Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

“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.”

“The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”

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

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

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.”

“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.”

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

secret wears away at a family until it is very nearly destroyed; parents with the best of intentions make selfish decisions affecting the fate of their child.

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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, / And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it.”