Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chödrön, 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.” I had felt every day since the previous June that I now lived—exiled, forever wandering—in no-man’s-land. But the truth was that this had always been the case. Any thought of solid ground was nothing more than an illusion—not only for me but for all of us. Those words: Completely awake. Live fully, sent to me by the half sister I had never known. I had strived for those states of being all my life, while a part of me slumbered. We will have been like dreamers. Now there would be no more slumber. You will be set free.

“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.” —