Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Only recently did my father Larry appear in a dream. We were together in a small harbor, crowded with sailboats, tied one to the other in a web of lines, hopping from one deck to the next. Despite their jostling by waves, the holes didn't bump. The water sounded alive, proud that I would finally take up ocean sailing. My father wanted to help me choose the best boat. His words of encouragement were brief, but his smile was ripe with paternal love. Perhaps the imprint of my parents exists
in the truthful tale of my genes. The color of my hair, my mother's dark brows, my conover wide smile, my father's easy laugh, my small muscled body that loves to dance a wild streak, as I'm told my mother did. And two whatever I experienced as an infant must also be within me. The tethered gaze between my mother and me, her voice that I surely recognized straight from the womb.
My father's touch as he stroked the tiny wings of my shoulder blades, the smell of my parents, the taste of her milk, my primal known world.
That's Sarah Conover, author of the recent memoir Set Adrift. Sarah's is the story of a family tragedy that occurred when she was a very young child, so young, in fact, that she has no memory of it. She's left with a lifetime of questions, of longing, and of the profound desire to understand all that has been lost? What can we piece together even when the pieces have been shattered
beyond recognition. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
It's kind of a complicated map my childhood. So my parents and grandparents vanished on January eighth, nineteen fifty eight. My grandfather spent a lot of winters down in the tropics sailing. He was one of the most trophied ocean racing yachtsmen of his time, commodoer of the Cruising Club of America, publisher of Voting Industry, on the board of Yachting Magazine, and my father was a contender for the Olympic Trials, and they had invited my parents down. My
grandfather and grandmother to join them. Right after Christmas. January first, nineteen fifty eight is when they left the Florida Keys headed extensively to Miami, but actually by way of the Bahamas, and they ran into the worst unpredicted storm in the Miami Weather Bureau's history at that time, where the day started out as you know, life breeze is expected, and then like within six hours, there were seventy mile an
hour winds and forty foot waves. Many boats foundered, many many and my family's voat was the only one that didn't return. And because of my grandfather's renowned in the yachting and business worlds, it was probably one of the most extensive private searches, private and public searches of the time. The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Cuban Navy, all sorts.
They combed twenty four thousand square miles looking for them, truly needle in a haystack, and one of the problems was that the weather state stormy for a number of days. They were reported missing on a Saturday, and the search couldn't start till a Tuesday, and that might have been
the only window where they could have been saved. They were seen by a fishing boat nineteen hours after the storm almost capsized five people hanging off the lines what are called drogues by the end of the boat sea anchors. But the boat that saw them was also foundered. Their motor had cut out, so there was a search that went on for quite a bit, and the dinghy of the boat, the kind of the little lifeboat, washed ashore on north of Miami about eighty miles five days later
or so, and nothing else was found. Pieces were put together of maybe what happened, but really, you know, forty forty five foot wave, seventy mile an hour winds, it tells a lot, and there might have been a mechanical fil on the boat. We don't know.
You were eighteen months old, your sister Eileen was almost three. At what point did you have any sense of anything about the story of knowing that you have lost your parents.
It's a funny question because you know, back then with doctor stock era, you don't talk to kids about these kind of things, right, They can't understand it. Really, adults can't understand it either. So my sister, who was older, she was the one who was told. My grandmother said your parents are dead, and I know, my grandmother must
have said it a number of times. But this is the weird thing about early childhood loss is one of the things you mourn is that you just know your world vanished, and you don't you don't have those stages of recognizing cognitively, Oh, I lost my parents. You know, it was almost preverbal and all that, so you don't have those stages of grief. There was no in a
way to recognize it. My sister seemed to. She remembers people coming into her room and she was in her crib and it was like a big black cloud that came over the hole. Everything the world just stopped.
But after the world stops, it also must go on. When Sarah and her sister are orphaned by this mysterious boating accident, they're sent to live with their aunt, their father's sister, fram and her husband, who have two children of their own. But Sarah and Eileen's maternal grandmother puts up a fight, a long fight. A custody battle persists for ten years, during which Sarah and Eileen are required
to see their grandmother every other weekend. The atmosphere in their aunt's home and their grandmothers could not be more different.
She was the one who was fighting for custody for a decade and filled me with vitriol about the family with majority custody. They aren't your real family, Those aren't your parents. You're not one of them. My father's sister's family, the way they had to respond to the grief was fran My father's sister couldn't talk about the accident at all. She lost her favorite brother, she lost her hero, her mother,
her father. She just couldn't talk about it. So there was one family that just couldn't talk about it and wouldn't despite all the sailing trophies on the India hutch. And then the other family, the other one fighting for custody, would only talk about it and would say that those conivers they killed my daughter.
You have this phrase in your book that really struck me, which was that you were schooled in dissociation and numbness. And we've talked a lot about dissociation on this podcast as sometimes a healthy defense mechanism degree you know, that protects us until we don't need protecting. Obviously, it can
also be unhealthy. I mean, one of the things that also really strikes me is the way that and you as so many kids in that era in particular, where there was a tragedy in a family or something difficult in a family, were left to piece it together for themselves, right, And you know, in a way you're dissociating, but at the same time you're working overtime to try to piece it together between what your grandmother, who you don't really trust, is saying to you and what your adoptive parents were
raising you are saying or not saying to you because they don't really want to talk about it, especially Fran.
Yeah, one of the tragic things is that the family that a majority custody was really blown apart, and Fran, my mother there just you know, she had four kids and she just couldn't give me the attention that my grandmother could. And so you know, in certain ways I gravitated like this person could give me all the attention
I need. And my sister and I we would visit my grandmother and she was rather an amazing artist and had oil paintings that she'd done of my mother and had professional photographs of my mother, no conovers, but of my mother all over her house in Connecticut. And she moved from Fresno to be close to us and to
try to rest us from the other family. And the weird thing was, you know, there were pictures of her mother all over the house, but it was that era where people didn't smile in photographs, and my sister and were like, that's our mother. I mean, you did not want to attach to these photographs, and it just it just did not really compute that this could be our mother.
My grandmother was complicated and fascinating too. You know, she lost her mother and her sister in the nineteen eighteen flu, so she had a tragedy behind her and I think her losing her daughter just center over the edge and she would do anything to get custody of us.
Why was she so against your aunt and uncle, who became your adoptive parents.
I think it was existential for her. And she was a bit of a kookie character. She was always weirdly ended up as a single not weirdly, I think very intentionally ended up as a single parent and married in the end about five times. And she had sort of amazing perseverance and as a single mom, but she would divorce whatever guy she got married to pretty fast.
And your mother was her only child.
No, she also had a son by a different father, and that when she kept her son laying very close in ways that you know, I'm sure could be psychologized very easily in terms of the Oedipus something. You know, he never got his own career. She always supported him. He was actually very very smart guy and a great flamenco guitar player. She kept him close, and I think it was existential for her after losing her daughter that she didn't lose him. So in a way, she made
everybody's life miserable between the two families. And on another hand, she taught me to see beauty. In some ways she really saved my life. She would set up an easel for both my sister and I and a beautiful still life on her breakfast table. The weekends we were with her and teach us to paint watercolor and oil colors, and she played the piano and danced. You know. It was she would let us have the run of the house and that was pretty fun.
She also didn't want you to call her grandma right.
Right, so that was another thing, so she had us call me mayor, which means mother in French. We did not know that, and it also ironically means the sea in French.
We'll be right back buck. Memory is such a puzzle. We need witnesses, especially in circumstances like Sarah's. As she writes, orphans not only lose their parents but also the historians of their early years. And in Sarah's case, she's on the receiving end of contradictory stories from her aunt and her grandmother. So pieces of the story of the truth come to her over time, like bits of buried treasure.
She begins to be able to assemble, little by little the truths of who she is and where she belongs.
There's different stages where you can think, oh no, wait a minute, wait, I look like her. But when you're little, you're just trying to land somewhere. And the whole family, everybody was set adrift by this accident, and where do I belong? I think orphans have the ability to you know, they're kind of a desperate figure, but they also can remake themselves. And at some point I just decided that's
what I'm going to do. I watched the Sound of Music probably twenty times, and you know, decided that mountains weren't going to be my thing. I just couldn't go near the water, and so completely left the whole sailing business behind and pretty young, went out to rocky mountains
and took a mountaineering course. And you know, I was probably maybe seventeen or eighteen when I walked across Switzerland by myself after having watched the Sound of Music, not realizing that that movie was in Austria, thinking it was in Switzerland. But I orphaned myself. I orphaned the grief, and you know, it seemed okay. I was restless, but
I also looked around me and I saw alcoholism. You know, by the time I was a teenager, my sister, Eileen, the other orphan, she had really disengaged from my grandmother, and my grandmother had shown me a lot of favoritism by then, and so that wasn't really a refuge anymore at all. And I didn't I couldn't trust my grandmother then either. You know, my father's siblings, except for Friend,
really dove into alcohol and very troubled lives. And that nobody would talk about the elephant in the living room. You know, I understand that that generation, the greatest generation. They had no tools. Nobody was talking about post traumatic anything. Nobody knew what to do with grief. So I understand it now. But you know, I had that group not talking about it, and the other group who was so skewed, my my grandmother. I just thought, nobody's telling the truth here,
and I need to know. I need truth. There has to be some authenticity. So at a very young age, I became, you know, a religious seeker. At first, it was through nature. When I was walking through Switzerland, I happened to walk into the tent where the great Indian saint Christiana Murdy was teaching of all people, and that started to open other doors, and I became a religious
studies major. Fran used to call me the biggest why kids she ever met, And I think I've been asking, you know, what is the question we've been asking our whole lives. One of them is why? Why? And what? And are we loved and by whom? And so there was a lot of why for me, why and where is truth? Where's our foundation? I left home when I was seventeen. I graduated early from high school, went out west,
went to a commune. But you know, along with the hippie era, there was a lot of spiritual banqueting around as well, and I guess I, you know, religious studies certainly gave me a view of it, and I had to just keep searching. There was a time when I was hiking in Nepal and I was hiking by myself. I was trekking in Nepaul and a Tibetan monk came in the opposite direction and smiled at me in a way that I'd never seen a human being smile in
my life. And this was right before college, and I felt like, Okay, that is my compass, whatever that is, that's my compass.
I can so picture that encounter with the monk on the path. I can picture that smile. I really, I can just see it. And you know, I wonder. I mean, you were, on the one hand, trying to stay ahead of what was haunting you as you were making these tracks, these trips and searching for something that you weren't sure what you were searching for. You quote the Buddhist psychologist Tara Brock as saying that trauma is severed belonging, and that really really struck me. It struck me as a
deep truth. And it seems that your sense of belonging was ripped away from you as an eighteen month old. And if that's your story, then it would seem that life becomes to some degree at some point about finding a way for that belonging to become a whole.
Yeah, and I do think that's what you know. Sometimes I call it the mother whole, but it could be the God hole. It could be what makes this steel whole. I think orphans is a noun and a verb. We are orphans, but we are also or in others that you know as a protective mechanism. And it gets mixed up with that horrible thing of you know, independence in American culture, but we orphan ourselves from one another. And yes, the need for belonging is so fundamental, and I was
looking for that, whether spiritual nature. I was looking so hard for that. I was looking for bedrock. So I decided the Gagnes, my eventually adoptive family. I'd already been told by my grandmother forever, they're not really your family, And you know, your name is Sarah Conover and their Gagne. Even though I grew up as a Gagne. I think that I just was looking hard and working hard for that sense of belonging. What do I belong to? What do we all belong to? Which is our bedrock?
How old were you when you changed your name back to Conover.
Yeah, I was in their early twenties when I moved out west. It kind of like, Okay, I'm just gonna do the whole thing. I'm going to take my birth name, my beautiful birth name back, and I left the Gagnes. They're all back on the East Coast and I'm my own self here and there we go. I'm going to just take that name back and like you know, putting them all in a bottle in the sea, like goodbye. And of course we can't do that. Of course we
can't do that. So my biological sister still has the last name by wing Gagne, and my other siblings kept that name. But they were my I don't call them my step siblings.
Well, and they were your cousins.
They were my cousins. They were my first cousins. Yeah.
As often happens, when we open one door, other doors open too. Sarah changes her name back to the name she was born with, and she also meets her future husband, Doug. She's studying to become an aikido, a Japanese martial arts instructor, in Boulder, Colorado. Doug is practicing martial arts too. They have shared interests and an immediate connection. They get married. Within a couple of years, they moved to California to start a family. Things seem to be going smoothly for Sarah.
She feels far from her childhood, which have been defined by secrecy, tragedy, and grief, but her grief returns and reverberates, because that's what grief does.
I was still running hard ahead of the grief, I think, and numb and pretty excited about a new baby. And I think the first big wake up call was that when my you know, there's that book bussel Vandercock's The Body keeps the Score. I also think the body keeps the clock. And at eighteen months. I only put this together about six months ago, Danny. Eighteen months is when I started not to be able to sleep.
When your son was eighteen months old.
Yeah, when he was eighteen months old, that's when sleep got very challenging for me. And later on I realized. We left California. We left and fran I moved to California. We decided all to move there together. You know, I'll move there. Let's do it at the same time, her second husband had family there. And I put this also together about six months ago. Is that when my daughter turned eighteen months old, I also left fran behind and
moved up to Washington State from California. Even though I had told people in California, I had said, I finally have the mommy I've been looking for. Brand was there all the time for us. It was a beautiful thing. And yet, and yet I wanted to move back to the mountains, my safe place.
As Sarah enters midlife, she can no longer outrun her grief. She sinks into a depression that seems, on the surface of things at odds with the beautiful life she has created with her family in this beautiful place.
It's one other thing I wanted to say about orphaning being an orphan and orphaning others and orphaning yourself, orphaning your own feelings from yourself. I orphaned my grief when I looked up you know, secrets. As in family secrets, it also means to separate. I really kind of thought about that.
To separate, surely it does that.
Yeah, and all of this, I mean, there was just separation and secretivity everywhere the ocean. Secreted my parents away, people secreted their guilt, their grief. We separated ourselves. I mean, I think that was the biggest tragedy of this is that it didn't bring you know, grief to heal has
to bring a community together. It blew us apart till recently, really, until my book was done and we could kind of all see the map of the grief, because grief can be horizonless, kind of like the sea, and for my sibs to see their pain on the page and my pain, we could find finally drop it. But meanwhile we just separated from each other and kept orphaning ourselves from one another.
Well, in the process of writing your book, you do a lot of research, but part of the story are the interviews that you do with your siblings, with Eileen and with your two cousins slash siblings. You grew up with them all of your remembered childhood, and you give them really space and a chance in your book to allow for their own feelings and their own reality, which is I would imagine part of what ended up being so healing about the book for all of you.
Yeah, that's one of the things I recommend to everybody's interview your siblings and you know those big touchstones in your family history. How did they experience it? Because you will learn a lot and it just diminishes any self involvement because everybody he'll surround you is suffering as well. I think it's a really important thing to do. We are meaning makers as we go through life. We're story makers,
and stories can also use us. And the fact that this tragedy blew our family apart meant that people were making up stories about each other. And if you ask any dysfunctional you know, anybody who's not getting along with somebody in their family, they have a story about that other person. So we had these stories about each other that couldn't get underneath the pain. And that's why I think interviewing your family so important. But stories can be
so dangerous. They're important when they work for you, when they work for another person. But boy, and we've all experienced this thing where somebody tells you just a little something about somebody you haven't met. By the time you meet that person, it's tainted already. And this is like one hundredfold with your family. So it's the unwriting of the fictions that we have about each other. And I also felt like I had to unwrite my own fiction.
First I was Sarah Conover, and then I grew up as Leslie Gagney, and then I wanted to drop the Leslie Gagney because she had had this kind of chaotic childhood, and so I became Sarah Conover. But those things are all inside you. So all of that for me had to get untangled, and I had to unwrite those fictions as well.
Fifty eight years after the accident, after the vanishing, Sarah's sister Eileen, has the idea that the family should come together for a proper memorial to honor their parents and grandparents.
I had asked, fran why didn't you have a memorial? I mean, they had been finally declared dead by the insurance company, and she said, we just thought we'd discovered them on a deserted island in the Caribbean. I kind of blamed Gilligan's Island for this or something, you know, But also that generation didn't have the tools to say, what, you know, what are the constellations of grief? You know, it's not just sadness, it's all this other stuff. And
she had to bunker her own grief. So we fifty eight years after my sister and I held a memorial and it was beautiful, and Fran was there, and my cousins slash siblings. I grew up with the two. They didn't come out for it, but Fran really stood tall. And we had a memorial benchmad saying Pops and Dan, Larry and Laurie's sail on and looking at golden gardens
out on Puget Sound. There just happened to be a sailing regatta going on, with the boats, the horns coming off the I forget what you call those boats, and a beautiful, beautiful day. And it was lovely to hear Fran and talk about what a gift we had been when she lost her parents, that she was able to adopt us and to raise us. And yeah, there was finally some closure around that.
Here's Sarah reading one last passage from her powerful and probing memoir.
Orphan. Every year I passed the moment when the sea held and turned you, when exhausted, you surrendered. You lie in wool, silks and taffetas heavy with water at the bottom of my ceed or trunk. You hang on the wall, crooked chipped, waiting to be straightened. How surprised I am at your face is growing into my son and daughter.
Perhaps you are coming back to me now, given back by the ocean in the bits left on the sand you wash ashore, and I'd pick through the sea, lifting shells to my ear and listening, fingering the sea scour and colored beach glass, resting the fragile carpses of the long dead in my palm. Little nothings to anyone else, but we know better. Blood is our private See my covenant with the two of you, my parents, remembering you. I won't throw anything back.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accurr is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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