Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: "You can say, "This is impossible, terrible.' Or you can say, 'This is beautiful, wonderful.' You can imagine that you're in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.

You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn't only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.

Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

Do you know the three great spiritual questions?" he asked..."Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.

I touched follow on my phone's screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another's existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast. I see you. I see you, too.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.

I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.

You have to judge things by the result," Shirley continued. "And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward." Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered.

But I was at the threshold of understanding what Shirley had meant about my not being an accident of history. Or rather: either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are. One sperm, one egg, one moment. An interruption—a ringing phone, a knock on the door, a flashlight through the car window—a single second one way or the other and the result would be an entirely different human being. Mine was just more complicated, an accident involving vials, syringes, contracts, and secrets.

A: “Nobody Knows It but Me” is by ad copywriter Patrick O’Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.

Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.

Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

One person's experience is not another's. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories. These are truths of a sort - the truth of adhering to what one remembers.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

you know the three great spiritual questions?” he asked. My eyes were closed, stinging from my disclosure, as they often did. “Who am I?” I whispered and paused. I couldn’t remember the other two. We were silent for a long moment. Outside his office, on the main street of Stockbridge, I could hear the whoosh of a passing car, the chirp of a lone bird. Finally, he continued. “Why am I here?” Tears ran down my temples and into my hair. He paused before offering me the last question. “And how shall I live?

grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.

The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.

You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.