Ch 19: The Grief that Set the Stage

How the tragedy and shame of polio sowed the seeds of secret-keeping.

Scraps of paper, official government documents, old photographs, newspaper articles, audio and video tapes, and letters littered my desk and the floor around it. Each document, each story I heard at some point over the years held some piece of the truth, of someone’s truth. As I sat in a chair in my study, I picked up each artifact, one by one, and listened carefully to the story it held. Mom had already been dead eight years, Norm almost thirty-five. Anything I could know, I already did. All I could do now was try to make sense of it. My journey toward understanding the motives that drove my parents to erase the time before my birth had to begin with what I knew about Mom’s life.