Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

“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?”

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.

He will ask me if I can accept the two tributaries—these two fathers I come from. I will learn to accept the two tributaries, in time. Their convergence is the story of my life.

They had been warm and forthcoming, yet with each passing day, I touched on the sense that part of me would now and forever be a wanderer. A stranger in a strange land.

It had been six months since my wandering had commenced. 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.”

“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.”

It had been nearly a year since I’d received my DNA results. Nearly a year of living in a new reality and adjusting to it the way the body acclimates to a new temperature. There was something to the old adage that time heals all wounds. I’m not so sure about the healing, but time certainly had brought me to a place of greater acceptance that this was indeed my life.