Inspired by a couple of personal experiences, and my ongoing first viewing of Six Feet Under. The series starts with the death of a maybe 60-ish father, and his 30-ish son begins to discover his father had a secret life. The old man was a dope smoker, with a secret apartment, and well, I’m still only 5 episodes in and who knows what is still to be discovered.
My own discoveries were not nearly so interesting. Whatever secrets my mom might have had were up to my dad to discover, but I did a lot of the cleaning up after he died at age 79. Way back when, I did a thread about the cops who found his body robbing his corpse, but still my sister and I found hundreds of dollars squirreled away in envelops all over the house. We also found a lot of correspondence with with many women, all of it postdating my mom’s death fortunately. In some cases it seemed like he was looking for a new wife, and in some it was almost like, er, letter sex – mildly pornographic fantasies about how he wanted to make love to some of them. We ended up throwing it out, because neither of us wanted anything to do with it. We had a lot of their names and mailing addresses, and I suppose it would have been appropriate to send out cards or notes to tell them that dad had died, but it just squicked us out. My sister managed his estate, and she did send out a couple of such notes in response to women who wrote later, because dad’s mail was being forwarded to sis.
One more similar experience with my 74 year old uncle, who died childless and never having married. I somehow got stuck handling his estate. When I and a couple of other family members went to clean out his home, we found a pretty large stash of VHS porn, and more surprising, dozens of business cards from prostitutes. None of them said so, of course, but they all referred to escorting or full-body massage, or “personal services”. These I threw away rather more reluctantly, because I didn’t even live in the same state.
Did you find any real surprises amongst the effects of your loved ones?
My mother hasn’t died yet, but I have stumbled upon two family secrets that I was never supposed to know:
My parents secretly got married in November 1955, seven months prior to their big church wedding in June 1956.
My dad was a student in veterinary school who flunked out.
Why on earth those two facts would be considered such earth-shattering secrets is beyond me, but my mother was seriously upset that I learned them. But, this is the woman who screamed at me when I handed her the financial aid form I had to fill out for college, because “it’s none of your business how much money we have! If you find out the numbers, you’ll think we’re rich, but we aren’t!”
I have no idea what may come to light when my mother dies, since obviously nobody ever told me anything if they could help it.
My mother has always been The Keeper Of the Secrets. I remember uncovering a paper when I was a teenager that was a marriage certificate to someone other than my father. I never said anything, because she would have beat me bloody. Every little thing was always a deep, dark secret. She’s 98, and I’m sure I’ll find lots of surprises – if she hasn’t destroyed the papers, to make sure she takes the secrets to the grave with her.
My wife’s parents are still alive, but in a rather eventful period of a few months, we learned that they actually got married some months before their official wedding; my father-in-law was briefly married before; and also he wasn’t his parents’ biological child – actually he was the son of his mother’s (unmarried) sister, I think.
My family discovered other family members linked to my grandfather’s brother (30 years deceased). His two families lived about 1000 miles apart and had no idea the other existed. In fact, it wasn’t until one party on each side was doing genealogical research that they came across a common ancestor that linked our two branches. Since then, we’ve met several times and marvel that he (the “family” man) was able to keep each side a secret from the other.
My maternal grandmother was like that. When I found out she was the child of an alcoholic father, and her mother was obsessed with keeping up appearances, my perceptions of her behaviors shifted from bizarre into understandable.
My father recently discovered his adoptive father had an early marriage and divorce. Apparently somewhere in the world my father has a 1/2 sister. Fortunately, dad doesn’t seem to have any need to try and find grandpa’s first family.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother tell a lie or cover anything up. It’s downright dangerous to tell her anything private–her ability to keep a secret is compromised by the fact that she has none of her own. She’ll describe the details of her bowel movements to strangers, and is happy to tell her children when and why she and Dad stopped having sex. And her train of thought is constantly jumping the tracks, so her monologues resemble freee association. Any big secret surely would have come out at some point. That’s maybe not unusual for someone in their 80s but she was the same way in her 40s. I don’t think she could keep a secret if she wanted to, and she’s never shown any signs of wanting to.
If my Dad has any secrets, Mom doesn’t know them, and if she doesn’t know them, they won’t come out posthumously. I’ve got both their wills and there’s never been a locked drawer in their house.
Upon my Grandpa’s death I acquired a box of family letters. Most were greeting/Xmas cards.
One was a letter to my Grandparents from the commanding officer of an American base in Germany (in the late 50’s). Apparently my Aunt (now also deceased) had run off to Germany to be with her Army boyfriend. Things didn’t go well and he beat her and kicked her out of his apartment. The Commander took it upon himself to contact her parents, inform them of the situation, and make arrangements to have her flown home to the US. This was never discussed in my family and when I showed my Dad the letter he tried to take it from me and have it destroyed.
My mother had been dead for several years when my father died. Turns out he had been having a fling (almost purely sexual, is my guess) with a widow, maybe 3 years older than him. I guess at that age you take what you can get. This was not exactly a secret, although he didn’t talk about it, but they did take a long trip together.
In cleaning out his dresser, my sister found a bottle of Viagra, and naked beaver shots of this woman. She was over 85 when they were taken. I thank whatever powers that saved me from seeing those pictures, and pity my poor sister. There isn’t enough brain bleach in the world.
On the other hand, I’m even more glad they weren’t pictures of my mother.
Roddy
My mom is still alive and I expect there are secrets that will go with her to her grave. I’m willing to bet any amount of money that she never told anyone that my youngest sister had a child out of wedlock who was given up for adoption. Although once I was an adult, she did tell me that my cousin wasn’t my uncle’s daughter - I guess since that scandal was on Dad’s side of the family, she could share…
Not really a secret but a little tidbit that came out after my dad died - he’d wanted to name me Roxanne. Apparently he’d been reading Cyrano de Bergerac. I’m guessing he didn’t get his way because it wasn’t a saint’s name, and being good Catholics and all that…
A friend of mine learned very late in life (she was in her 50s) that her mother had been married and divorced before marrying her dad. Her mom was afraid of what the daughter would think - the daughter who was married and divorced herself before finding the love of her life. I’m pretty sure it was a generational thing - divorce simply was not spoken of in her day.
Before my Grandfather died, he discovered that the woman he had always thought was his mother was actually his grandmother, and his real biological mother was the woman he had thought was his older sister. Apparently he was born to a teenage mother out of wedlock and her parents raised him as their own. He also discovered that his father (who was his grandfather) had been previously married with other children, so he had a bunch of cousins he hadn’t known about but was able to reconnect with before he died.
Poor old guy – it’s damn hard to hide your porn viewing when it needs to be projected up on a screen. Give me a laptop computer and a splash guard any day of the week.
