October 1, 2020 • 39 mins
Ruthie Lindsey attracted a massive following with her picture-perfect lifestyle shots on Instagram. But what those images didn’t show was everything that came before, including an accident that nearly killed her, a painkiller addiction that might have finished the job—and the unconditional love of a family determined to pull her out of the darkness.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of my heart radio. When
I wake up in baton rage after the accident, with
a tube in my throat to help me breathe and
my eyes burning, I will begin to learn. I will
learn that love is not always allowed a parade of
(00:22):
a thing. It can be strong and silent. It is
not the throb of my name across the football field,
but the low, tender call for me across the sterile room,
a call from a person who knows they may never
be heard, but chooses to speak anyway. It is not
the presentation of shiny crowns and shiny roses. It is
(00:45):
the table filled with wrinkled petals and dirty water, the
flowers that people brought, not knowing if I would ever
wait to see them. It is not sitting on the
sidelines in a nice sweater watching me blossom. It is
sitting by my side, disheveled and bare faced, watching me
with her. I will learn that love is one person
(01:06):
becoming undone for another. It is being stripped of the
protective armor we've worked hard to fashion for ourselves to
become the armor for somebody else. It's standing naked and shivering,
or for what scares us the most to honor what
it is that we love the most. This is the
love that will transform me. That's Ruthie Lindsay Speaker, podcast host, activist,
(01:34):
and author of the memoir There I Am. You know
that expression, God doesn't give us more than we can handle.
I've never liked that expression, and I don't really believe it.
Some of us are given a lot just the way
it is, and it's up to us to decide whether
we can handle it. Ruthie's story is one of such courage,
(01:58):
the deepest reservoirs of ridge that served to transform confounding
pain and grief into something so bright it shines like
a star. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:23):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up with older brothers on a farm in
the middle of nowhere, and I had an older brother
(02:43):
that basically helped raise me, who just absolutely I was
his adored me. I never went a day without knowing
that I was loved and adored. And you know, my
dad's eyes lit up when I would walk in the room.
And I grew up on the land, which I was
(03:06):
super extroverted. So there are parts of being out in
the middle of nowhere that was really hard for me.
I'd go to town at my friend's homes and like
what I would do to be able to run next
door and play with a friend Like that sound like
the dream of dreams, But I'm so grateful to have
grown up in the middle of nowhere on this farm,
like my dad plowing our garden with a mule, and
(03:28):
just freedom to run outside in the woods and in
the creek all day long. I could run free and wild,
and I think that's had such an impact on my
life today, like my love for mother Nature and how
much she has become just really she is my medicine,
(03:51):
you know, And I think that was a gift given
to me from such a get go. My dad loved
the land so much. She loved working the land, and
you know, we ate out of our garden all summer long.
And this was in South Louisiana. Is all right in
South Louisiana and tiny little town called Saint Francisville, but
(04:13):
we were we were like fifteen minutes outside of San Francisville,
so like the town's tiny with two red lights. But
then we were fifteen minutes away from that just I mean,
no neighbors, gravel road, you know. I was able to
like jump in my dad's pickup truck in like fifth
grade and drive it up and down the road, and
I mean we were just we didn't own keys to
(04:35):
our home, didn't own them, and I thought that was
totally normal. When we'd go on vacation, we always left
the keys in her car, and I thought, that's just
what everyone did. You know, Tell me about your mother.
We have gotten so much closer as I've gotten older.
She was moved from New Orleans to the farm. It
(04:58):
was not her dream. She's very much a city girl,
and I think being out in the country was a
bit difficult. And she had a really painful childhood. She
was a child of alcoholics. Her mom died when she
was very very young, and her dad married someone who
had been in the Holocaust, and so of course had
her own issues and was also an alcoholic. And so
(05:21):
my mom was brought up with a lot of dysfunction,
but was so beautiful. I mean, my mom still, she's
in her seventies, and it's just the most stunning woman.
And so that at the time, especially back then, like
I mean now too, but that really got her out
her beauty and that's what she knew, that's what everyone
(05:43):
told her she was about, you know, And I think
that's such a disservice to all humans, but to a woman,
because it's harder to process that there's so much more
to us, you know, when only praise you ever get
is about how beautiful you are. And she is just
she's such an amazing human and I feel so proud
(06:08):
of her and to be her daughter, because she's just
been on such a massive healing journey. I think because
of all the trauma that she grew up with, we've
just gotten closer and closer as I've become an adult.
I think I was a lot harder on her when
I was younger, because you know, we're all just doing
the best we can, and she she didn't have a
(06:29):
mom growing up, and what she was able to do
with what she was given is pretty spectacular. But there
was also a lot that was was hard, you know,
because she was human and she was hurt. And how
did your mom and your father meet? My dad was
(06:50):
going to school to become an educator in New Orleans,
and to make money. He was bartending at this like
cool kid bar in New Orleans. Um. He was just
this larger than life presence. Mr Extrovert knew everyone, very charming.
And my mom was actually a flight attendant for Delta
based in New Orleans, so she was very rarely at home.
(07:11):
She was always flying all over the place. And they
were in the sixties, I mean wild. They had a
mutual friend and said they should meet and connected theme
and so my mom said yes, which she was pursued
by them all the time, I mean all the time.
And when he was getting her address to come pick
(07:32):
her up. They literally lived in the same house. She
lived in the basement apartment of this house that was
broken into like three or four apartments, and he lived downstairs,
and they had different entrances, and because she always traveled,
I mean, they never saw each other, but they lived
in the same home in New Orleans. I can see
(07:52):
like the movie version of this, right, her coming in
the front is coming in the back exactly. And when
she was pursued by so many that she just I
think she was just kind of like whatever. And then
one night, just being kind of a punk, she brought
a guy to the bar that he was bartending, and
my dad just went straight up to him and shook
(08:13):
his hand and bought him a drink, and like was
so unaffected by like, I mean also his pride. He
would never let her know that he cared. And she
started hanging out around the bar. And one night, she said,
the shifting point for them was she saw my dad
behind the bar get his eyes grow so big and
just attack mode, almost and he jumped over the bar
(08:35):
and went to the corner of the room. And there
was this homeless guy that my dad loved, that he
was always feeding and taking care of, and I guess
his pants had fallen down or some idiot had maybe
pulled his pants down, and all these guys were drunk,
guys were sitting around like making fun of him, and
my dad lost his mind and jumped over the bar
and like pulled up the guy's pants and beat up
(08:57):
the guys that were messing with him and kicked him
out of the are And that was the turning point.
She was like, that's the kind of man that I
want to be with, and she fell in love with
them that night. Ruthie grows up with her parents and
her brothers on their patch of land, their farm in
southern Louisiana. As she said, she could run free and wild.
(09:21):
But then when she was seventeen, her life was changed forever.
In an instant, I pulled out on a major highway
in front of an ambulance and he hit me on
my car door going sixty five and broke three ribs
and puncture my lungs and my lungs collapse and my
spleen ruptured. And then I broke the tops vertebrae in
(09:43):
my next see one and C two. But the ambulance
driver actually knew how to stabilize my neck and not
pull me out of the car, which I mean, you know,
there's no telling what would have happened. I should not
be here. I mean literal percent chance to live, one
percent chance to walk. And they were able to get
(10:03):
me to the hospital and had to pretty immediately put
me on life support after they got the chest tube
in and got my screen removed. After I was in
the hospital about a week and off life support, they
went in and did my spinal cord surgery where they
took bone from my hip and fused it into my
neck and back. Then they used wire in spinal cord fusion,
(10:26):
so they wrapped so you want to see two with
wire with the bone. I was so lucky. I was
young and healthy. I was a senior in high school.
It happened on my dad's birthday. I left there with
a big neck grace walking after about a month able to,
you know, go back to school after Christmas. You would
(10:47):
never know anything had happened to me. All my scars
are hidden from clothing, in my hair and besides this
neck brace. I mean, you'd never know. And I at
the time didn't really have any residual effects, like I
would get sore her if I danced too much. But
outside of that, I was very disassociated. I would talk
about it in third person like it had happened to
(11:07):
someone else, and I always say, oh, yeah, it was
way harder on my family and my friends than it
was on me. I don't even remember it. I was
on life support and I love telling stories, so it
was just a fun, crazy story to tell that I
felt very disconnected from. So Ruthene daunted a pretty big bullet. Right,
(11:28):
She's fine, she goes on with her life. She's lucky,
she's in one piece. She isn't traumatized. She's just going
to move on and dance and grow and enter the
next phase of her life. She doesn't go to therapy.
I mean, why would she. She's lucky. She develops an
eating disorder in college, her way of pushing the big
(11:48):
feelings down with food, but she really doesn't think anything's wrong.
There's this psychological term dissociation. Rucie will learn this later,
in which we flow to away from ourselves, numb ourselves
so that we don't feel whatever it is that we're
not ready to feel. Ruthie checks all the boxes. She
(12:11):
graduates from college and gets married a few years later
to a musician, a drummer. She's mad for I just
believed everything was gonna work out great. You know. We
bought our little home, We had all these dreams, all
these plans, all the children we're going to have, all
the children we would adopt. And one day, about a
year into our marriage, I was walking in front of
the store in this crazy, gnarly shooting. Pain went up
(12:35):
my neck and I remember thinking, either I've been electrocuted
or the shot, or you know, was I struck by lightning.
I mean it was that severe and that debilitating, and
it dropped me to my knees, where I blacked out
for a second, and then I was left with black
inky spots in my eyes and horrible, horrible migraine and
(12:56):
terrified me, of course, and I started it going to
see doctors because that shooting pain started happening regularly and
more and more frequently. And every time I go to
a doctor, they'd have me do an m R. And
when the film would come back, there would be this
black spot on the film and they'd say, oh, that's
just the magnet and the machine interacting with the wire
(13:18):
from your spinal cordfusion, because it would be directly where
the surgery was, and they be like, everything around it
looks fun. They started me in all these different therapies
and nothing was helping, So then they started me on
narcotics because you know, I was not functional. I was
in such severe pain, and of course I just didn't
(13:39):
want to hurt all the time, so I took anything
they recommended. And that's just sent me on a very
slowly darker and darker path. Like I stopped being able
to function, I stopped showing up for work. I eventually
had to quit working. Um I was spending all of
my time in bed, I stopped showing up as a partner,
(14:00):
as a daughter, as a sister, as an aunt, as
a friend. And that was the gist of my life
for about four and a half years before we finally
figured out what was causing the pain. I saw a
new doctor. I've seen so many at this point, and
finally this one doctor said, Ruthie, I can't tell you
(14:23):
what's going on until I see what's underneath that spot.
And I had never asked, you know, I didn't even
think to ask, but definitely was not an advocate for
myself at the time. And basically, this fifty X ray
showed that one of the wires from my previous final
corn fusion had broken and pierced into my brainstem. Okay,
(14:49):
let's take a breather. Two Here a wire had broken
and pierced Ruthie's brainstem. I mean, which is like your
reptile brain. If you're a I support, they're keeping your
reptile brain alive. It's like the basic functions of organs
and breathing. And I shouldn't be alive. I should not
have brain functioning. I should not be speaking, I should
(15:11):
not be walking. And I'm the only human that's ever
had that that we've can find any record of. So
I'm so lucky to be here. So lucky. It's you know,
not once but twice, right, Yeah, had it not been
an ambulance, you know, had there not been someone at
the scene who knew what to do, had after all
(15:33):
those years you not have found the doctor who just
had the most practical let's do an X ray, you know,
after all this, So this is around two thousand nine
when you have the knowledge of Okay, now this is
(15:54):
what's been causing this excruciating pain, and there's a surgery.
I mean, I was essentially a taking time bomb. Right.
They couldn't believe that I was breathing, functioning, walking alive.
But insurance it was a pre existing injury and so
insurance wasn't going to cover it. And my dad, who
we called Papa, he I told my mom and my
(16:16):
godfather that he was going to come see me to
tell me that he was going to sell our farm
so I could have this surgery because insurance wouldn't cover it.
And he, on his way to visit me, stopped to
visit our Amish friends because we have Ammishers. He did
everything the way the Amish did with his garden. They
had raised his barns. He would get his animals from them,
(16:38):
and he went every two to three months to just
work the land with them. And they became one family
down and it was just his heaven, his happy place.
And we don't know exactly what happened because no one
was with him at the moment, but we get a
phone call that he ended up falling down a flight
of stairs into the basement. It was just the craziest,
(17:02):
just most freak accident. And I was already you know,
on so many drugs and so shut down and on
the highest level of finnel patch and taking all the drugs,
and I just I had no capacity. I just shut
down even more so. And I remember at the time,
(17:23):
I did not know how to process hard things, so
I just numb myself even more. I just remember, you know,
I would pinch myself until I would believe because I
would just think, like, this is a nightmare. Wake up, Ruthie,
wake up. And now I can hear myself and the
privilege and the thing that I'm about to stay. But
(17:43):
I would say, this can't be your life. This can't
be your life, This isn't your life, which you're also saying,
this could be for someone else, you know, like this
could be someone else's life, but it can't be mine.
Not Ruthie, lindsay, this is a nightmare. Ruthie, Wake up,
Wake up. Ruthie is twenty nine years old. She's spent
(18:07):
years in excruciating pain, unnecessarily so, and is facing terrifying
expensive surgery and now her beloved dad he dies of
his injuries. He had been on his way to try
to save her, literally to sell the farm to pay
for her operation. Was this going to be more than
she than anyone could handle? But then because of the
(18:30):
kind of guy her dad had been, his goodness and
kindness comes back a hundredfold. The whole community rallies and support.
It wasn't just a loss for me and my family
he walked in the door. I'm telling you you would
just want to be drawn into his presence because it
felt so good. He made everyone feel like they were
(18:53):
the most special person that he knew. And when he
would leave us, when he'd leave my brothers and all
and her children, you say, I love you so much.
Remember your manners and always look out for the little
guy and his whole thing is he wanted us to
look out for the person that everyone else was missing
and to enter in and like love them and serve
(19:15):
them and honor them, not just notice, you know. And
that's how he lived his life. What was so beautiful
in that time was my godfather ended up setting up
this medical fund in my daddy's honor so that I
could have the surgery because he knew that that was
his last wish, and checks and let her started coming
(19:36):
in out the wazoo because people would be like, your
dad bought my prom dress, your dad sent me on
my senior trip. Your dad bought our Christmas tree, your
dad paid my rent, your dad got me into my
first year of college. I mean, I'm telling you, this
list went on and on, and we did not have
much growing up. It's not like we were in this
(19:58):
wealthy family at all. My godfather, who was the president
of the bank, is like, yeah, he would take out
loans so that he could do these things and to
help other people, and that's just the kind of guy
he was. And so because he had shown up and
loved so many people so well, the full amount of
money was raised for me to have this surgery. And
(20:22):
it's because of his love, his love for others, and
his love for me, I was able to do this
life altering surgery that I had to do to keep living.
And it just felt like such a honor to be
his daughter, you know, Like it's such a privilege to
(20:42):
be Lloyd Lindsay's daughter. Like I feel so grateful to
have gotten to be raised, to have chosen him. I
am such a weirdo, and I believe in past lives
and all the things that I really believe. I'm like,
I was so wise to choose that man to be
my father. What a gift, you know. No, there's this
(21:06):
moment in your book where you write about the last
time that your father saw you. You were consumed with pain,
living in your bed, hopeless, And I so identified with
that because my dad died when I was young as well,
and I was a mess. I was a complete mess
(21:27):
when he died, and I adored him. And there's there's
something about honoring a person by becoming the person, you know.
I've often written and often said that my dad became
my north star and really has guided me ever since
my asking him, what would you do? You know? How
(21:47):
should I be? How do I get through this and
internalizing that yeah, yeah, we'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. As a result of all the
(22:09):
years Ruthie had been on pain killers, her tolerance for
medication was off the charts. It took a lot of
heavy duty drugs to make her even slightly comfortable. After
she's successfully operated on at the Mayo Clinic, she's experiencing
a whole new level of pain. The goal was to
get her living, breathing, walking, but she's sustained severe nerve
(22:32):
and spinal cord damage and feels a constant, burning pain
like half of her is on fire. She walks out
of the hospital a titanium screw where the broken wire
had once been, holding that piece of wire in her hand,
but then she goes straight back to bed and feels
more hopeless than ever before. Ruthie spends years years in
(22:56):
that bed, in terrible pain, medicated and then with sedith,
a nasty bacterial infection. On top of everything else, her
husband's away on tour more often than not, and their
marriage is coming apart, and she breaks. Finally, she has
a breakdown and moves back with her family, this time
(23:18):
into her brother's house. She needs help badly. They all
know it. But instead of going away to a rehab,
Ruthie decides that she's going to do it. She's going
to wean herself off narcotics because she can't bear the
thought of being sent away. What would people think? Speaking
of the you know, the what will people think sort
(23:40):
of mentality I'm thinking about, you know, in terms of
family secrets, there really are two that I want to
talk to you about. And one is that during some
of this period of time, you had fixed up your
house and you had this incredible knack with design, and
some photographs were taken and you made everything really gorgeous
(24:01):
and like this beautiful interior, and you became this Instagram darling,
suddenly having this world of people seeing your beautiful life,
everything perfect. And I think that that's such an important
thing for people to hear and to think about, because
(24:23):
so much of social media, Instagram in particular, is about
comparing our insides with other people's outside or what we
think other people's outsides are, you know, the various personas
that all of us, in some way or another project
on social media, even when we're trying not to. And so,
(24:43):
when was the moment that you sat down and opened
your Instagram account and posted the truth and just like
shared it in all of its complexity with the people
who were following you. I actually didn't start my Instagram
(25:06):
account until after I'd wean myself off all the drugs.
It took me about four months to get off all
of the narcotics, and I had my brother was like,
you can lay in your bed and hurt, or you
can get up and be with people and try to
love people and serve people and live life and hurt.
I was like, okay, so much trying to live and hurt,
you know. And once that happened, and you know, my
(25:27):
marriage did end, and I was like, if I get
back in that bed, I will die. I will die.
So Instagram it became a part of my life joy journal.
It was like all I thought about all these drugs
was my pain and my trauma. And as I weaned
myself off the drugs, I was you know, you can't
feel joy and goodness if you don't allow yourself to
(25:48):
build darkness and pain and loss. You known one, you've
known the other. And so all of a sudden I
was able to see sunsets for the first time. I
was able to see my nieces and nephews I had
not knows them. Allowing myself to feel my pain gave
me my eyes to actually see to experience joy on
this like profoundly different level. And so what ended up
(26:11):
happening is I wasn't giving people the full context. I
was only giving them the beauty, the joy, the goodness.
I did not give them the context of my joy.
And after about eight or nine months of doing that,
I had people that didn't know me following along on
social media, and I started getting these messages of like,
(26:31):
oh my gosh, I want your life, what a dream life.
This is so beautiful. I wish that was my dining room.
I was, you know, all these crazy messages, and it
made me nauseous because I'm like, I remember looking on
social media and just I would have paid so much
money to have been able to be outside playing with
the children that I was dreaming of having instead of
(26:53):
just laying in my bed hurting all the time and
out doing these adventures, you know. And the idea that
I could conjure up those feelings and someone else without
them getting the full picture made me so sad. I
grew up. It's like my mom was a child of alcoholics.
You show up, you you know everything could be chaos
in the house, but you walk outside and you smile,
(27:15):
and you'd be pretty, and you be kind and you
act like everything for this tidy bow. And this when
the first time when I shared my message, stared my
story of what was really happening. Was really the first
time that I had publicly ever shared how bad things were.
I wrote about my divorce. I wrote about c diff
and like ship my pants all day every day. I
(27:36):
wrote about my husband leaving with a dear friend of mine.
I wrote about losing my daddy. I wrote about chronic,
debilitating pain that I lived in with every day of
my life. I wrote about being dependent on all those
narcotics all of those years. And I remember when I
had published, thinking, oh my god, people are going to
(27:57):
want to run for the hills, like this is the
opposite of what they've been following before. And of course
it does the exact opposite. I mean, my inbox just
flooded with people because we're so longing to not feel alone,
We're so longing to feel connection and authenticity. That's beautiful, Rizzi,
(28:22):
and it it reminds me of this line from a
poem of Elizabeth Barrett brownings, I can't quote the whole thing,
but the phrase I'm thinking of is a gauntlet with
a gift in it, and all gauntlets have gifts in them,
but we don't necessarily find them. Yeah, we'll be right
(28:46):
back now. It's just after the Christmas holidays. In very
early January twenty nine, Team Ruthie has become an Instagram sensation.
The truth really does set her free, and she's writing
(29:06):
what will become her memoir There I Am. She's with
her mom, and her mom asks Ruthie if she's ever
done one of those DNA ancestry tests. Her mom muses
about her old hippie days, both she and Ruthie's dad.
She says she wouldn't be surprised if maybe there was
another kid out there, No big deal. Just like that.
(29:28):
Ruthie didn't think anything more of it. It was presented
in such a casual way. But then a few months later,
woo woo alert. Rusie speaks with an intuitive guide and
the guide says that she keeps seeing another brother. Ruthie
still sort of files us away, but then when she's
back home in Nashville, she sees a healer she trusts
(29:50):
and has gone to for years. Ruthie brings up the question,
not expecting to hear anything really, but then something happens
that rocks her world. By the way, side note woo
woo very often ends up being world rocking. She goes, yes, Reefee,
you do you have a missing brother? Your mom is
(30:12):
very intuitive and I was like what. She goes yeah,
and I go, well, how am I going to find him?
She says, you don't have to. He's going to find
you and very soon. So about three weeks later, I
get a message one morning on Facebook and it says, hi, Ruthie,
my husband doesn't have Facebook. He recently matched with you
(30:33):
on ancestry and I believe he's your relative. And I'm like,
oh my god, here it is. So I give her
my number and tell her to have him call me,
and I get a phone call and he said, um, hi, Reethee,
this is David McGhee. Do you know why I'm calling?
I go because you're my brother. He goes, how did
you know? I feel? I've just been waiting for your
(30:55):
call and I'm so excited. So when my dad was
in college, he was like a sophomore junior in college.
Nineteen David's mom was a senior in high school, went
to l A. S U for a weekend, met my dad.
They ended up cooking up. She went back home months
later found out she was pregnant. Back then, you know,
(31:16):
if you're pregnant, you get sent away, especially in the South.
So she got sent away to have this baby. No
one knew about it, and he was adopted by this
couple in Oxford, Mississippi. He was a professor at All
miss which is where I went to college. And when
he had his first son, he started looking for his parents.
He wanted to find out, especially his dad. He hired
(31:39):
two private detectives, looked for almost twenty seven twenty eight years,
and never found anything because it's a closed adoption state.
And finally, so his family got together on the six
year anniversary of his son's untimely passing. He had passed
of an accidental overdose when he was twenty three years old.
(32:00):
He has two children, both have partners and babies, and
the whole family got together to celebrate William's life and
his wife was like, you know, you can't give up.
I know you've been looking forever. She had made him
spit into a tube. Also like two years before, I'm
just going to sign into your ancestry account because who
knows signs in there's my name. She's like, there's a
(32:22):
match and it's so high it has to be your sister.
But there's no profile. But there's this girl named Ruthie
Lindsay and his daughter in law goes Ruthie Lindsay. I
follow her on Instagram. I followed her for years and
he's like, now, slow down, I'm sure there's more than one.
She was like, no, that is your sister. I know.
(32:42):
And she pulls up my website and there's a video
of my dad. David is the only one that looks
like him. He's the only one that hunts and fishes
and gardens. He does similar work. He works in education
at all miss he is like this larger than I mean,
it's the craziest where then it gets even crazier. My
(33:02):
full brother that I was raised with. Every summer he
is the camp doctor at this summer camp called Camp
Alpine for boys. Well, David's daughter, my niece, grew up
going to the sister camp that I also went to,
and she was a counselor. When my nieces were there
and they all fell in love with her well. This
summer in particular, she was the camp director at the
(33:25):
boys camp, and my brother and his family were all
there because he was the camp doctor, and they all
just fell in love with her even more, and my
brother and my sister in law met her. She ended
up getting really sick, having to go to the infirmary.
My brother held her hair back while she vomited. And
this is her uncle. This is in fact her uncle,
biological uncle. Then a year year or two later she
(33:48):
got married. She invited my brother and his family of eight.
So on the sixth anniversary of the tragic loss of
his son, David, who's been searching fruitlessly for years, is
matched with someone named Ruthie Lindsay as a sister. His
daughter in law is a fan of Rusie's follows her
(34:08):
on Instagram. The coincidences abound. So many of those close
relatives have known each other, crossed paths, shared parts of
lives together without ever knowing they were Kim. Last summer,
everyone came down to the farm and got to be
on this land where my nieces and nephews are the
fourth generation that lived there. And he got to see
(34:31):
this land that my daddy plowed with his garden, and
he got to see the land that his granddad loved
more than anything. And it's just it's just this full circle.
You can't make this shift up like beautiful gift that
we are just so blown away by. I just and
the timing was perfect, just all of it. You know.
(34:55):
As I'm listening to I'm just thinking, I've heard so
many stories in the last few years of families who
make a discovery and someone picks up the phone and
calls and says, I think we're related. The very first
impulse that many many people have in that situation is
(35:20):
to feel threatened. You now, what do you want? You
must want something? And I'm listening to your story and
it's all about love and an open heartedness that then
creates the beauty, allows for the beauty. You know. It's
it's an open palm instead of a closed fist, it's
(35:43):
an open heart instead of a shutdown heart, and it
begets and begets the beauty that you're talking about. And
even that you're talking about in the way that so
much pain, the loss of a child and everything you're
talking about, Rucie is just really, really beautiful. It's hard
(36:05):
to remember life without him now, like he is just
such a treasure and such a gift. Remember what I
said at the beginning about courage. Ruthie's story is really
(36:28):
at its core about the courage to heal, and part
of that healing is not wishing or willing any of
it away. Here's Ruthie with the last word. I think,
if that first surgery when I had my wreck, everything
had been great from them on, if you know that
second surgery when they removed the wire, if that had
(36:50):
fixed everything, quote unquote, and you know I didn't have
the physical pain. If those things outside of me would
have quote unquote cured me, I would have never woken up.
I would have never had the breakdowns which eventually led
to the breakthroughs. I would never have gotten there had
(37:11):
I been quote unquote cured. It took all the trauma,
all the pain, all the loss, all the heartache. Those
experiences were the entry ways, the entry points, the invitations
for me to ultimately come home to myself. And when
we do this healing work that we're also deserving of,
(37:33):
then we get to go out and be those mirrors,
to be those safe containers, to be that light and
that expansive like you spoke of abundant love, because there's
always an abundance. There's always more. Every gift I have
I can freely release. It's all energy because there's always more.
(38:08):
Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan
is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer.
We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler
Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret
you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
(38:29):
one eight secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more podcasts from
(39:02):
My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of my heart radio. When
I wake up in baton rage after the accident, with
a tube in my throat to help me breathe and
my eyes burning, I will begin to learn. I will
learn that love is not always allowed a parade of
(00:22):
a thing. It can be strong and silent. It is
not the throb of my name across the football field,
but the low, tender call for me across the sterile room,
a call from a person who knows they may never
be heard, but chooses to speak anyway. It is not
the presentation of shiny crowns and shiny roses. It is
(00:45):
the table filled with wrinkled petals and dirty water, the
flowers that people brought, not knowing if I would ever
wait to see them. It is not sitting on the
sidelines in a nice sweater watching me blossom. It is
sitting by my side, disheveled and bare faced, watching me
with her. I will learn that love is one person
(01:06):
becoming undone for another. It is being stripped of the
protective armor we've worked hard to fashion for ourselves to
become the armor for somebody else. It's standing naked and shivering,
or for what scares us the most to honor what
it is that we love the most. This is the
love that will transform me. That's Ruthie Lindsay Speaker, podcast host, activist,
(01:34):
and author of the memoir There I Am. You know
that expression, God doesn't give us more than we can handle.
I've never liked that expression, and I don't really believe it.
Some of us are given a lot just the way
it is, and it's up to us to decide whether
we can handle it. Ruthie's story is one of such courage,
(01:58):
the deepest reservoirs of ridge that served to transform confounding
pain and grief into something so bright it shines like
a star. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
(02:23):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up with older brothers on a farm in
the middle of nowhere, and I had an older brother
(02:43):
that basically helped raise me, who just absolutely I was
his adored me. I never went a day without knowing
that I was loved and adored. And you know, my
dad's eyes lit up when I would walk in the room.
And I grew up on the land, which I was
(03:06):
super extroverted. So there are parts of being out in
the middle of nowhere that was really hard for me.
I'd go to town at my friend's homes and like
what I would do to be able to run next
door and play with a friend Like that sound like
the dream of dreams, But I'm so grateful to have
grown up in the middle of nowhere on this farm,
like my dad plowing our garden with a mule, and
(03:28):
just freedom to run outside in the woods and in
the creek all day long. I could run free and wild,
and I think that's had such an impact on my
life today, like my love for mother Nature and how
much she has become just really she is my medicine,
(03:51):
you know, And I think that was a gift given
to me from such a get go. My dad loved
the land so much. She loved working the land, and
you know, we ate out of our garden all summer long.
And this was in South Louisiana. Is all right in
South Louisiana and tiny little town called Saint Francisville, but
(04:13):
we were we were like fifteen minutes outside of San Francisville,
so like the town's tiny with two red lights. But
then we were fifteen minutes away from that just I mean,
no neighbors, gravel road, you know. I was able to
like jump in my dad's pickup truck in like fifth
grade and drive it up and down the road, and
I mean we were just we didn't own keys to
(04:35):
our home, didn't own them, and I thought that was
totally normal. When we'd go on vacation, we always left
the keys in her car, and I thought, that's just
what everyone did. You know, Tell me about your mother.
We have gotten so much closer as I've gotten older.
She was moved from New Orleans to the farm. It
(04:58):
was not her dream. She's very much a city girl,
and I think being out in the country was a
bit difficult. And she had a really painful childhood. She
was a child of alcoholics. Her mom died when she
was very very young, and her dad married someone who
had been in the Holocaust, and so of course had
her own issues and was also an alcoholic. And so
(05:21):
my mom was brought up with a lot of dysfunction,
but was so beautiful. I mean, my mom still, she's
in her seventies, and it's just the most stunning woman.
And so that at the time, especially back then, like
I mean now too, but that really got her out
her beauty and that's what she knew, that's what everyone
(05:43):
told her she was about, you know, And I think
that's such a disservice to all humans, but to a woman,
because it's harder to process that there's so much more
to us, you know, when only praise you ever get
is about how beautiful you are. And she is just
she's such an amazing human and I feel so proud
(06:08):
of her and to be her daughter, because she's just
been on such a massive healing journey. I think because
of all the trauma that she grew up with, we've
just gotten closer and closer as I've become an adult.
I think I was a lot harder on her when
I was younger, because you know, we're all just doing
the best we can, and she she didn't have a
(06:29):
mom growing up, and what she was able to do
with what she was given is pretty spectacular. But there
was also a lot that was was hard, you know,
because she was human and she was hurt. And how
did your mom and your father meet? My dad was
(06:50):
going to school to become an educator in New Orleans,
and to make money. He was bartending at this like
cool kid bar in New Orleans. Um. He was just
this larger than life presence. Mr Extrovert knew everyone, very charming.
And my mom was actually a flight attendant for Delta
based in New Orleans, so she was very rarely at home.
(07:11):
She was always flying all over the place. And they
were in the sixties, I mean wild. They had a
mutual friend and said they should meet and connected theme
and so my mom said yes, which she was pursued
by them all the time, I mean all the time.
And when he was getting her address to come pick
(07:32):
her up. They literally lived in the same house. She
lived in the basement apartment of this house that was
broken into like three or four apartments, and he lived downstairs,
and they had different entrances, and because she always traveled,
I mean, they never saw each other, but they lived
in the same home in New Orleans. I can see
(07:52):
like the movie version of this, right, her coming in
the front is coming in the back exactly. And when
she was pursued by so many that she just I
think she was just kind of like whatever. And then
one night, just being kind of a punk, she brought
a guy to the bar that he was bartending, and
my dad just went straight up to him and shook
(08:13):
his hand and bought him a drink, and like was
so unaffected by like, I mean also his pride. He
would never let her know that he cared. And she
started hanging out around the bar. And one night, she said,
the shifting point for them was she saw my dad
behind the bar get his eyes grow so big and
just attack mode, almost and he jumped over the bar
(08:35):
and went to the corner of the room. And there
was this homeless guy that my dad loved, that he
was always feeding and taking care of, and I guess
his pants had fallen down or some idiot had maybe
pulled his pants down, and all these guys were drunk,
guys were sitting around like making fun of him, and
my dad lost his mind and jumped over the bar
and like pulled up the guy's pants and beat up
(08:57):
the guys that were messing with him and kicked him
out of the are And that was the turning point.
She was like, that's the kind of man that I
want to be with, and she fell in love with
them that night. Ruthie grows up with her parents and
her brothers on their patch of land, their farm in
southern Louisiana. As she said, she could run free and wild.
(09:21):
But then when she was seventeen, her life was changed forever.
In an instant, I pulled out on a major highway
in front of an ambulance and he hit me on
my car door going sixty five and broke three ribs
and puncture my lungs and my lungs collapse and my
spleen ruptured. And then I broke the tops vertebrae in
(09:43):
my next see one and C two. But the ambulance
driver actually knew how to stabilize my neck and not
pull me out of the car, which I mean, you know,
there's no telling what would have happened. I should not
be here. I mean literal percent chance to live, one
percent chance to walk. And they were able to get
(10:03):
me to the hospital and had to pretty immediately put
me on life support after they got the chest tube
in and got my screen removed. After I was in
the hospital about a week and off life support, they
went in and did my spinal cord surgery where they
took bone from my hip and fused it into my
neck and back. Then they used wire in spinal cord fusion,
(10:26):
so they wrapped so you want to see two with
wire with the bone. I was so lucky. I was
young and healthy. I was a senior in high school.
It happened on my dad's birthday. I left there with
a big neck grace walking after about a month able to,
you know, go back to school after Christmas. You would
(10:47):
never know anything had happened to me. All my scars
are hidden from clothing, in my hair and besides this
neck brace. I mean, you'd never know. And I at
the time didn't really have any residual effects, like I
would get sore her if I danced too much. But
outside of that, I was very disassociated. I would talk
about it in third person like it had happened to
(11:07):
someone else, and I always say, oh, yeah, it was
way harder on my family and my friends than it
was on me. I don't even remember it. I was
on life support and I love telling stories, so it
was just a fun, crazy story to tell that I
felt very disconnected from. So Ruthene daunted a pretty big bullet. Right,
(11:28):
She's fine, she goes on with her life. She's lucky,
she's in one piece. She isn't traumatized. She's just going
to move on and dance and grow and enter the
next phase of her life. She doesn't go to therapy.
I mean, why would she. She's lucky. She develops an
eating disorder in college, her way of pushing the big
(11:48):
feelings down with food, but she really doesn't think anything's wrong.
There's this psychological term dissociation. Rucie will learn this later,
in which we flow to away from ourselves, numb ourselves
so that we don't feel whatever it is that we're
not ready to feel. Ruthie checks all the boxes. She
(12:11):
graduates from college and gets married a few years later
to a musician, a drummer. She's mad for I just
believed everything was gonna work out great. You know. We
bought our little home, We had all these dreams, all
these plans, all the children we're going to have, all
the children we would adopt. And one day, about a
year into our marriage, I was walking in front of
the store in this crazy, gnarly shooting. Pain went up
(12:35):
my neck and I remember thinking, either I've been electrocuted
or the shot, or you know, was I struck by lightning.
I mean it was that severe and that debilitating, and
it dropped me to my knees, where I blacked out
for a second, and then I was left with black
inky spots in my eyes and horrible, horrible migraine and
(12:56):
terrified me, of course, and I started it going to
see doctors because that shooting pain started happening regularly and
more and more frequently. And every time I go to
a doctor, they'd have me do an m R. And
when the film would come back, there would be this
black spot on the film and they'd say, oh, that's
just the magnet and the machine interacting with the wire
(13:18):
from your spinal cordfusion, because it would be directly where
the surgery was, and they be like, everything around it
looks fun. They started me in all these different therapies
and nothing was helping, So then they started me on
narcotics because you know, I was not functional. I was
in such severe pain, and of course I just didn't
(13:39):
want to hurt all the time, so I took anything
they recommended. And that's just sent me on a very
slowly darker and darker path. Like I stopped being able
to function, I stopped showing up for work. I eventually
had to quit working. Um I was spending all of
my time in bed, I stopped showing up as a partner,
(14:00):
as a daughter, as a sister, as an aunt, as
a friend. And that was the gist of my life
for about four and a half years before we finally
figured out what was causing the pain. I saw a
new doctor. I've seen so many at this point, and
finally this one doctor said, Ruthie, I can't tell you
(14:23):
what's going on until I see what's underneath that spot.
And I had never asked, you know, I didn't even
think to ask, but definitely was not an advocate for
myself at the time. And basically, this fifty X ray
showed that one of the wires from my previous final
corn fusion had broken and pierced into my brainstem. Okay,
(14:49):
let's take a breather. Two Here a wire had broken
and pierced Ruthie's brainstem. I mean, which is like your
reptile brain. If you're a I support, they're keeping your
reptile brain alive. It's like the basic functions of organs
and breathing. And I shouldn't be alive. I should not
have brain functioning. I should not be speaking, I should
(15:11):
not be walking. And I'm the only human that's ever
had that that we've can find any record of. So
I'm so lucky to be here. So lucky. It's you know,
not once but twice, right, Yeah, had it not been
an ambulance, you know, had there not been someone at
the scene who knew what to do, had after all
(15:33):
those years you not have found the doctor who just
had the most practical let's do an X ray, you know,
after all this, So this is around two thousand nine
when you have the knowledge of Okay, now this is
(15:54):
what's been causing this excruciating pain, and there's a surgery.
I mean, I was essentially a taking time bomb. Right.
They couldn't believe that I was breathing, functioning, walking alive.
But insurance it was a pre existing injury and so
insurance wasn't going to cover it. And my dad, who
we called Papa, he I told my mom and my
(16:16):
godfather that he was going to come see me to
tell me that he was going to sell our farm
so I could have this surgery because insurance wouldn't cover it.
And he, on his way to visit me, stopped to
visit our Amish friends because we have Ammishers. He did
everything the way the Amish did with his garden. They
had raised his barns. He would get his animals from them,
(16:38):
and he went every two to three months to just
work the land with them. And they became one family
down and it was just his heaven, his happy place.
And we don't know exactly what happened because no one
was with him at the moment, but we get a
phone call that he ended up falling down a flight
of stairs into the basement. It was just the craziest,
(17:02):
just most freak accident. And I was already you know,
on so many drugs and so shut down and on
the highest level of finnel patch and taking all the drugs,
and I just I had no capacity. I just shut
down even more so. And I remember at the time,
(17:23):
I did not know how to process hard things, so
I just numb myself even more. I just remember, you know,
I would pinch myself until I would believe because I
would just think, like, this is a nightmare. Wake up, Ruthie,
wake up. And now I can hear myself and the
privilege and the thing that I'm about to stay. But
(17:43):
I would say, this can't be your life. This can't
be your life, This isn't your life, which you're also saying,
this could be for someone else, you know, like this
could be someone else's life, but it can't be mine.
Not Ruthie, lindsay, this is a nightmare. Ruthie, Wake up,
Wake up. Ruthie is twenty nine years old. She's spent
(18:07):
years in excruciating pain, unnecessarily so, and is facing terrifying
expensive surgery and now her beloved dad he dies of
his injuries. He had been on his way to try
to save her, literally to sell the farm to pay
for her operation. Was this going to be more than
she than anyone could handle? But then because of the
(18:30):
kind of guy her dad had been, his goodness and
kindness comes back a hundredfold. The whole community rallies and support.
It wasn't just a loss for me and my family
he walked in the door. I'm telling you you would
just want to be drawn into his presence because it
felt so good. He made everyone feel like they were
(18:53):
the most special person that he knew. And when he
would leave us, when he'd leave my brothers and all
and her children, you say, I love you so much.
Remember your manners and always look out for the little
guy and his whole thing is he wanted us to
look out for the person that everyone else was missing
and to enter in and like love them and serve
(19:15):
them and honor them, not just notice, you know. And
that's how he lived his life. What was so beautiful
in that time was my godfather ended up setting up
this medical fund in my daddy's honor so that I
could have the surgery because he knew that that was
his last wish, and checks and let her started coming
(19:36):
in out the wazoo because people would be like, your
dad bought my prom dress, your dad sent me on
my senior trip. Your dad bought our Christmas tree, your
dad paid my rent, your dad got me into my
first year of college. I mean, I'm telling you, this
list went on and on, and we did not have
much growing up. It's not like we were in this
(19:58):
wealthy family at all. My godfather, who was the president
of the bank, is like, yeah, he would take out
loans so that he could do these things and to
help other people, and that's just the kind of guy
he was. And so because he had shown up and
loved so many people so well, the full amount of
money was raised for me to have this surgery. And
(20:22):
it's because of his love, his love for others, and
his love for me, I was able to do this
life altering surgery that I had to do to keep living.
And it just felt like such a honor to be
his daughter, you know, Like it's such a privilege to
(20:42):
be Lloyd Lindsay's daughter. Like I feel so grateful to
have gotten to be raised, to have chosen him. I
am such a weirdo, and I believe in past lives
and all the things that I really believe. I'm like,
I was so wise to choose that man to be
my father. What a gift, you know. No, there's this
(21:06):
moment in your book where you write about the last
time that your father saw you. You were consumed with pain,
living in your bed, hopeless, And I so identified with
that because my dad died when I was young as well,
and I was a mess. I was a complete mess
(21:27):
when he died, and I adored him. And there's there's
something about honoring a person by becoming the person, you know.
I've often written and often said that my dad became
my north star and really has guided me ever since
my asking him, what would you do? You know? How
(21:47):
should I be? How do I get through this and
internalizing that yeah, yeah, we'll be back in a moment
with more family secrets. As a result of all the
(22:09):
years Ruthie had been on pain killers, her tolerance for
medication was off the charts. It took a lot of
heavy duty drugs to make her even slightly comfortable. After
she's successfully operated on at the Mayo Clinic, she's experiencing
a whole new level of pain. The goal was to
get her living, breathing, walking, but she's sustained severe nerve
(22:32):
and spinal cord damage and feels a constant, burning pain
like half of her is on fire. She walks out
of the hospital a titanium screw where the broken wire
had once been, holding that piece of wire in her hand,
but then she goes straight back to bed and feels
more hopeless than ever before. Ruthie spends years years in
(22:56):
that bed, in terrible pain, medicated and then with sedith,
a nasty bacterial infection. On top of everything else, her
husband's away on tour more often than not, and their
marriage is coming apart, and she breaks. Finally, she has
a breakdown and moves back with her family, this time
(23:18):
into her brother's house. She needs help badly. They all
know it. But instead of going away to a rehab,
Ruthie decides that she's going to do it. She's going
to wean herself off narcotics because she can't bear the
thought of being sent away. What would people think? Speaking
of the you know, the what will people think sort
(23:40):
of mentality I'm thinking about, you know, in terms of
family secrets, there really are two that I want to
talk to you about. And one is that during some
of this period of time, you had fixed up your
house and you had this incredible knack with design, and
some photographs were taken and you made everything really gorgeous
(24:01):
and like this beautiful interior, and you became this Instagram darling,
suddenly having this world of people seeing your beautiful life,
everything perfect. And I think that that's such an important
thing for people to hear and to think about, because
(24:23):
so much of social media, Instagram in particular, is about
comparing our insides with other people's outside or what we
think other people's outsides are, you know, the various personas
that all of us, in some way or another project
on social media, even when we're trying not to. And so,
(24:43):
when was the moment that you sat down and opened
your Instagram account and posted the truth and just like
shared it in all of its complexity with the people
who were following you. I actually didn't start my Instagram
(25:06):
account until after I'd wean myself off all the drugs.
It took me about four months to get off all
of the narcotics, and I had my brother was like,
you can lay in your bed and hurt, or you
can get up and be with people and try to
love people and serve people and live life and hurt.
I was like, okay, so much trying to live and hurt,
you know. And once that happened, and you know, my
(25:27):
marriage did end, and I was like, if I get
back in that bed, I will die. I will die.
So Instagram it became a part of my life joy journal.
It was like all I thought about all these drugs
was my pain and my trauma. And as I weaned
myself off the drugs, I was you know, you can't
feel joy and goodness if you don't allow yourself to
(25:48):
build darkness and pain and loss. You known one, you've
known the other. And so all of a sudden I
was able to see sunsets for the first time. I
was able to see my nieces and nephews I had
not knows them. Allowing myself to feel my pain gave
me my eyes to actually see to experience joy on
this like profoundly different level. And so what ended up
(26:11):
happening is I wasn't giving people the full context. I
was only giving them the beauty, the joy, the goodness.
I did not give them the context of my joy.
And after about eight or nine months of doing that,
I had people that didn't know me following along on
social media, and I started getting these messages of like,
(26:31):
oh my gosh, I want your life, what a dream life.
This is so beautiful. I wish that was my dining room.
I was, you know, all these crazy messages, and it
made me nauseous because I'm like, I remember looking on
social media and just I would have paid so much
money to have been able to be outside playing with
the children that I was dreaming of having instead of
(26:53):
just laying in my bed hurting all the time and
out doing these adventures, you know. And the idea that
I could conjure up those feelings and someone else without
them getting the full picture made me so sad. I
grew up. It's like my mom was a child of alcoholics.
You show up, you you know everything could be chaos
in the house, but you walk outside and you smile,
(27:15):
and you'd be pretty, and you be kind and you
act like everything for this tidy bow. And this when
the first time when I shared my message, stared my
story of what was really happening. Was really the first
time that I had publicly ever shared how bad things were.
I wrote about my divorce. I wrote about c diff
and like ship my pants all day every day. I
(27:36):
wrote about my husband leaving with a dear friend of mine.
I wrote about losing my daddy. I wrote about chronic,
debilitating pain that I lived in with every day of
my life. I wrote about being dependent on all those
narcotics all of those years. And I remember when I
had published, thinking, oh my god, people are going to
(27:57):
want to run for the hills, like this is the
opposite of what they've been following before. And of course
it does the exact opposite. I mean, my inbox just
flooded with people because we're so longing to not feel alone,
We're so longing to feel connection and authenticity. That's beautiful, Rizzi,
(28:22):
and it it reminds me of this line from a
poem of Elizabeth Barrett brownings, I can't quote the whole thing,
but the phrase I'm thinking of is a gauntlet with
a gift in it, and all gauntlets have gifts in them,
but we don't necessarily find them. Yeah, we'll be right
(28:46):
back now. It's just after the Christmas holidays. In very
early January twenty nine, Team Ruthie has become an Instagram sensation.
The truth really does set her free, and she's writing
(29:06):
what will become her memoir There I Am. She's with
her mom, and her mom asks Ruthie if she's ever
done one of those DNA ancestry tests. Her mom muses
about her old hippie days, both she and Ruthie's dad.
She says she wouldn't be surprised if maybe there was
another kid out there, No big deal. Just like that.
(29:28):
Ruthie didn't think anything more of it. It was presented
in such a casual way. But then a few months later,
woo woo alert. Rusie speaks with an intuitive guide and
the guide says that she keeps seeing another brother. Ruthie
still sort of files us away, but then when she's
back home in Nashville, she sees a healer she trusts
(29:50):
and has gone to for years. Ruthie brings up the question,
not expecting to hear anything really, but then something happens
that rocks her world. By the way, side note woo
woo very often ends up being world rocking. She goes, yes, Reefee,
you do you have a missing brother? Your mom is
(30:12):
very intuitive and I was like what. She goes yeah,
and I go, well, how am I going to find him?
She says, you don't have to. He's going to find
you and very soon. So about three weeks later, I
get a message one morning on Facebook and it says, hi, Ruthie,
my husband doesn't have Facebook. He recently matched with you
(30:33):
on ancestry and I believe he's your relative. And I'm like,
oh my god, here it is. So I give her
my number and tell her to have him call me,
and I get a phone call and he said, um, hi, Reethee,
this is David McGhee. Do you know why I'm calling?
I go because you're my brother. He goes, how did
you know? I feel? I've just been waiting for your
(30:55):
call and I'm so excited. So when my dad was
in college, he was like a sophomore junior in college.
Nineteen David's mom was a senior in high school, went
to l A. S U for a weekend, met my dad.
They ended up cooking up. She went back home months
later found out she was pregnant. Back then, you know,
(31:16):
if you're pregnant, you get sent away, especially in the South.
So she got sent away to have this baby. No
one knew about it, and he was adopted by this
couple in Oxford, Mississippi. He was a professor at All
miss which is where I went to college. And when
he had his first son, he started looking for his parents.
He wanted to find out, especially his dad. He hired
(31:39):
two private detectives, looked for almost twenty seven twenty eight years,
and never found anything because it's a closed adoption state.
And finally, so his family got together on the six
year anniversary of his son's untimely passing. He had passed
of an accidental overdose when he was twenty three years old.
(32:00):
He has two children, both have partners and babies, and
the whole family got together to celebrate William's life and
his wife was like, you know, you can't give up.
I know you've been looking forever. She had made him
spit into a tube. Also like two years before, I'm
just going to sign into your ancestry account because who
knows signs in there's my name. She's like, there's a
(32:22):
match and it's so high it has to be your sister.
But there's no profile. But there's this girl named Ruthie
Lindsay and his daughter in law goes Ruthie Lindsay. I
follow her on Instagram. I followed her for years and
he's like, now, slow down, I'm sure there's more than one.
She was like, no, that is your sister. I know.
(32:42):
And she pulls up my website and there's a video
of my dad. David is the only one that looks
like him. He's the only one that hunts and fishes
and gardens. He does similar work. He works in education
at all miss he is like this larger than I mean,
it's the craziest where then it gets even crazier. My
(33:02):
full brother that I was raised with. Every summer he
is the camp doctor at this summer camp called Camp
Alpine for boys. Well, David's daughter, my niece, grew up
going to the sister camp that I also went to,
and she was a counselor. When my nieces were there
and they all fell in love with her well. This
summer in particular, she was the camp director at the
(33:25):
boys camp, and my brother and his family were all
there because he was the camp doctor, and they all
just fell in love with her even more, and my
brother and my sister in law met her. She ended
up getting really sick, having to go to the infirmary.
My brother held her hair back while she vomited. And
this is her uncle. This is in fact her uncle,
biological uncle. Then a year year or two later she
(33:48):
got married. She invited my brother and his family of eight.
So on the sixth anniversary of the tragic loss of
his son, David, who's been searching fruitlessly for years, is
matched with someone named Ruthie Lindsay as a sister. His
daughter in law is a fan of Rusie's follows her
(34:08):
on Instagram. The coincidences abound. So many of those close
relatives have known each other, crossed paths, shared parts of
lives together without ever knowing they were Kim. Last summer,
everyone came down to the farm and got to be
on this land where my nieces and nephews are the
fourth generation that lived there. And he got to see
(34:31):
this land that my daddy plowed with his garden, and
he got to see the land that his granddad loved
more than anything. And it's just it's just this full circle.
You can't make this shift up like beautiful gift that
we are just so blown away by. I just and
the timing was perfect, just all of it. You know.
(34:55):
As I'm listening to I'm just thinking, I've heard so
many stories in the last few years of families who
make a discovery and someone picks up the phone and
calls and says, I think we're related. The very first
impulse that many many people have in that situation is
(35:20):
to feel threatened. You now, what do you want? You
must want something? And I'm listening to your story and
it's all about love and an open heartedness that then
creates the beauty, allows for the beauty. You know. It's
it's an open palm instead of a closed fist, it's
(35:43):
an open heart instead of a shutdown heart, and it
begets and begets the beauty that you're talking about. And
even that you're talking about in the way that so
much pain, the loss of a child and everything you're
talking about, Rucie is just really, really beautiful. It's hard
(36:05):
to remember life without him now, like he is just
such a treasure and such a gift. Remember what I
said at the beginning about courage. Ruthie's story is really
(36:28):
at its core about the courage to heal, and part
of that healing is not wishing or willing any of
it away. Here's Ruthie with the last word. I think,
if that first surgery when I had my wreck, everything
had been great from them on, if you know that
second surgery when they removed the wire, if that had
(36:50):
fixed everything, quote unquote, and you know I didn't have
the physical pain. If those things outside of me would
have quote unquote cured me, I would have never woken up.
I would have never had the breakdowns which eventually led
to the breakthroughs. I would never have gotten there had
(37:11):
I been quote unquote cured. It took all the trauma,
all the pain, all the loss, all the heartache. Those
experiences were the entry ways, the entry points, the invitations
for me to ultimately come home to myself. And when
we do this healing work that we're also deserving of,
(37:33):
then we get to go out and be those mirrors,
to be those safe containers, to be that light and
that expansive like you spoke of abundant love, because there's
always an abundance. There's always more. Every gift I have
I can freely release. It's all energy because there's always more.
(38:08):
Family Secrets is an I Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan
is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer.
We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler
Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret
you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your
story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
(38:29):
one eight secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more podcasts from
(39:02):
My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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