a child I see now who suffered trauma.
I lived with great fear that if I upset her,
I could lose her too. I would believe it. So
I kept a lot of these questions to myself, and
I would just work them over in my own mind,

(11:41):
even though I was desperate to ask her. Someone what
they might know what I never did. We'll be right back.
In that enormous silence that so often surrounds trauma, a

(12:02):
child's mind plays tricks. I think this happens to all
of us who have experienced a cleaving loss, but particularly
a young child who has no tools, no way to deal.
And so Michael is ever vigilant. His magical thinking tells
him that loss begets loss, tragedy, tragedy. He can control

(12:25):
the world and keep his mother, his brother, and himself
safe if he stays watchful but silent. You grow up
and become a journalist. In a way, even the questions
the wise that you were asking as a child were
the questions of someone who might grow up and become

(12:46):
a journalist. Need to drill down, need to know, need
to get to the bottom of the story. I know
there's a part of me that made the decision to
live out his life. Because what you have to understand
is my father kept these meticulous scrap books from the

(13:07):
time he was probably in kindergarten, and they go from
kindergarten through college through grad school. And they were really
all I had of him. And they were kept in
the bottom of this bookcase. And I discovered them when
I was a boy, and I would always wait until

(13:28):
my mother was out of the house and then I
would go to them, and to me, they were this
almost like I hope I'm using this story away with
like this talmudic kind of documented to all these evidence
to piece together a life. I would see this boy
growing up, everything from report cards to mother's day cards

(13:48):
he made for his mother when he was eight, to
seeing him writing stories for the high school newspaper and
reading them. And I thought, and so when you ask
earlier about what was his voice, I don't. I never
heard his voice, but I could see this voice being
made manifest and watching and grow. In Grimar school, I

(14:09):
had teachers who recognized my ability to write, so you know,
as I got older and well, I know how to write.
And so I think it's sort of my sense of
self was meeting this what I thought was an unrealized
self of his life, and I thought, well, maybe I
can remember thinking I'm going to fulfill his unfulfilled life

(14:36):
and I'm going to make myself known as the son
of Bob Hainey. So there's a large part of that
that I see. But I also wonder maybe I was
supposed to do something else. Well, I was shaped by
our experiences. I mean, that's and we're shaped by our losses.

(14:57):
And you know, I often say, you know, you change
one thing, then everything changes. It's so unusual that he
kept these scrap books for a man, first of all,
and he strikes me as something much more common that
girls would do. Then boys are also the parents would
do for their children, as opposed to actually documenting his life,

(15:19):
you know, piecing that together. I mean, it's it's sentimental
to say as if he almost knew that, you know,
that he was leaving something behind so that you could
understand or track him through his own life up until
that point. What did it look like? What did the
what did the scrap books look like? They're you know,
Depression era and sort of big portfolios with string holding

(15:43):
them together. And the pages are that thick rough almost
like now it's all faded rough paper and hoot of
glue down. And you know, you can see them being
bought at the five and dime store and um out
in Nebraska where he grew up. And and you know,
I wonder what he was thinking, this, this desire to

(16:03):
document his life, you know, to preserve his life. One
thing that's really interesting is there are some letters that
he wrote two girl friends or a girl, a girl
or two that he had a crush on in high school.
And I don't know why I have had them, but

(16:26):
I remember reading them, and I remember they were filled
with such yearning and also such vulnerability and even self doubt.
And I'm just thinking that when you're ask again about voice,
I remember his voice. No, but I remember that voice,
and that voice voice, remember imitating it. I'm imitating it
with when I started to be fifteen sixteen, and he

(16:50):
was very vulnerable and kind and very like me. He
was over sensitive. And you know this one someone told
me when I was reporting the story, is he was
so hard on himself and but wait a minute, that's me,
you know, And again is it did I have that
in me? Or did I see his voice and start

(17:11):
to then invalidate it. I don't know, but he was.
He was a very vulnerable boy, teenager and yet very smart.
But I think, very hard on himself. Interesting because you
you spent your life, most of your life not knowing him,
and yet what you're describing as something that many people
never know about their parents. So how old were you

(17:35):
when you've found the obituaries of your father. I was
seventeen eighteen in high school and I had to write
a term paper and I was doing research on microfilm,
and I just had the thought that, you know, he
was a journalist and he was prominent. I wonder what

(17:58):
the newspapers wrote about him, what the open where he said.
There were four newspapers that wrote up the obituary about him.
Two had just a story that he, you know, had
died and there was but then two of them had
this detail in them and said he had died after
visiting friends on the thirty block of North Pine Grove

(18:18):
in Chicago. And I can remember sitting there reading, well,
that's weird. Number one, come if I he has friends
up there there and he was visiting them. That none
of these friends ever said to me, G Mike, I
saw your dad just before he died. I want you
to know he said this about you, or like there
was never any friends who raised their hand for that night.

(18:41):
Number Two, that we knew, no one as far as
I knew, who lived in that area of Chicago. Number three,
that area Chicago is nowhere even remotely island the way home,
that he wouldn't have him taken. But this sugar went
down my spine that I had found something forbidden that
I probably should not be reading. And though I wanted

(19:02):
to ask my mother and show her what I just found,
I made copies of the micro film and I took
him home and I just hid them in a box
under my bed. And that was when I was seventeen
eighteen and kind of moved on. But still there was
that knock on the door all the time when you're

(19:24):
sitting there thinking, and that knoxing you really should be
looking at me, Yeah, I mean it's for forbidden, and
also confirming of something, yeah, and confirming ten twelve years
of suspicion. So then you go off to college and
you start living your life, and at what point does

(19:46):
that knocking get louder? The knocking gets louder. Just about
the time I was thirty three thirty four, starting to
crest towards the age my father was when he died,
and I had again. It might not sound believable to
some people, but if you've had trauma, you would understand.

(20:07):
From the time I was seven eight nine, I really
was confirmed in my belief that I would not outlive him,
and that it was even a reason why I did
not I want to get married, and if I did
get married, I was not going to have children because
I did not want to die on them, and what
was the point. So really, as I m started to

(20:30):
cress towards the age he died, which was thirty five,
I sort of really went into a an emotional crisis.
And I was seeing a doctor, you know, intensive kind
of analysis. And when I sort of started seeing I
mean she said, well, you're basically having a functioning breakdown.

(20:54):
I was able to go on with things Monday through Friday,
but you know, and at nights and then at home.
I sort of really that that year, So leading up
to it was really very difficult, and I think what
made me think is I just have to find this answer,
and that's what really traveled me toward it. It should

(21:14):
be said too, that you were a very successful working
writer and journalist during this time that you were functioning
in that, you know, nine to five during the week way,
which I think that really bears saying and also talking
about a little bit, because I think it's true of
so many people, um that there is a way in

(21:36):
which you can kind of have a place in the
world in which, you know, for many people into their
work lives where outwardly everything seems perfectly fine. I would
imagine that your colleagues and the people that you were
working with had no idea that you were having this
kind of functioning breakdown. Yeah, and I think you know,
from what we know about trauma, I mean that people

(21:58):
survived trauma and you have no idea whether it's something
some PTSD in combat or you know, we've read about
people who survived Nazi camps, or you know, people who
survived horrible sexual trauma. You know, you you you learn
to compartmentalize, right, You learned to get on with your

(22:19):
life and you you want you that is all part
of the moving forward or not letting this thing define
you or destroy you. However, it's going to always keep
knocking on that door unless one sits down with it
and really answers to it and ask it asked for answers.
So I think it did. As I've said. It's I've

(22:41):
been not confronting those suspicions and going in search of
the answers that I needed to at least make a
run for if I was going to be complete. I
was incomplete. So Michael commences the search he's been putting
off in some ways all his life. He begins with

(23:02):
his mother. He tells her he wants to write about
his dad and get in touch with the old circle
of newspaper guys who would have known him and worked
with him. It wasn't only about getting to the bottom
of what had happened on that April night in nineteen seventy.
He wanted to know the man he had lost. He
wanted to learn more about Bob Hainey's boyhood and how

(23:24):
he left the small dustbowl town in Nebraska where he
had been raised and found the means and ambition to
get himself to Chicago. Fundamentally, Michael was asking the questions
that lead to the answer of how he came to be.
Imagine a world of older, perhaps now retired, newspaper men.
A tough breed, these men, and they were mostly men

(23:47):
who reported on the streets of Chicago then drank away
their cares at the local watering hole. There's a tight
bond among journalists who work shoulder to shoulder at the
same paper. They stick together, look out for one another
her So when Michael begins to report the story, he's
met with a range of reactions. Mostly he's being stonewalled.

(24:10):
Some of these guys are willing to meet up with him,
talk with him, but when it comes to the night
of his father's death, he gets nothing. And remember Michael
is a seasoned reporter himself, one of the best. He
has all these skills, this background as a journalist, but
he's not getting answers. This goes on for a good

(24:31):
solid year, but eventually he gets a couple of breaks
he never could have imagined. In the essential basic reporting
of what I was doing, I was led to two
women who changed my life and change the trajectory of
my life and made my story possible. One was a

(24:51):
woman named jan who worked at the Morgue in Chicago,
and another was Lynn, who worked at the hospital my
father was body was taken after he died, and they
were both working at two of the grimmest places you
might imagine. Jan in the Morgue. Literally, like when I

(25:12):
first met her, I always say, like, there she was
in this sort of behind this plexiglass window where she's
got her whole job is to encounter people who were
coming to claim bodies of loved ones. That was her
eight hour day job. And I walked up to her
and talked through a little hole and looked down, and

(25:33):
she's got two bibles open, side by side, And I said,
the journalist to me, I said, that's interesting. Why do
you have two bibles? And she said, Old Testament, New Testament.
You've got to know what was fore told and what
was delivered. And she was, as I said, worked in
one of the grimmest places in the world, but filled

(25:55):
me with such life and optimism and made a profound
difference in my life. And she's the one who then suggested,
so do you need to go to the hospital. You
need to find the records. But I went to the
hospital where he was taken, and I went down to
the records room, which is as I say, paper is
like water. It seeks its own level, which is usually

(26:17):
in a basement. And I found this woman Lynn, and
I just told her what I needed. She looked, shouldn't
have it. And about a year and a half went
by where I had I didn't have any answers, and
I just sort of put aside the search. I got
a call one day from Lynn and she said, is
this Michael. I said yeah, She said, this is Lynn.

(26:37):
Do you remember me. I said yes, I do, and
she said, you know, I just couldn't stop thinking about you.
And I thought, it's a terrible thing that you don't
have answers. And she said, you know, I always felt
bad I couldn't find those records because I knew they
had to be here. And she said, so today I
went to the cabinet. I pulled out the filing cabinet,

(26:58):
pulled every drawer out, and there was your father's record
that had fallen on the bottom, and they have it.
I can't make that up. These two women, Jan and
Lynn appear almost as angels in Michael's search. What's remarkable
is that each of them, instead of just doing their jobs,

(27:18):
and saying nope, sorry, no information available here. Each of
them keeps thinking about his story. Years go by from
the time Michael first meets them in the morgue, in
the hospital, places where people are often inured to the
suffering of others simply by overexposure, but each of them
keeps thinking, or in Jan's case, praying. She called me,

(27:43):
how is at work? As in my office? And this
is you know, four or five years into this search
and I was working on the story, had discovered certain
truth that I was afraid to then bring to my mother.
And I got a phone called day and I hadn't
talked to Jan probably in three or four years, and

(28:04):
she and she said, I was hearing you in my
prayers and you need help. And again people think I'm
making this up, but I'm not. And this is what
life will bring to you if you put yourself in
on a path sometimes and she said, you have a choice,
She said, I can you have seen you. You've just

(28:24):
kind of popped open the lid. You're coming out of
the box, I mean, and to me, it's it's it
was almost like I was coming out of a coffin.
And she said, now, what's your choice? You're gonna throw
that lid off, or you're gonna let a close on you.
How she divined that and knew that at the time,
but it was this exhortation, this, and I can't account

(28:47):
for it, but there it is. Right. So when Lynn
found the hospital records, there was a name associated with
your father's hospital records, which was a name that you
didn't know. It was no friend I've ever heard of,
so the name of a woman and gave her address.

(29:09):
I quickly looked her up on Google, and I had
discovered that she had died about a year before. So
I was personally for my own search crest fall and
I was, but also just wondering what was this woman's life.
I found some obituary. She had been working at a
paper with my father and then left shortly there after

(29:30):
and moved to San Francisco. She was young at the time.
My father was thirty four or five. She was in
her late twenties. And then I found another person another,
a person that my mother didn't know. It had been
a colleague of my father's, guy named Tom Moffatt. I

(29:50):
called him up one night and he said, oh, let
me call you tomorrow. Called them back and the reason
he put me off, as he told me later, he
just had a couple of beers and he was afraid
he was going to spill something. But I guess the
night gave him a time, a chance to reflect. And
what he said to me, he said, I'm going to
tell you something, and I'm gonna tell you this because

(30:14):
when I was a kid growing up, he said, my
mother went away. And he said I was about fourteen,
and he said, when she went away, you know in
quotation marks, he said, I always thought she didn't love me.
And when I found out later was she had suffered

(30:34):
a nervous breakdown, going to various facilities. And he said,
with my father, and tell me the truth. And he said,
lo and bold. Decades later, I had my own bouts
with you know, and who knows again, like again, now
these echoes happened in our lives. Was it because it
was in him or was it just echoing off of her?

(30:56):
And he said, so, I think he deserved to know
the truth. And he said, I was the guy who
is your dad's alibi, And he told me the truth
of what happened that night. My father was seeing this woman,
her name is Bobby, was Bobby, and he died in

(31:18):
bed at her apartment, and she was young. She was
clearly that's a horrible situation to be in. She called
my uncle, who was a newspaper editor and at another
paper in town. He was a very executive veditor of
the Chicago Today slash Chicago American. So she called him

(31:44):
just as she was also calling the police, and he
showed up with the police. From what I understand, he
basically got the cops to agree. Listen, this guy had
two young boys at home, a young wife, can't wait.
Degree that he died on the street, and that can
be our story, which my uncle was very close to

(32:07):
pulling that off. He comes over, he knocks on the door,
He gets to the newspapers not to print that story.
But two of the newspapers whoever was writing that obituary
didn't get the phone call to take that out, so
that's how it slipped in. Otherwise he would have had
the perfect cover up, and you know, he would have

(32:27):
protected quote unquote all of us. But you've got a
six year old boy saying that doesn't add up, and
then when you're thirty five thirty six years going in
search of that, there's a moment in your conversation with
Tom Moffitt where you're you're saying to him, you know,
sort of incredulously, like that was altering the scene of

(32:48):
a crime, I mean, and he says to you, it
wasn't a crime, it was a tragedy. I found this
one of the most powerful parts of your book. The
idea that you know when things happen is at least
as important as what happens or changes alters what happens. Right, So, Um,

(33:10):
you know the idea that just a minute in either
direction and it would have been the simple tragedy. If
he had been having a drink in the bar before
he went over to Bobby's, and he had had his
massive coronary, then then it would have been that would
have been the story, and you would never have known
about Bobby. Um. He could have spent the evening with

(33:33):
Bobby as he had done many times before, and then
left and started to go home, and then once again
it would have been the quote unquote simple tragedy. And
yet all that still would have been the case. Your father,
your young father was having a long affair with with
a young woman that he worked with, and that would
still have been the case um, and so that would

(33:55):
also have been somehow woven into the sort of d
in a of you know, the fabric of of his absence,
that it would have been even more elusive. Yeah, those
vibrations I call them those ripples across the years. That's
why these stories resonated, because there whether the cheers or

(34:15):
mine or other people that have written stories or just
live these stories, it's something in your soul picks up
those vibrations and says, MS isn't And if you're tuned
to it, there it is. But yeah, well amenute. Either way,
it's a different life, right, it's a different story. So

(34:35):
now Michael knows he has the answer to the question
that's been haunting him. So now there's knowledge. But with
this knowledge comes a whole new layer of complexity. So
often when we finally discover a secret, we then feel
the burden of that secret. In effect, we become the

(34:56):
secret keepers, because now what does Michael do about his mom?
It was a great relief obviously that I had hunch
or that feeling was confirmed and that I wasn't wrong
for feeling all those thoughts and suspicions, But it was
a horrible burden immediately. And as I said earlier, if

(35:22):
I looked at my childhood, one thing I always lived
in fear of was being either cast out or made
an orphan. And by that I mean losing my mother's love,
either through something I did to anger her, which I
know as her childlike you're going to be cast out,

(35:43):
You're gonna lose that love, or you know, I would
lose her. And so when I come into ownership of
this secret my father is a secret I've basically froze.
And for a good year I just thought, I can't

(36:04):
write this story. I can't share it. I don't know
what I'm gonna do now. Because I couldn't bring it
to her. I knew if I, you know, to complete
the story, I need to tell her what I have
found at least have her permission to share our family story.
And it's the story that involves her is our tragedy.
And this was where you received the call from jam

(36:27):
saying I've been I've been praying, even in my prayers,
and are you going to just close this. I can
see your I can feel your distress. I can feel
that something stopped you wort on this book almost ten years.
And when I started it. I was a single man.
By the time this period had come, I was with
my now wife Brook and I'd have would have long

(36:48):
discussions with her and she would say, you have to
tell her. I said, what I'm going to destroy her life?
And she said, all women know, they know. I said,
what happens if you know? I just said, it's not
just trusted. When I was on this search, I came
to everyone and every encounter with not with anger, but

(37:10):
with love and being like whatever this person says that
I'm gonna learn something, and my anger about what happened
is that's past. But if I can navigate my love
and navigate with you know, the search for the truth
and not hurting some people, that's what I always tried

(37:30):
to do, and especially then bringing it to my mother,
that's what I had to do. So tell me about
going to pizza with your mother, went home and it's
just Chicago and one to her favorite Italian place, and
you know, that's when I said, I have to tell
you what I found. And and it was a very stoic.

(37:52):
So I keep saying silent, stoic and unemotional. And you
can't underestimate her strength. As I've said, before actually is
thirty three, h no husband, two young children, no money,
and she did it. So I told her, and she
really didn't flinch. You know, you're not a flinching person.

(38:13):
I was so concerned that she was going to think
I was tearing him down. Instead, she listened and did
not argue with me. You write something really beautiful at
the very end of your book, which is your mother
is recounting something that a friend of hers said about
your father. She said she felt Dad always was of

(38:35):
two worlds. He was smart and funny and sensitive and kind,
but there was a dark, melancholic side. She said, I
don't think living in this world was easy for your father.
My mother says, well, this world is all we have.
She goes silence, and in that moment I see her anew.
I realized, here I am a son who went looking

(38:55):
for his father and found his mother. After I finished
writing a draft of the book and sold it, you know,
I went home and gave my mother a draft of
the book because I wanted her to read it before
I published it, and flew home on a Saturday, put

(39:16):
the manuscript on the kitchen table. My mother, being my mother,
said well, I'm not going to read it while you're here,
and I said, well, I don't want you to read
it while I'm here. So we spent the day together.
Flew back home to New York. Two days later, as
at work, the phone rang, Ah, it is my mother,
and she said, I just finished reading the book and

(39:39):
then she started to cry. My heart sank. I was convinced,
this is the moment I'm cast out, this is the
moment I've actually broken it. And I said, why are
you crying? And she said, because it's the most beautiful
gift you could have ever given me. I said, what

(40:01):
do you mean? She said, you know, for forty years,
I've pushed these questions down, so far down that I
had forgotten about them. But they were always there, and
now I see that you've These are the answers I
needed and I should have looked for. And I'm sorry
that that I wasn't there. Some weeks after this, and

(40:23):
this is after the manuscript, she would call me every
so often with something she had just remembered or the
question she had. For instance, she called me one day
and she said, you know, I was doing the wash
this morning, and I know you're gonna think this is strange.
But I just had this flash of something I remembered.
I said, what's that actually? Like, I remember one morning

(40:44):
doing the wash and putting Dad's shirt into the machine
and I saw lipstick on his collar and I said, well,
what did you do? And she said, I pushed it under,
just put it in there, close the lid. I said,
you did, She said, Michael, you were four or five

(41:05):
Christmas six or eight. I said, like, if I had
contemplated that, my world would have fallen apart. I couldn't
do it. I just had to go on, and I
made that decision. A few weeks later, she called me
up and she said, can I ask you a question?
I said what she said? Do you think if I

(41:26):
had been a better wife, he would still be here?
This wouldn't have happened. And again my heart just sank
because I can only imagine the sadness of that and
where that's coming from. But I also saw who I

(41:47):
was as a son decades later on the other side,
and I could do something that I could do now,
which was to put my arms around her. And I said,
I'm glad you said that, because I can tell you no,
I said, Mom, that's like saying if I had been
a better son, maybe he wouldn't have done that. They said,
you know what, he made his choices, and they make

(42:11):
me sad. We'll never know why he made those choices,
but it's not a comment on who you are, and
I wasn't what we are still as a family and
that we remain as a family, and I think the
journey brought us closer together the way we hadn't been.

(42:40):
Many thanks to Michael Haney for trusting me with his story.
You can find out more about his book after visiting
Friends a Son's Story by following him on Twitter at
Michael Haney. That's at Michael Haney. Family Secrets is an
I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagin is a supervising producer.
Sir and Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macaluso are the

(43:03):
executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com. You can
also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook
at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot

(43:25):
com for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the
I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.