I've just returned from my mother's funeral. She didn't raise me so there were many relatives on her side that I didn't know. I felt sad realizing how much I'd missed in not knowing them.

I felt sadder still to see how family secrets had shaped the belief systems of so many young family members---to their detriment.

But I felt saddest of all to learn that my mother had spent the first 5 years of her life with my great grandmother, a woman so evil she would have made life worse for a corpse.

I'd always thought, and in fact said, at the meeting the family gathered for to arrange the services, that my mother was "spineless." But now I know why.

I learned that this woman, Isabel, often chased my mother and grandmother through the house with hammers, frying pans, and other deadly objects trying to kill them. Isabel was obviously deranged. But what a way to grow up. I feel broken-hearted to have learned this secret too late.

Although my mom and I finally connected the last week she was in a nursing home, I think that connection would have come much sooner had I known of her background. She never spoke of it and I never thought to ask. I thought she had grown up with her controlling mother and tied my mom's timid behaviors to that. Isabel's craziness had been kept a secret.

And so too, have the secrets of incest been buried. And what grows from that deadly soil are crippling denial, co-dependency, a religious fervor that dooms all those to hell who have never heard the gospel, low self-esteem, and talents laid to waste.

I had before me the aftermath of abuse and living effects of denial. I am so sad to see how secrecy perpetuates dysfunction. Sadder still that I became the outcast at the funeral because I spoke the truth. But saddest of all for the disjointed world my family continues to live in.

Secrets are deadly.