I have been listening to the excellent podcast Family Secrets, hosted by Dani Schapiro, and so many of the episodes surprisingly kick up memories for me.

I say “surprisingly” because despite the fact that I admit freely that I was the secret keeper in my family (by which I mean, specifically, Mother, Poppa, and myself) and despite knowing how adversely those secrets affected all of us and our relationships, it had never occurred to me before just how much those secrets affected the outcome of my life after their deaths.

For instance, my mother’s mental health issues were not a secret. She admitted them (once she had a name for them) and, especially with her own family, was honest about her difficulties living with them.

To a point.

The secret was always about how much worse off she was than she admitted. She owned up to her bipolarism and clinical depression, but not the “shameful” things like being a shopaholic. She lacquered over the cracks in our lives and I was expected to carry those truths well hidden. In fact my mere existence was supposed to serve as negation to her worst failures: if nothing else, she raised a brilliant and successful daughter.

(My failure to be skinny and pretty was something she viewed as a personal slight. I was making her look bad.)

Likewise, my father’s alcoholism was a well-known affliction, but it was important to always maintain the fiction that is was nothing serious and something that did not affect us too much. In truth it was very serious, and I’m pretty sure it was the thing that eventually killed him (well, that and smoking, but hey, he was born in 1923!).

Mother kept “double books” to hide the truth of our financial situation from Poppa, although even when he did know he never took action to stop her or change our path to destitution. Father pretended that he only drank a couple of beers a day and hid the whisky that he would use to “fortify” his morning can of Coors.

They were, I think, trying to keep their secrets from themselves. Maybe even from me, despite being the one who knew all the secrets. Was Mother aware of Poppa’s secret stashes? Probably. Was he aware of her “cooking” the household accounts to hide the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt she in a constant state of never paying off? Probably.

They took their so-called secrets to their deathbeds. I wonder if, in that, they felt like they accomplished anything?

I mistakenly thought that the secrets evaporated with their lives, but instead those secrets kept me in the same role of “secret keeper” in twisted ways. No longer protecting them or even their memories, instead, I continued with the same pattern of oblique honesty and self-erasure that had served me during their lifetimes.