Teenage lovers, unplanned pregnancy and a relationship torn apart by protective parents. The interrupted love story of Linda Dawe and Raymond Cave could have been a movie script, but their story is all too real. Photographs and interviews on The 40 Year Secret (Monday, 10 p.m., CBC News Network) take us back to the late sixties when the two met in their Sault Ste. Marie high school. Dawe and Cave are riveting as they candidly look back on their lives, their memories heard in juxtaposition with thoughts from Dawe's mother, who as the only surviving parent, bravely explains why she sent her pregnant daughter away to give her child up for adoption. "We just wanted to do it like everybody else did, we wanted to sweep it under the rug," she says. Decades later, a high-school reunion put them back in the same room, which they quickly left to get reacquainted over dinner. But the story isn't over yet: Now they must find the little girl they gave up.
CBC Radio listeners may recall Dawe and Cave's story, where they told it just as eloquently, but the emotional, visual power of television takes us even further into their tale: The flickers of guilt that still cross the mother's face, the anger that still registers on the couple's expressions and in their voices, and Dawe's emotional return to the Toronto home for unwed mothers. This is what makes The 40 Year Secret unforgettable.
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