Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Finding all this out is a door to discovering what a father really is. It isn’t closure—you may not get to have that—but it’s an opening to a whole new vista.”

I do sometimes wonder who my father really was....But I can say that he was an A #1 Super Dad!!!

“Sweetheart, this opens up a world of inclusiveness—and in the end, you have to include yourself. You aren’t bleeding color. You’re holding the light ones and the dark ones. They’re all yours. Ultimately, in all of this, Dani—the postscript is that it’s really called love.”

It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.

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

What about grief felt prior to looking a loved one? Maybe I grieve for our life that used to be.

“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?” —

My DAD along the journey..

once heard a psychic say that the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion. In that case, the entire restaurant would be filled with my long-lost relatives: mother, father, aunts, uncles, floating, invisible, impassively witnessing the meeting about to take place.

Yes!!! And the story of the Dragon Fly

Father. He didn’t feel like my father. He hadn’t raised me. We’d met hours earlier. So who was he to me—and I to him? Biological. Social. Later, it will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land. —

“How many souls—potential souls—do you have here?”

Not sure about the wording here...maybe tho "potential" is the key.

A guru told me—with a certainty I couldn’t help but envy—that the dead do not feel pain. When we die, she said, we survey it all: the whole complex human catastrophe we’ve left behind. We see patterns and designs from the great distance of death, and understand our life’s purpose, after the fact. An expert in the philosophy of yoga pointed me to a book on karma. The director of a holistic institute promised me that when I got to the other side of my own searing pain, I would be set free.

😌

“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.”

Any thought of solid ground was nothing more than an illusion—not

we can never know what lies at the end of the path not taken. Other difficulties, other heartaches, other complexities would certainly have emerged.