Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

trying to remember that I had a life that had been going on long before I knew about Ben Walden—a life in which the man in the yarmulke on the bookshelf was my one and only dad.

Even when DNA testing became available—and later, when it became inexpensive and simple—the possibility of being sought out had never occurred to him. But he was someone who spent his life thinking about medical ethics. And ultimately, this was an ethical question if there ever was one. What did I owe him? What did he owe me? Who were we to each other?

Late that night, half-drunk, exhausted, I created a new file on my computer titled “Imaginary Responses.” In the weeks to come, each time I felt compelled to write to Ben, instead I would open the file and draft a note I knew I would never send:

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

as I went through the motions, within me a pendulum continued to swing back and forth. On one side was Ben Walden—the fact of him, of his existence in the world. And on the other side was the tangled story of my parents and my continued, fervent desire to believe that they hadn’t betrayed me.

as if there might be a case study in which I would recognize my parents and all would be revealed.

“Farris was an outlaw,” he said. “He was practicing medicine without a license.” —

How did I know to commit her words to memory?

“What I’m most interested in,” I said, “is what my parents knew.” “Well, they certainly would have mixed your father’s sperm with donor sperm,” he responded matter-of-factly. “This was the practice.” “And they—my parents—would have been told it was happening?” My friend’s tiny toy poodle skittered into the back room. “In a way. Yes and no.” “What do you mean? What language would have been used? What words?” I was talking fast now, rushing, impatient. Yes and no? I couldn’t live with yes and no.

“A treatment for your father’s low sperm count,” DeCherney continued. “They would have been told that the treatment would help the husband’s sperm.”

My educated parents, who knew something about biology, making a dark and complicated decision to hear only what they wanted to

hear, and to believe only what they longed to believe.

“I mean, it all worked out. Your father never knew.” There it was. Four little words. Your father never knew.

“There always would have been a question mark,” DeCherney said. “That was the whole point. To protect the father.” “But what about protecting the child?” I asked. “I mean, it didn’t entirely work out. Because now I know.” “Precisely,” DeCherney said. He sounded almost rueful. “Now there are no more secrets.”

of visitors from Portland, Oregon. Was it a coincidence that several of them spent hours reading deep into my old essays and interviews—particularly those that related to family? Or that quite a few people went back to the beginning of my decade-old blog to read every post? At times I thought maybe we were imagining things. Maybe I just had some dedicated readers in Portland. But at other times I envisioned us—Ben’s family and mine—all of us reading, searching, digging toward some sense of one another, and of this unexpected turn our lives had taken. Perhaps as I was watching YouTube videos of Santa and grandchildren’s excursions to SeaWorld, they were reading essays about my father’s time with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or my spiritual journey away from my strict religious upbringing.

Later, I will become a student of trauma. I will read deeply on the subject as a way of understanding the two opposite poles of my own history: the trauma my parents must have experienced in order to have made a decision so painful that it was buried at the moment it was made, and the trauma of my discovery of that decision more than half a century later.

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time. I had experienced trauma over the years and had developed ways of dealing with it. I meditated each morning. I had a decades-long yoga practice. I had suffered other traumas—my parents’ car accident, Jacob’s childhood illness—and had come out the other side, eventually. What I didn’t understand was that as terrible as these were, they

were singular incidents. The car crash. The diagnosis. In the aftermath, what was left to be dealt with was the grief, the anxiety. But this—the discovery that I wasn’t who I had believed myself to be all my life, that my parents had on some level, no matter how subtle, made the choice to keep the truth of my identity from me—this was no singular incident. It wasn’t something outside myself, to be held to the light and examined, and finally understood. It was inseparable from myself. It was myself.

to see in two dimensions, and now I had been handed a pair of 3-D glasses. The clarity was both liberating and devastating.

I listened over and over again to the interview with the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk which I had noted on that early index card: “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.”

I grew up to become a storyteller. I moved from fiction to memoir, writing one, two, three, four—now five—memoirs. I captured my life, and the life of my family, between the pages of book after book and thought: There, t...

Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me. I understood that there were layers, striations of consciousness, inaccessible ...

I am the black box, discovered years—many years—after the crash. The pilots, the crew, the passengers have long been committed to the sea. Nothing is left of them. Fathoms deep, I have spent my life transmitting the faintest signal. Over here! Over here! I have settled upon the ocean floor. I am also the diver who has discovered the black box. What’s this? I had been looking for it...

In a journal I had kept in my early twenties, I berated myself, just a short while after my father had died, for still being in the thick of grief. As a grown woman, stumbling across that journal entry, I wanted to reach back and let that young, lost girl know it was okay.

I was exhausted from my week of making room for other people’s stories when I hardly had the space for my own.

From the time I was a child, I thought of the month of September also as the month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish calendar, leading to the High Holy Days. Elul is meant to be a period of reckoning with oneself in preparation for Rosh Hashanah, when God opens the Book of Life and judges each one of us. How have we sinned? How might we repent? Following Elul are the Days of Awe, the ten-day stretch between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a period of intense transformation fraught with meaning and dread. On Erev Yom Kippur, God gathers the great court to determine our fate, and on Yom Kippur, the Book of Life is sealed for the coming year. In synagogue, we list our sins, pounding our chests above our hearts: For the sin we have committed before You by false denial and lying. For the sin we have committed before You by a confused heart.

As a young girl, I was allowed to sit next to him in shul, and I could feel the way his body relaxed when he davened, the way his voice became stronger and fuller within the plaintive melodies of the Hebrew liturgy.

Here in shul, prayer was our secret language, our way of connecting.

It was a solemn undertaking, this business of reckoning.

Did the genetic code that linked us allow me to recognize him?

looked up the two dates Ben had proposed. They didn’t fall over Elul. They fell on Erev Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur—the holiest days of the year.

The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens—that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube—formed me?

People had told me every single day of my life that I didn’t look like I belonged in my family—nor did I feel I belonged in my family—yet I didn’t stop to consider what this might mean. I couldn’t afford to. Not even after I learned the method of my conception at the age of twenty-five. Not even after Susie told me I ought to look into it.

The clues screamed in neon. But I could not see them. After all, plenty of people feel or look “other” than their parents or siblings. Biology doesn’t promise similarity. Traits skip generations. Characteristics emerge, seemingly out of nowhere. Our parents seem alien to us. My mother, certainly, had always seemed alien to me, biology be damned. And so I built my narrative edifice, brick by brick: my mother was a pathological narcissist who had a borderline personality disorder; my father was depressed, shattered by marital misfortune; I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who looked like she could have gotten bread from the Nazis; I was the hard-won only child of my older parents. My sense of otherness derived from these—and only these—facts.

The feeling I would have again and again, of recognizing myself in Ben, was one I could become aware of only as I realized I had never experienced it before.

I discovered an obituary of Edmond Farris that made no sense—he had died suddenly, of a heart attack, several months before I was conceived. If Farris was dead, then who was running his institute?

Augusta Farris—not a doctor, not a scientist, in fact a cookbook illustrator—had put on a white lab coat and continued her husband’s work after his unexpected death. Did I owe my existence to Augusta Farris?

The donor’s characteristics must match those of the patient’s husband.

The donors should be men of science or medicine.

My shoulder had begun to ache over the summer, and by early autumn I could hardly move it. It became impossible to reach for a dish on a high shelf, or even strap on my seat belt. If the body can be seen as a metaphor, then it seemed I was shouldering something, carrying a giant boulder on my back all through the night in my sleep, then awakening to a half-frozen self. Nothing helped. Not physical therapy, not yoga, not even a cortisone shot.

I had reread some of my early books in recent weeks and was taken aback, again and again, at the choices I’d made, the language I’d used—particularly in my fiction—that pointed to some sort of consciousness lurking just beyond my ability to perceive it. The truth had been inside me all along.

“Do 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?” —

This only added to the surreal nature of the moment. Of all the possible destinations, this place to which I felt an uneasy connection had turned out to be the best meeting spot for lunch with Ben and Pilar.

Much of my anxiety had been poured into making a restaurant choice.

I was in a state of high alert. Even after all the careful planning, it seemed crazy and impossible, as if I had been swept into someone’s novel—someone’s melodramatic novel—and I was playing a character rather than living my

I wanted to stay suspended in this moment of before. I didn’t have the muscles for this.

If he had chosen to keep such a massive secret, how could it feel to have that secret revealed now, when it was too late to discuss or make amends? I once heard a psychic say that the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion.

more than half a dozen steps. What now? There seemed to be nothing to do but acknowledge the strangeness, to live inside the world of

All those staring contests I’d held with myself as a child were about this, I now understood.

But there was something I had promised myself I would say, and I said it as soon as I had an opening to cut through the polite chitchat.