The Problem with Secrets

When I was growing up, Normand Trinder Bowley was my hero. He knew everything about everything, he was kind and generous, and it seemed every tradesperson in the community sought him out in his retirement because he could solve problems that had them baffled. And he was my grandfather.

Except he wasn’t.

I remember like yesterday the Saturday my Dad came over to our house, looking very troubled. I was 42, my dad was 73. We sat at the kitchen table with coffee, and I asked him what was on his mind. Like a man with a heavy burden, he revealed the secret: his natural father had died when my Dad was just a boy and my grandmother remarried a wonderful man who raised her three young boys as his own. Prouder father and sons could not be imagined.

Dad promised his mother that he would keep the secret, but as time passed after her death he knew it was a silly promise, that in time, the truth would leak out somewhere. It always does. Apparently none of my cousins were kept in the dark, so the secret had a short shelf life in any event.

Before that I never really thought much about secrets, family or otherwise, and to this day I haven’t really developed a firm opinion about them, whether they’re fundamentally wrong or if they exist in shades of gray. I’m much more inclined toward the latter, that there is a spectrum, but also that the tilt must be in favor of the living, not the dead, of the innocent and not the guilty, and of the other and not the self.

There may be a moral argument in favor of “no secrets, ever”, but I doubt it. This is really just an extension of not always blurting out what’s on your mind. There is also the hard question of timing – in the most innocent case of all, when do you level with your kids about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?

Holding secrets from others usually comes with a cost to yourself which must be weighed against the cost to the potential recipients of the news. My poor father had his secret festering in his soul for years and the awkwardness just kept getting sillier and sillier until my Mum talked him out of it, with her usual good moral analysis.

There are probably secrets which should stay unspoken forever, and many more that need to be kept in the closet until long after those who would be hurt are gone from the scene. There are also many others which need telling sooner than later in the cause of justice. There are no snappy answers, but all of us who have secrets (who doesn’t?) need to understand the costs of keeping them and the costs of sharing them.

I wish there were a simple algorithm or a question you could ask Artificial Intelligence that would solve this for you, but there isn’t such a thing. For each of us in an increasingly amoral world, each secret gives rise to a moral struggle between truth and openness on the one hand, versus preserving perceived memories and legacies on the other.

If life were simpler, these things would be easy, but that’s not how it is.