Part I: Family secrets: when, if ever, is it time to divulge the truth?

In my latest thriller, my lead character, Dr. Linda Ann Kipling, learns from her dying father information counter to everything she knew growing up. She thought that her parents had emigrated from Germany several years after World War II. What her father admits on his deathbed is that their family left Berlin the very day Hitler committed suicide. More distressing is that her mother’s father was part of Hitler’s inner circle.

And so begins my novel, White Thaw: The Helheim Conspiracy. Kipling’s father decides he has no choice but to reveal this information because he suspects that the Nazi regime is planning a comeback. He feels morally obligated to tell someone. In this case, he is breaking a promise only to himself, a desire to protect his daughter from the truth.

The point of this blog is not to discuss the plot in my book, but to explore the larger question of when it is appropriate to divulge a family secret that has lain hidden, perhaps for decades.

Let’s lay out three hypothetical scenarios and think them through:

Hypothetical #1: You are the eldest of three children and only you know that your father was a hit man before he recognized the error of his ways, moved to a new area where no one knew him, married your mother, and honorably raised three children. Your parents have since passed away, and you are the only one in the family who knows this secret. You have no intention of outing your father. But then, your younger brother, a wealthy industrialist, decides to name a wing of a new community hospital as a tribute to your father. You realize that the resulting publicity (which will likely propagate far from your local community) could bring someone out of the woodwork and divulge your father’s secret.

What do you do?  Do you go to your brother, tell him everything, and encourage him to rethink his plan?  Or do you do nothing, in effect rolling the dice?

My thoughts. This is a tough one. Since blood is thicker than water, you might argue that it is better to ruin your father’s image in only your brother’s eyes rather than those of your baby sister, the rest of the family, and your father’s community. Contrarily, you do understand that if this decision were being made by an unbiased observer, he or she might say that justice would finally be served if your father were found out. This scenario poses the classical question defined in Leon Uris’s powerful novel, QB VII: does a life of good ever make up for an earlier terrible crime?

Hypothetical #2: Let’s kick it up a notch. Again, you are the eldest of three children. Of the children, only you know that your mother, as a teenager, had a daughter out of wedlock; this child was given up for adoption and lives in the local community. Shortly before your mother dies, she (who knows you know) makes you promise never to reveal this information to anyone, especially your siblings. Unfortunately, some time after both of your parents die, you read in the local newspaper that this child (now a grown woman) has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life. To locate a match, the call goes out for people to be tested. You secretly go yourself, but find that you are not a match. (Apparently, even among siblings with the same parents, the chances of a match are only one in four.)  What do you do?  Do you tell your siblings the truth and ask them to get tested? Or do you adhere to your mother’s request and say nothing, rationalizing that there’s a good change that nothing would come of the additional matchings anyway?

My thoughts: You conclude that a woman’s life trumps the embarrassment of a youthful indiscretion. If your mother were there to make the decision, she would agree, you think.

In Part 2, tomorrow, I will lay out a scenario that, to me, is the most difficult of the three to resolve.

Categorised in: White Thaw

This post was written by paulmarktag01