I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

“Why wouldn’t you grieve, Mr. Birdsey? Your twin brother is, as you said, an abandoned house. If no one is home, then someone is missing. So you grieve.”

Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.

Like any other living thing. You starve something long enough, it dies. Dr. Azzi was more right than he realized. . . .

I was forty-one years old the year I lost my brother and found my fathers—the one who had died years before and the one who’d been there all along. In the years since, I have become a wealthy man, a little girl’s father, and the husband, once again, of the woman I always loved but thought I had lost for good. Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

My students balk at tests, complain that I give too much work, and learn, I like to think, what I have learned: that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.