The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the spring of 2017, I was overwhelmed by the most profound wave of depression that I have ever experienced. I use the word wave deliberately: when it finally burst on me, having crept up slowly for months, I felt as if I were drowning in a tide of sadness that I could not swim past or through. Superficially, my life seemed perfectly in control—but inside, I felt drenched in grief. There were days when getting out of bed, or even retrieving the newspaper outside the door, seemed unfathomably difficult. Simple moments of pleasure—my child’s funny drawing of a shark, or a perfect mushroom soup—seemed locked away in boxes, with all their keys thrown into the depths of the ocean. Why? I could not tell. Part of it, perhaps, was coming to terms with my father’s death a year before. In the wake of his passing, I had thrown myself manically back to work, neglecting to give myself time and space to grieve. Some of it was confronting the inevitability of aging. I was at the edge of the last years of my forties, staring into what seemed like an abyss. My knees hurt and creaked when I ran. An abdominal hernia appeared out of nowhere. The poems that I could recite from memory? I would now have to search my brain for words that had gone missing (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— / The Stillness in my Room / Was like”… um… like… like what?). I was becoming fragmented. I was officially entering middle age. It wasn’t my skin that began to sag, but my brain. I heard a fly buzz. Things got ...