Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Most people in our community have no idea what's been going on with Danny.

For years, we've brushed off the questions about what he is doing, where he is, He's in school, he's finding his way.

My parents were resolute about preserving Danny's privacy.

This is no one's business.

We don't want people to look at Danny that way.

It'll get better, and we don't want it to be held against him.

Over time, people stopped asking.

Years from now, it will be impossible not to question the real purpose our secrecy served.

Who was protecting whom and why?

Of course, we were worried about how people saw Danny.

But were we keeping the

Secret for ourselves too?

In choosing silence?

Were we also protecting our family from the stigma of mental illness?

Were we hiding from our own shame and grief that a member of our quote unquote good family was so broken and lost?

And what was the cost of our silence to Danny?

What was it like for him to know that his life was a secret.

That's Julie Fingersh, journalist and author of the recent memoir Stay, A Story of family, love and other traumas.

Julie's is a story of not one, but two happy families.

But coming from a happy family does not protect us from loss, from grief, from trauma so intense that it becomes buried within us.

All we can do is attempt to make meaning out of what life hands us.

And by the way, that's a lot.

I'm Dani 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.

I grew up in Prarie Village, Kansas, in a Jewish community within a very non Jewish community, and.

The landscape, the real landscape for me, was

Just one of love and community and safety.

My parents had and have a wonderful marriage.

My dad was a lawyer, he worked very hard.

My mom was a homemaker if they called it back then.

And I was the middle child with an older brother, Paul, and a younger brother, Danny.

It was a much simpler life than our kids have today.

It was just homework and play and family time and friends time, and a very idyllic life in most ways.

Paul's three years older than me, and Danny's was three years younger.

Than me, and so I think part of what became so much part of the story was that Paul was the cool kid who was off doing his cool things with his cool friends.

And Danny and I were very much a team and partners in play and always spent a lot of time together.

Danny was the beautiful boy.

He was shy.

He had what I always think of as planet white eyes.

He had these big brown eyes and bushy brown hair, and his physicality is so vivid.

In my mind.

He was always tan, he always was very lean, and he.

Was just very sweet.

He was very sweet, and we used to call him the noticer.

He just noticed everything.

We spent a lot of unstructured time together.

We would often on weekends come together and be like what.

Should we do?

And we'd rip up little pieces of paper and write things like all the different ideas like lemonade stand and picnic in the park, and riding our bikes around the neighborhood and judging the houses of deciding which ones we'd want.

To live in.

We were really close and I think an anchor for each other.

You know, have school and you go out into the world into school, and even though it was a small school and it was a Jewish day school actually, and reported to be very community oriented.

There's still just the usual dynamics of classes and hierarchies and all that, and it was like always for me.

I think about how coming home opening my front door.

I can still hear the sound of my front door closing, and it was like you were home.

It was a sanctuary and Danny was a part of that sanctuary for me.

We just could be totally ourselves.

I think as a kid, you're not really aware so much of all the dynamics the social stratus.

But I was always very clear that.

My family was part of a very strong and loving and safe community.

My dad came from very modest beginnings and he became a very accomplished lawyer, and what I can remember, I would go to his office, his law office on weekends often, and one summer I worked there.

And he was just very revered in our community and still is is just known to have a lot of integrity.

He's just very honest and very straight up.

And my mom is beautiful.

She's beautiful, and she's dynamic, and she's a magnet for people.

So in my mind, my parents were like giants in our community and whenever we were out, they would just be approached and it was just clear they were beloved.

My family was really, I think, one of the families that was in the center of that Jewish community in lots of different ways.

When Julie is a senior in high school, Danny is a freshman, their older brother, Paul is a junior in college.

What's happening to Danny around this time?

Begins?

As Julie calls it, like a whisper.

It was very subtle.

As I remember it, everything changed when he changed schools and we all had gone to a Jewish day school and then we all transferred to a private high school.

We were very much minorities in terms of our Judaism, and we really were from a different world.

So we really were kind of worked out of a cocoon and thrown into this very status oriented, wealthy elitist place where socially it was really rough.

And I would say it wasn't that rough for Paul.

It was rough for me, and I think it was really rough for Danny.

So what I recall the way it started was he started at the school and it was hard to distinguish.

I think we all would assume that's a hard transition to make, but it was almost like he wasn't able to make it.

He became with.

John and all the things that he and I used to do together.

We would often after school, we'd come together and just go take the dogs for a walk or hang out in the library.

He didn't want to do those things anymore.

And so I think at the time we thought, well, it's the new school, and then he's been not a lescent.

This is just a hard time, and I certainly had a hard time, and I think then he just gradually retreated.

Yeah, it's the old sort of frog and boiling water in a way exactly.

It was absolutely that, And I think that's an apt description because for so long we did not understand the line between adolescens and something much bigger.

After she graduates from high school, Julie goes off to Swarsmore College, following in the footsteps of her older brother Paul.

Now Danny is the only child at home.

Julie doesn't share her worries about Danny with her new college friends, not because it's a secret, but because it's private.

The men and women in Julie's family have different ways of dealing with the crisis.

Julie and her mom do talk about it all the time, keeping it in the family.

Julie's dad and Paul tend to keep their feelings to themselves.

This split screen existence in Julie's early college life exacts a cost, and Julie begins binge eating.

What's interesting is that at the time, we would never have considered it a secret.

I think I was really raised in a culture of privacy, so that on one hand, we were very as a family, were outgoing and warm and embracing.

But then there's a line.

There's a line, and I think that when Danny started to retreat and really started to struggle, it was really intuitive to us that it just wasn't anyone's business and why would we share that, Like he wouldn't want that to be shared.

And I think it's again, it's the frog in the boiling water.

It's like along the way, it went from privacy to secrecy.

And I almost don't.

Know, I can't pinpoint when that happened, but I think it was probably when things went from just retreating to he was having a really hard time and things started happening and the binge eating.

At the time, I had no, I made no connection between that and what was going on in home at all.

And then in terms of the gender and the family dynamics, I think it was an extension of who we are as people.

My mom and I are loquacious and we are big processors, and we spoke to each other about it primarily because we were preserving the family's privacy, and my dad and my brother they aren't big talkers about struggle at all, and so it was this natural rift between how we coped differently.

And then in time, I think.

The secrets and the privacy starts to do its insidious work.

Danny's condition worsens.

There are some good periods, bringing the family a modicum of hope, but the stretches of stability are rare, and in the wake of this hope comes fear and defeat.

Danny decides to visit Israel, a huge relief to the family that he's up for such a trip, but it's also laced with dread.

They all hold their breath, wondering is this going to help?

Is he going to be okay?

And he isn't.

He comes home and starts exhibiting new levels of out of control destructiveness, smashing windows violent episodes.

These episodes signal to the family that maybe his condition will require some sort of medical intervention.

He does get medically assessed, but receives no diagnosis, aren't sure how to diagnose him.

And then graduation comes along.

High school graduation typically a joyous affair, but for Danny and his family, not so much.

He walked across the stage with his gown unzipped, unlike anybody else, and with kind of the frozen look on his face.

It was like this sense of foreboding of the future.

Graduation is supposed to be this moment where you're there, you did it, You're ready to jump into the rest of your wonderful life that you've been working for.

And the way that ended, where when we went back, when they filed off stage and all the parents and families got together to await the arrival of the graduates, and I'll just never forget that sense of dread and almost denial.

Is he really not coming?

Is he really And just that failing of he didn't come and what did that mean?

What did that mean?

Where did he go?

And what's going to happen next?

It was this feeling of the hope that he was able to do these things, and then there would be like a dive that was deeper than where it had started.

And it just was like this cycle of hope in psyching ourselves up, like he's going to be okay, and he went to Israel, but he'd made it through his graduation, and then when he didn't show up, there was just such a sense of I.

Think fear, honestly fear.

I think we all were just afraid of what that meant for all of us and for him, mostly in his future.

And then that fear is just exacerbated dramatically when he gets into an altercation with your father.

Your father characteristically loses his temper and out of just parental fear and huge worry for Danny, and Danny grabs a knife.

It was surreal that could happen in our kitchen, which was the center of our home.

My mom is an amazing cook.

We all spent so much of our time in our childhoods around the family table, have bought holidays, doing arts and crafts together as kids, doing our homework, and the fact that we could be in that same space and that could happen.

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

Danny continues to spiral and is admitted to Meninger Psychiatric Hospital.

Julie, in the meantime, is trying to reconcile her two realities, her brother's deteriorating health and her own bright future.

She graduates from college and gets a job as an editorial assistant at BusinessWeek.

She moves to New York City, meets the man who will become her husband, and locks into the beginnings of a rich and dynamic life, a burgeoning career as a journalist, a wonderful partner, and yet the other reality of her brother's condition is something that continues to plague her.

On one hand, it was this double life of and in New York City, I'm living a dream.

I'm going to be a journalist.

I really just I just had that sort of naive idea of I'm just going to do it and I'm going to be successful, and it's that was the dream before going into it.

And at the same time this was happening with Danny, and so there was just that double life.

And then there was the double life of my life in front of the people I was living among and with, and then my life behind the scenes on the phone all the time with my mom and Danny and my dad and Paul too.

That it was like there were these two double lives.

And in some ways it was a refuge to be able to be out in the world and not have to have the people in my life know what was going on behind.

There was a relief in that, but there was a cost to it too, and in many ways, like the artist part, I think for siblings, when there's a sibling that struggles, is that it's just impossible to believe that your life going well is not making their life worse.

It was just impossible to not draw that line.

And so in the back of my mind that pulled and pulled at me, and.

It was like every success.

I can remember my first National byline, I don't even know that.

I want to tell Danny it was like he was in a mental.

Hospital, and I want to say too, you include in your book some of Danny's notes and letters to you, and he was like, so your cheerleader and so seemingly without a malicious or envious bone in his body.

You're right.

So this wasn't coming from the kind of sibling thing where it might be like, oh, you're getting all the good stuff and look at me.

It was the opposite of that, when there's that terrible cat of if this is going to be good for me, then somehow that means it's going to be.

Bad for you.

I think that the phrase the terrible calculus is so apt because in some ways to me, it was even more painful that he never led on that he was jealous, or that he looked at my life with envy, and that was such a reflection of him and how good he was and how sweet he was, And that just made it worse to me because I knew, or I thought I knew that.

How could it not The contrast between our lives was just getting greater and greater.

After a year's stay with no improvement at Menninger, Danny's doctors decided to try ECT electroconvulsive therapy, and scary as this is, there is again that hope that maybe this will be the thing that helps.

Unfortunately it doesn't.

Danny's deterioration accelerates.

Now it's May fifteenth, nineteen ninety six.

Julie and Dave are married and living in New York.

They don't have kids yet.

The phone rings at one in the morning and it's Julie's brother Paul.

At this point, Danny had been struggling since he was fourteen and now he was twenty seven.

And so at the time, I was on the phone with a friend of mine late and it was call waiting back then, and I saw it was my brother's number, and I thought, oh my god.

I mean, it was like I just there was nothing else that could have been.

And I think that's one of those moments in your life where it's like a before and after and you just go into this state of unreality.

And I clicked over and my brother told me, just like that, Danny's going to die.

And I can just remember people talk about out a body experience, and that is how it was, and this feeling of my mind refused to hold it, even though in some ways it was like your nightmare coming true and all those years of imagining it and like suddenly you're standing in it.

And yeah.

We talked for a few minutes, and I asked where my parents, like if they knew what had happened, And what I remember is just that he said.

You got to convince them not to go there.

At that time, he was at a halfway house and he actually was doing really well.

He had a job and he was really optimistic and things were looking up.

And he came home one day and greeted the guys that he lived with and said, I in it hanging to go upstairs and take a shower before dinner.

And he went up and what the fireman said was, you know, he shared a bathroom and there was an aerosol can Deodora and Danny had always I mean, it was sort of poetic because he had always played with fire.

He'd always been fascinated with that.

It was something like we did as kids.

We would use.

Magnifying glasses in the sun and burn sticks with it.

And then later on there was that Saint Elmo's Fire, that movie that you may remember where Rob Low sprays aerosol and then lights it.

And so what happened was Danny was playing with.

It and he lit it with a lighter and the cant exploded and because it was.

A spray, it just exploded on him.

And what the fireman said is that they didn't think it was a suicide.

They didn't think he could have known that was going to happen.

But I think that for us there was some comfort in that but I think there was also or I'll speak for myself, not my rest of my family.

It was a feeling of like, I know that in some recess of his mind, and particularly since he had attempted taking his life before that, in some recess of his mind, that he was capable of that and certainly capable of tempting it, and I think had attempted it, and that day it was a calculation.

I think he couldn't have known.

But he was taken to the hospital and he said to the guys that were his housemates were out there with them, and he was still conscious, and he said, oh, hey, we'll see you guys later.

He didn't think he was going to die.

And I think that once he got to the hospital it was clear that the Barns were too severe to save him.

Described to me the landscape of the family that you and Dave made together in those years following this staggering loss.

So we had moved, we'd moved from Boston to San Francisco.

Dave was doing a fellowship to be a doctor, a specialist, and it was supposed to be for a year, and Danny had died three years before, and it was before our daughter was born that he died, so our daughter Jesse.

When we moved it was a year and a half, and I would say, for me the landscape, the feeling I had was I came to California giddy, Yes, so happy to be somewhere new, and happy to be somewhere exotic and foreign and beautiful.

Most of all, happy to move to a place where no one knew about Danny or what had happened.

And it was an amazing relief and joy to start our family, to grow our family there.

And it's crazy because when I line my childhood up with our kids, it's so much the same.

It was, though idyllic.

We just had so much fun.

Our son Sam was born three years later.

We ended up staying.

In part it was supposed to be for a year, but I think we ended up staying because life was so joyous there, and I'm sure no small measure, because it was light without history, without other family there as a reminder or as just a network.

It was just like we were reinventing ourselves.

But it was so much the same in the sense of what a loving and happy, an idyllic childhood our kids had and we had as new parents and young parents.

That was a landscape.

It was just a happy, safe, revelatory, light, beautiful life we created as a young family.

Though Julie relishes in this revelatory and beautiful family life, she also runs up against feelings of despair, wondering if she did the right thing by choosing to stay home when her kids were born.

She writes, I've been spearheading community projects, meeting with CEOs, sharing an events stage with Secretary of State Colon Powell, fielding questions from the press.

And now now I sat cross legged in a circle of new mothers, singing, ring around the rosie, with a drooling baby on my lap.

Now I was Jesse's mom, walking around with little cascades of dry vomit down my shirt.

It was clear before I was many things.

Executive director, writer, strategic partner, program developer, fundraiser, community leader.

Now I was one thing.

I lived in, a seven day a week world of sing songy, high pitched tones.

Conversations were limited to baby talk, days of all the same thing caregiving.

No matter how I sliced it or how much I loved being with Jesse, a stay at home mom was a fraught designation.

It was a big decision for me to stay at home because I had always envisioned myself I.

Say, worshiped at the altered productivity.

That was what I longed to value and achievement, and that is also a very Jewish thing, and so the idea of giving that up, it was like, then, who am I going to be.

Like besides a mom?

And I had this one seminal conversation with my brother who basically said, you have your whole life to work, and you have the privilege of being able to raise your kids.

Why would you say no to that?

You could always go back to work.

And I think at the time I remember this sense of he's right.

On a logistical level, he's right.

It was also really hard for me to justify staying working as a writer.

At that time when I left, I was running a nonprofit agency, but I assumed I would go back to being a writer at some point and the money I made it would cover a fraction of what childcare was going to be.

So it was to me it felt like, if I stay at work, that is a pure indulgence that is for my own development and self actualization, and how can I put that in front of our children's welfare, and so that is what drove the decision.

And I think at the beginning it was such a joy.

It was like this guilty relief of, Oh my gosh, I'm Jesse's a baby, Jesse's a toddler.

Life is so crystal clear that days were structured, the priorities were clear.

You feed them, you burp them, you poop them, you go to the playground.

It was a relief, and I think what happened was it became fraught the older the kids got, the more I immersed myself in that California world, which was a lot of moms who had given up their careers to be home with their kids.

It was just hard to imagine going back.

But I think inside there was always this voice that was saying, what are you doing?

Why are you giving everything up?

Who was I?

What happened to that crazy, like ambitiously obsessed person that I had been for the first thirty years in my life.

So then fast forward, Jesse was a senior in high school and Sam was a freshman in high school, and Jess started feeling this incredibly intense feeling of dread and anxiety and grief.

For the longest time, I thought well, this is just this is what it is.

It's like any parent of a child leaving the nest is going to be sad, but it felt like so much.

More than that.

And the day that it came to a head for me was Jesse was a senior in high school.

Like I was saying, is like she was headed for the stars.

At that age.

She had not gone through the Ringers.

Socially, she had really made her way with a lot of ease.

There had been terrible things that had happened at her school outside of her, but in terms of who she was and how she did.

Sue was storing and one day she came in to our house and I was cooking chicken soup, and she tossed her wallet on top of.

My onions and said, guess who called?

And I said who?

She said, the Secret Service.

And at that time it was actually that summer, the summer after her senior year, the summer right before she was supposed to go to college, she was interning for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So she'd come home from her internship and said that.

And I said, what Secret Service?

Yeah, So it turns out she said she was one of two interns chosen to be part of Hillary's motorcade to take her around to Tim Cook's house and all big wigs to fundraise, and I was so proud and I just was looked at her and she was shining and so happy, and.

I was so proud.

And then it was like I can so vividly feel that underneath there was like this crest, like this wave of envy.

That I had for her.

And as a parent, you're allowed to feel a lot of things, but you're definitely not allowed to feel jealous of your own kid.

This is not something we talk about.

We can stay jokingly I want to come back as my kid in my next life.

Okay, that's one thing, but you're not really allowed to say I am jealous of my child.

And that is what I was feeling.

And that's when I knew something was very wrong, as that feeling kept coming up more and more as it like the march of time towards one shoes leaving for college.

So that was the stage for our leaving and me feeling.

Very like tortured and guilty and not able to talk about I mean talk about secrets.

Now.

That was a secret.

I told my one of my best friends, my running partner, and I think that's it for a long time, not Dave.

No, I don't think I did.

I think it was a long time before I told Dave because I was ashamed.

I was horrified.

This is like the antithesis, and not to mention like, I am so close to my daughter.

We were one of the mother daughters who people looked at as people would always say, oh my god, you and Jesse.

You're so lucky, so lucky.

How she talks to you, and how you guys have such a close relationship, which I always felt so then to feel this feeling of envy.

For her was just so awful.

We'll be right back.

Jesse goes off to Northwestern, but before she does, she turns to Julie one day and asks, mom, how are we going to do this?

They're so close, so used to knowing the daily minutia of each other's lives, how literally, Jesse wonders, how are they going to navigate being so far apart phone calls, texts, FaceTime.

This is always a huge moment between parents and their kids going off to college, but in the case of Jesse and Julie, it looms particularly large.

The weekend we got to Northwestern for her orientation.

She started having stomach pain and having to go to the bathroom a lot, and it got dramatically worse within a couple of days, to the point where on moving day, which is supposed to be this very classic iconic day of the first day of the rest of your life, this new phase, she had to stay in the hotel because she just couldn't get out of bed, and Dave and I and Sam helped to set up her room and did it on her own.

And then what happened is.

That the day before we left her there, they have this ceremony called the March through the Arch and all the kids walk through this and we saw her and it was so clear that she was in pain, but the health services had said it was gastronritis and that was going on.

And then we met at the field and her fists were bald up, and I just remember thinking like, oh my god, are we really going to leave her like this?

We're really leaving her like this?

And we just gently said, Jess, are you sure you don't want.

Us to stay for a couple extra days just to help you.

No, I don't want you to just go and fine, and so we did.

And it's funny because, honestly, like until this moment, it's such a bizarre parallel that never occurred to me that just in the way that it was Danny's graduation and this thing happened that was so it was like foreboding.

It was like a foreshadowing of what was going to happen in the rest of his life.

It was the same thing on that orientation day.

It was such an emblematic moment standing in a hot field and seeing that she was sick and feeling should we stay or should we go?

And the tension with adult children that all they want is to be independent in that moment, and you, as a parent, your job is to support that.

And yet when your child is clearly.

Something has gone wrong, your instinct is you can't leave them.

And it's like there's no playbook for that.

When they're sick, you know, when they're fine, you just know you leave.

Doesn't matter that they're sad, doesn't matter that you're sad.

But when they're sick, do you leave?

But we did.

It's so interesting to me that to me those parallels, whether or not that was something that you were conscious of, is that there was this kind of weird foreshadowing parallel.

You weren't conscious of it, but it was there, and in a way like its own secret, it was present.

I am so freaked out by that discovery right now.

I can't believe I never saw that.

It's a secret you were keeping from yourself, because the only reason why I know it is because you wrote it, and you wrote it in a way that allowed me to see it.

It's so weird.

Just a week after arriving at Northwestern, Jesse calls her mom with an update.

Things have worsened.

She called me and she said there was blood in the toilet, and so I went back, I got on the planet, went to the hospital, and she was diagnosed with ulterative colitis and they put her on a medication.

You seem to respond to it, and then that was it for a while.

We went back to our roles of.

Okay, you're independent, and wow, look at you.

You made it through your first hurdle, and we made it through your first hurdle, and now we're going to let you live your life.

And Jesse was very clear she didn't really want us to be asking her about it all the time.

She wanted to focus on her new life.

But it was really interesting though that when she was in the hospital.

When I think about secrets and I think about how different this.

Current family of mine handled.

The situation differently than we did with Danny, is that I can remember her being in the hospital and she was missing her first week of college, and these people didn't know her.

This was a whole new world.

And so listen to her talking on the phone to herra and to her new roommate and to the new people she met before orientations started.

And the way she was already.

Integrating this new part of her life and being droll about it with a sense of humor, like, oh, yeah, I just figured my first week of college, I just might as well start off in the hospital.

And this feeling of not really wanting to show or feel or own or tell what was like the severity of what had just happened and what was ahead.

Yeah, there's another beautiful passage from your book that I just want to read here, because from this point on, as the months go by and you're not talking about it out of respecting her independence and young adulthood, and she's got under control, her condition worsens takes a real turn, and there's this passage that you wrote, which is for months now, she'd carried out our family legacy of pursuing, prevailing, achieving, but the family legacy had failed to win this one, and a new teacher, the teacher of illness, was about to prevail.

Yeah, that's exactly true.

Perhaps partly in preparation for this next chapter in her life, Julia signed up for a writing retreat in Montana.

She's thinking that it might be just what she needs, a push, a deadline, a community of other writers to help her get started again.

And so I signed up.

My plan was, We're going to drop Jess off at school and a week later, I'm going to start over.

I'm going to start a new part of my life and try to reconnect with the writer I used to be.

And the irony of Jesse got thick.

It was the week before I was supposed to go on that retreat, and I can remember feeling I was there in the hospital with her.

The retreat was supposed to start four days later, and I thought, wow, I obviously I'm not going to go if she needs me here, And I remember that thinking for the first time, it was the first time I connected the story of Danny with Jesse and how the irony and that the inner conflict of my primary feeling was fear about Jesse and what would happen, and wanting to save her and wanting to make everything okay, and then this tiny voice in the back of my mind going, but what about the rest of your life?

Are you putting that side?

Again?

I wasn't even conscious of it.

It really didn't become conscious till much later, But I can see looking back that that got put in motion, and she responded to that medication and she was ready to go back to school.

And I went to that retreat a couple days late, and then that was where that next part of my journey began, of just like the part of my life that was just for me, which I hadn't really touched since I was in my twenties, you know.

And it's interesting, Julie, like, it's so easily could have been otherwise, the terrible calculus of basically, I don't get to have this, I don't get to have this.

I'm not going to get to have my own identity that's just mine in a way, the parallels are really extraordinary.

And I think the worst part is that I wasn't really conscious when Danny was sick or when Jesse got of.

I didn't have the fully developed thought, Oh, I guess I'm never gonna have something on my own.

All I felt was fear and dread for these two people I loved, and then this nagging feeling of guilt that I was even thinking about myself.

It was that same thing with Danny, like how dare I think about my little writing career when he's failing it?

And with Jesse it was like who cares about like my little writing retreat?

But there is that tiny little part of you that wants that voice of don't forget me.

A few months after the first incident of Jesse's bleeding, it seems the medication is working and that everything's under control.

But then Julian Dave get another call.

Jesse's ulcerative colitis has worsened again.

She may be facing major surgery.

That possibility quickly turns into an inevitability as Jesse undergoes an emergency procedure to remove her colon.

This is a shocking development, destabilizing for anyone, but all the more so for a young, incredibly vital person.

Jesse will then undergo two more reconstructive surgeries over time in order to allow her to have a quote unquote normal life.

Jesse comes through these surgeries with flying colors.

She is incredibly resilient and determined.

She takes some time off from Northwestern to navigate her recovery, and the family is together once again.

They even get a puppy that evergreen harbinger of joy and playfulness.

But Julie has a lot of self examination to do.

There has been so much trauma, trauma on top of trauma past seeping into the present.

She begins a course of therapy called e MDR that has come up before on this podcast.

It stands for eye movement, Desensitization and reprocessing.

One of the hallmarks of this therapy is that it allows the patient access to memory with no narrative.

It's not about connecting the dots.

It creates the possibility of a real breakthrough, and this happens for Julie.

The dots connect tell me what Jesse had known about her uncle, who she never knew.

Jesse and Sam both knew I had a brother.

They knew Danny's name, and seeing lots of pictures and heard lots of stories about him.

But what they knew was that he died in an accident, and that's really what they knew.

We never talked about depression, We never talked about mental illness.

And when I think about the architecture of family secrets and what drives it, what drives you to build them, and what drives you to have this engine behind them, the whole concept of a family secret, in some ways I recoil it that because it almost feels as if you really understood the implies patience.

But for us, it was like, I didn't want my kids to know what happened because it was horrible, it was traumatic, and why they were kids?

Why do they have to know that?

Why do they have to be burdened?

Why do they have to be scared to know that my brother, that this happened to someone so close to them.

But I think what happened was this secrecy came to roost.

And I think it's so interesting because Jesse in this story really became a teacher to me because she with her illness, she made a choice early on that she was not going to keep it a total secret, partially just because she physically couldn't.

So you can't tell she's sick, but if you're close enough to her, you'll know by her behaviors that she needs certain accommodations.

But I think that she taught me that it was just damaging.

I was damaging to hide it from my kids.

It was hard to know when they'd be ready to hear it.

But I think when the moment came where we talked about her illness and she was saying, mom, please, it makes everything worse when you and dad are constantly looking for the solution and for the next big thing and it's all behind this wall.

It adds this burden, and just let me have my illness, let me figure it out myself.

I think for me understanding the cost of family secrets and understanding the cost of what happens to us when we keep them, and how we end up editing ourselves out of our own life in a certain way, it really came to roost for me during this time with Jesse when she very courageously.

Did tell people.

And one of the big moments in my life was being asked to speak at our high holiday services about something, and I made the decision right then.

I made the decision that I was going to talk about Danny to a community that I had been in.

For twenty five years, and.

Maybe three or four or five people knew I even had a brother, And going back.

To earlier in the story, like the giddy.

Thing, it was like no one knew, no one knew, And on that day I did tell it, and what happened afterwards was so instructive, because what you hear anytime there's a story like this, anytime someone really tells the truth, they find out from everyone around them, me too, that they too.

There were all the people.

Who were coming and saying, oh my god, thank you for sharing your story.

We had no idea.

We can't believe that would be you.

In the same way that like, oh, the perfect Hay family, how could that had been in your past?

But it was also in the release in telling, like making it, like breaking through that secret and just making it information about the whole of me and the whole of Jesse.

It was like the power of the secret evaporated.

It's been really one of the biggest lessons of my life.

How privacy turns into secrecy, and that secrecy and privacy turns into isolation and loneliness, and what has happened to all of us since we have come forward with call them secrets or breaking through the privacy or whatever, is that we are much more whole people.

We don't have to hide anymore.

And we also found out that it turns out not only does no one hold it against you, but it's like that vulnerability and honesty is the fastest path to connection.

Like spose how we are all the same, that we all do have so much of the same pain.

Here's Julie reading one last passage from her memoir Stay.

I was finally coming to understand that our birthright is this.

We are entitled to our own lives.

No matter what happens to those we love.

We are entitled and we don't have to be anything.

Other than who we are.

When the people we love struggle, we can love them and we can try our best to help them, but we cannot save them.

It is enough to learn how to save ourselves.

Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio.

Molly's Zakoor 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 ero.

You can also find me on Instagram at daniwriter and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

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