In April 1995, Steve Luxenberg had a life-changing conversation. “My sister called and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’” Luxenberg recalls. ‘”Mom had a sister.’”
You see, Luxenberg and his siblings grew up in Detroit believing their mother was a lonely only child. But his mother, Beth, hospitalized at the time of her revelation, casually mentioned to the staff that when she was four, her two-year-old disabled sister was sent to an institution. She was 78 at the time, depressed, and suffering from emphysema. Luxenberg never brought it up.
“Amazingly enough — remember, I’m a long-time investigative reporter — I decided not to ask my mom about this, she was too ill at the time, and I was too much her son,” he says. “I believed her when she said that her sister was two. I believed her when she said she didn’t know of her sister’s fate.”
But this was just the start of shocking discoveries. Six months after his mother’s death in August of 1999, Luxenberg learned in a letter addressed to his mother from his grandparents’ cemetery that there were not two, but three graves. The third was his mother’s sister, named Annie.
“All the stories I had heard from my mom about her life as an only child, all of them exploded in that moment,” Luxenberg says. “All the stories that she had told us about growing up as an only child, exposed as a lie.”
Luxenberg discovered that Beth grew up with Annie, born in 1919 with a deformed leg and mental disabilities. At 21, Annie suffered a psychotic break and was institutionalized. Beth, unmarried and still living at home, was 23. She did not keep in touch with Annie throughout the 31 years she was institutionalized, although she arranged her burial. He also learned that his mother’s name was not Beth, but Bertha.
These lies fueled Luxenberg’s dogged research for Annie’s Ghosts, a compelling memoir that not only brought forth many other buried secrets but attempts to discover what societal and family forces led his mother to live such lies for most of her life.
To unearth these secrets, however, took a hefty dose of determination by Luxenberg, a longtime Washington Post investigative reporter and editor. Due to ever-increasing privacy laws, it was just about impossible for him to find Annie’s records, an issue that scores of others face when seeking answers about their ancestry.
“As geneticists learn more and more about the physical basis for all kinds of conditions, we want to know more about our family members, not less,” says Luxenberg. “I think it’s absurd that family members can’t get records of family members long deceased, there is no point in keeping those records private.”
Since the publication of Annie’s Ghosts, Luxenberg has become a beacon of hope for others seeking answers. He’s received emails from readers all over the country asking for help; in Wayne County, Mich., where Annie’s records were based, Luxenberg has helped over two dozen people navigate the web of bureaucracy. “When I get emails, give advice or make phone calls on their behalf,” he says, “I feel that is a way to give back.”
Early on in his own hunt, Luxenberg phoned the Michigan Department of Community Health in Lansing for answers. There, he told an employee that he wished to find out about his aunt’s time in the institution. “She replied, ‘You and 5,000 other families. I get dozens of calls a month from people like you who have just discovered they had a relative they never knew about,’” he recalls.
Luxenberg, who gives talks to mental health and genealogy organizations on the need for open records of the dead, advises people searching for answers to begin at the county court where the relative was committed. “I start there,” he says, “because it tells the family who needs information when the case began.”
The story of what happened to Luxenberg’s mother, aunt and grandparents, he says, is “the story of what happened to thousands of American families in that era.”
Once Annie’s deformed leg was amputated, her behavior to grow increasingly erratic. His grandparents, Russian Jews who barely spoke English, were overwhelmed by Annie’s increasingly paranoid behavior. She refused to leave the house for days at a time, Luxenberg discovered in the records he unearthed, and refused to bathe or eat.
“My grandparents did not know what to do,” he says. “‘They were all going crazy,’ the records reports.’” A neurologist told his grandparents to have Annie committed; they felt guilty yet grateful that a system could take their troubled daughter, he says.
Luxenberg speaks of the changes in America’s mental health system since the time Annie was institutionalized. Now, she would have received counseling and help for both her physical and developmental disabilities. She could have lived in a group home and held a job. “I would like to think,” he says, “that today, Annie would be a shining example of the ways in which this generation is doing better than the ones that came before.”
Check out Steve’s website and blog, which includes continuing answers to reader questions and his contact information.
Photos courtesy of Steve Luxenberg.
