Documenting a childhood without trust
Pauline Dakin and her little brother Ted grew up on the run.
Theirs was a family of murky secrets and ominous silences. Their parents were divorced. And over and over, their mother would uproot them, without warning, bouncing them from Vancouver to Winnipeg to Saint John, N.B.
They were never allowed to say goodbye to friends and teachers.
They couldn’t tell relatives where they were.
The only constant in their life was their mother’s friend, Stan Sears, a United Church minister, who was a sort of adopted uncle, a father figure who looked out for them.
Then, when Pauline Dakin was a 23-year-old reporter, Sears and her mother Ruth told her their secret.
Their family was in hiding from the Mafia.
Dakin was told her father, a Vancouver businessman, was involved in organized crime. Her mother was in witness protection, as were they.
Sears wasn’t just a family friend. He was also, he explained, an undercover agent helping to protect them. And he was her mother’s lover, too.
For Dakin, the revelation seemed to explain so much about their mysterious childhood.
“It occurred to me from the very beginning that it might not be true. But I had a very conscious desire to go with it, because of who was telling me,” she recalls.
“It was who these people were that made me choose to believe.”
It took a couple more years before her brother, the younger child, was let in on the secret.
“I think my mother and Stan knew that when they told me, I would not believe it at first,” says Ted Dakin, who now lives in Edmonton, where he’s assistant director of sales for Postmedia, which owns the Journal.
“But I got to the point where you couldn’t not believe it. I had to believe. I couldn’t take a chance.”
The siblings spent their 20s living in fear, convinced they were being followed, both by Mafia operatives and by undercover protection details. They rarely stopped looking over their shoulders.
But as Sears’ stories got more and more elaborate, they started to doubt. It took years, though, before they realized Sears was delusional and that he’d convinced their mother, a United Church minister herself, to share in his paranoid fantasies.
“I think she came to be delusional,” says Pauline Dakin. “He was a gentle, really intelligent man. He gave her life meaning. She would have believed anything he said.”
An award-winning health reporter who now teaches at the University of King’s College School of Journalism in Halifax, Dakin has just written a remarkable new memoir about the surreal youth she and her brother shared.
Run, Hide, Repeat is part crime thriller, part scientific analysis of delusional disorder.
Sears was a high-functioning psychotic, a fabulist who conjured up a whole world of adventure and excitement, peopled by spies and enemies. His life was a work of performance art — an interactive piece of theatre in which he was the star, and the Dakins played supporting roles. He sustained the illusion with elaborate ruses, designed to convince the Dakins they were under protection by secret agents. It was an extraordinary detailed fantasy, one with seemingly logical answers for every question or doubt.
Writing the book, Pauline Dakin says, helped her with her complicated feelings about her mother and Sears, two people she’d loved and trusted.
“I wanted to write about it, to sort it out for Ted, for our kids, for myself,” she says.
“It was like the chains fell off. Now that I have answers, I don’t have to hate him any more. There was no malevolence in any of this.”
But for Ted Dakin, his sister’s book has awakened difficult memories.
“It’s been a hard couple of months, leading up to this for me,” he says. “For a long time, I was trying to forget the whole thing. I’m very good at socking things away. It was my defence mechanism. I really didn’t want to deal with it.”
He worries now about how his friends will react to a story he’s told to very few. He’s worried, too, about the public reaction.
“There will be a lot of skepticism out there, people saying ‘How could you believe it?’ But no one will understand how you could believe something like this until you are in the middle of it.”
Adds Pauline Dakin: “For years, I felt ashamed that I’d believed it as long as I did, that I allowed it go on for as long as did. But Stan believed it, 100 per cent. He was living it.”
Now that I have answers, I don’t have to hate him any more. There was no malevolence in any of this.