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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.

Anything was capable of setting it off. A guest at a party in my home admired the sepia photograph of the small boy in his bowler hat. Who’s that? The answer I had always given was no longer true. Or a doctor’s appointment at which I was asked to update my medical history. How could I explain that my father was no longer deceased? While having my vision checked, I let my longtime ophthalmologist know that I am genetically predisposed to a rare eye condition. Nothing to worry about, Ben had said. It would be reasonable to be followed.

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.

The boa constrictor had begun to metabolize the elephant. I began to visualize my parents’ choices on a continuum, like weights on a scale. On one end, there was absolute lack of knowledge. But my desperate parents, struggling to have a child, had gone to a lawless institute near the campus of Penn to see a mad scientist known specifically for donor insemination. Increasingly, absolute lack of knowledge had begun to seem like my own self-protective fantasy.

Everyone seemed to be telling me that my parents had possessed some level of knowledge. Wendy Kramer, Leonard Hayflick, Alan DeCherney, Rabbi Lookstein, Aunt Shirley—all of them had gently or not so gently let me know that there was agency. My parents had made a decision. And no matter how difficult or painful, I had to open the door to the likelihood that they had some awareness. The weights inched further over to conscious knowledge with each passing week.

Their trauma became mine—had always been mine. It was my inheritance, my lot. My parents’ tortured pact of secrecy was as much a part of me as the genes that had been passed down by my mother and Ben Walden. It was another facet of the whole picture. It felt as if I had only ever been able 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, that’s it. Now I understand. I dug until my shovel hit rock. 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 through analysis or intellect. Only in a state of half dreaming could I begin—and then only barely—to touch the truth.

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 all my life without knowing it existed. Now I hold it in my hands. It may or may not contain clues. It is a witness to a history it recorded but did not see. What went on in that plane? Why did it fall from the sky?