What Was Not Said

Invisibilia

NPR

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Social Sciences, Science

4.6 • 22.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2018

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Your aging mother lives in another country. Then a tenant moves into her house – he's clean, polite, helpful. At first you are relieved, until you begin to suspect that man has sinister motives. That's the situation two brothers found themselves in, in Taiwan. Then something happened between the tenant and the mother that unsettled the brothers' lives even more. We examine how leaving things unsaid with our intimates can lead to misunderstandings and missed connections.

Transcript

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0:00.0	To most of the people who opened it up, it looked like a normal Christmas letter.
0:04.5	The traditional yearly inventory of trips taken, weddings attended, and blessed blessings
0:10.1	counted.
0:11.1	December 25, 2016.
0:13.8	We visited Pamplona, a small town in northern Spain last October.
0:18.0	There was nothing remarkable there, except for their...
0:20.8	So if you just read the words, as Charlotte had when her dad's letter first arrived, it
0:25.6	was hard to find a note of darkness.
0:28.1	We have both been in relatively good health and have been thus doing lots of running
0:32.2	arounds.
0:35.0	A totally normal, average Joe Christmas letter.
0:38.7	Except for the hidden message, Charlotte's all buried between the lines on the page.
0:44.1	So what is not said in this letter?
0:47.1	Well, there's nothing in the letter about me.
0:51.9	Now is there.
0:52.9	I'm the only child.
0:54.1	I have two kids who are the only grandchildren, and there's no mention of me in the letter.
1:01.1	And there hasn't been, since probably about 2010.
1:05.1	Wow.
1:06.1	2010.
1:08.1	That was when Charlotte and her family suddenly dropped out of the annual Christmas letter.
1:13.3	And in the beginning, Charlotte thought maybe it was an oversight.
	...

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