I’m supposed to be writing a memoir.

What am I writing? A memoir or a pathography? A kind of autobiographical story about my own illness, or about the effect of my parents’ coterminous sicknesses of addiction, depression, malaise, heart disease? Is scholar David Morris correct when he tells us that illness defines us, or “tells us who we are”? In part, I think that he is. It is not when we are healthy and happy that all of us come to know who we truly are or what we can become. Rather, it is in the depths of illness or suffering that some of us discover ourselves as if for the first time.

 

Illness has a kind of taboo around it. When was the last time you heard anyone mention their cancer or HIV status or a bladder infection in public – at lunch with their coworkers, at a 40^th birthday party for a friend, at Christmas over a cup of eggnog? There is something unseemly about being sick, something shameful about being overtly unhealthy or ‘abnormal’. Many of us seem pathologically convinced that though we ourselves are not normal, a perfectly ‘normal’ and happy existence is out there somewhere. Only it remains  – for some inexplicable reason sent forth from the gods or fate or our less-than-perfect childhoods – inaccessible to us. We spend enormous amounts of time trying to be healthier and happier, but with mixed results. But what if we could move past a world entirely divided into twos, where one side was good and the other bad? What if we could live in the messy middle of things?

 

Scientists have recently discovered that good and bad are not easily distinguished at the microscopic level, even with the aid of the best science available to mankind. Viruses are everywhere, more numerous and more unique on a genetic level than anyone had ever previously imagined. Remnants of viruses exist in the uncanniest and most unwelcoming of places – in frozen tundra, at heat vents buried deep in the sea, and in our own human genetic makeup. Some scientists think that ‘junk DNA’ like viral remnants might actually be the sole foundation for our own human immune system. In other words, we are currently using old viruses to fight off new viruses. In a sense, then, humans are a collection of walking viruses with hats, shoes and cell phones. We exist now as part of the larger virosphere, one in which every location on our planet shows vestiges of viruses, and viruses are perhaps the oldest ‘living’ things on the planet. A virus is almost certainly our collective ancient ancestor.

 

This is less shocking to me; I have always felt a kinship to viruses. They feel like part of my skin, like I myself might be a virus in disguise. I was sick a lot as a child, and – in my family at least – I was often invisible. Growing up, I had the distinct impression – at times horrifically validated – that no one wanted me. But somehow I was resilient enough to change along with my environments. I was vulnerable, but tough. I survived my past. I learned from it. Just like a virus.

 

In the next few weeks, I’ll be dusting off my pens and getting down to the daily grind of writing 500 words per day. Last semester, I was inundated with teaching and writing academic articles and going through the bureaucratic hoops of my PhD program – so I never wrote anything that mattered to me on a personal level. Also, I was terrified of writing the narrative of my life.

 

We are, as human beings, supposed to be inherently drawn to telling stories about ourselves and about the world. We are ‘narrative’ producers and consumers. A memoir is a story that is somehow supposed to combine history and memory. But as anyone can tell you, history and memory are both less than perfect forms of ‘non-fiction’ (to say nothing of James Frey and Stephen Ambrose – just to name two famous people who either fibbed or plagarized in the crafting of their ‘narratives’).  Our memories are at least 50% fictional, even if we never realize it ourselves. And history? We all know that adage by heart. 

 

I have no idea how to structure the story of my childhood. It makes no sense, on some level, even to me. Even now. Even in the bliss of so-called ‘emotional distance’ from the events. 

 

I also love my parents. And I hate them. And that feels both true and wrong all at the same time. I want to both protect them and to reclaim my rights as their only daughter.  I still struggle with the silence of having been an invisible particle in my parents’ turbulent lives, of finding my own voice through their – and my own – past.  Since both of my parents are dead, I have the last word – quite literally. However, I also am a keeper of their memory. Upon a parent’s death, a child comes to slowly but inexorably embody that parent. They live inside me – quite literally on a genetic level, and metaphorically on the level of memory. My parents infected me early. Anatole Broyard – the literary critic for the New York Times who died from prostate cancer in 1990 – once wrote that telling the story of his sickness had ‘detoxified’ him. It was a way to reclaim the narrative of his life away from his disease, a refusal of Broyard’s to become cancer. Perhaps by doing the impossible task of writing my life, I, too, can reclaim it from my parents. I am more, in the end, than the product of their diseases.