Secrets of the Dead

+ “The Watershed” (Poem)

Throughout my life, people have told me secrets.

Not dirty, guilty secrets.

Secrets of hurt. Secrets of betrayal. Secrets of abuse. The kind of secrets they would have told their therapist if they’d had one.

They knew I would guard those secrets from others until they were ready to tell them, if ever.

Once, a professor (not one of mine) revealed to me his parents were Satanists who’d ritually abused him and his sister as children. The story was so incongruous with his dignified persona, he would have been the last person I’d suspect of harboring a secret like that. He had severed ties with his parents as a result.

I later wondered if he had been the victim of the Satanic panic propagated by psychologists during the 1980s and 1990s. Not only had the patients been implanted with emotionally scarring false memories of traumatic experiences overwriting what may have been perfectly pleasant childhoods, but their familial relationships had been ruptured as a consequence of these delusions. It demonstrates what can happen when the fragility of the human mind meets the hubris of reckless authority.

Or maybe it did happen. I hold his account in the space of Maybe and feel empathy for him whatever the truth.

I lost touch with him years ago. I hope he’s discovered the memories were false, has made amends with his family, and has long ago healed over those scars. I will tuck his precarious memory back in a drawer with lavender sachets and cedar chips for safekeeping.

But what do I do with the secrets of the dead?