Secrets on Secrets

I grew up knowing that both my father’s parents had fathers who were absent. Which was the source of a great deal of pain and shame for them both. Even when I was very young I understood the pain of loss; who wouldn’t miss their dad? But the secrecy that built up around their disappearances was something that eluded me.

My grandfather acknowledged that his father had ducked out. One day, my great-grandfather, who was a train conductor, put his cap on my grandfather’s head, hopped on the train, and never came back. And my grandfather said he never heard from him again. This was the family story, repeated many times through the years.

But when I was dealing with my parent’s estate, I found a letter written by my grandfather’s sister, my great-aunt Murl, in which she wrote that she’d been in contact with their father many times and that he regularly sent money. In the next sentence she asked the recipient not to share this secret with her brother. But her reluctance to tell the truth was never explained.

I grew up knowing that my grandmother’s father died in WWI. But no, what actually happened was rather than getting a divorce, he had abandoned his family. Currently, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. But not in the teens and twenties. It was expensive and difficult. Poor people couldn’t afford it, nor did they have the time to navigate all it took to get divorced. It was far easier for a man to disappear, maybe sending money from time to time, but, as was the case in my grandfather’s family, he just disappeared.

But more than anything, divorce was shameful. Quite often the woman was the suspect; your husband wouldn’t have been hanging out in the tavern and wouldn’t have taken up with all those women if you’d been a better wife. It was by far easier to disappear and keep it all out of the papers and away from the gossip mongers.

We finally discovered why he left though. After the last of my grandmother’s siblings died, my father went to help deal with the estate. They were going through boxes and found the birth certificates of my great aunts and uncles. On one of them, the father who was named wasn't my great-grandfather.

Oops! Busted!

After all this I had no choice but to write a song about secrets. And lies upon lies. A tragedy in one act.

The character in this song is not based on anyone I know. But with the ongoing sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church, ‘the black and white truth’ was an easy choice. A reason for the narrator’s helpless sorrow, finally understanding why a loved one had lived a solitary and unhappy life, and the grief of not being able to tell him that he wasn’t to blame.