43. FAMILIES OF ORIGIN¹²

12 Henry O’Connor has a chapter in Dr. Sick titled “Families of Origin.” It’s one of two told in mosaic form (the other being the chapter “The Day of Gifts”). It is twenty-two hundred words, thirty-eight sections long. These sections are snippets of biographic information of each of us. They read somewhat like lists and somewhat like obituaries. It’s the saddest chapter in the book.

The thirty-seventh section of “Families of Origin” is about me. It’s obtuse because my identity is classified. O’Connor writes, “John Doe, aka Thirty-Seven, was fifteen years old when he joined The Survivors. The particulars of his upbringing are unknown, but one can safely assume his home life left much to be desired. He was too young for a driver’s license. He was a freshman in high school. He was eighty-nine pounds when apprehended.”

O’Connor strikes similar emotional chords with each member of my family. His writing is flat. He uses very few adverbs. He gives facts that come across as the most human thing in the book.

Vignette after vignette, we are chronicled.

Each of us is different, but each of us is the same.

We all lost someone or something or everyone or everything.

Cancer took most of our loved ones.

Abuse destroyed our psyches.

Some died in car accidents.

Some died because they put guns inside of their mouths.

O’Connor doesn’t offer any insight in this particular chapter, which I applaud. It works better as an impression. The reader, even though he’s hell-bent on understanding in order to gain a sense of control in order to keep fear at bay in order to preserve the fantasy of immortality in order to blot out the Truth that he, in fact, is the God he prays to for protection and love and raises at work and healthy children, can still pause, reflect, see us as human. The reader can deduce that his own family of origin wasn’t as bad. Or if it was, he can feel good about the fact he didn’t subject himself to round after round of chemotherapy and then break into strangers’ houses and murder their families. The reader understands that we were looking for a new family. A new start. A new doctrine to live by. O’Connor uses the phrase “a loving family of his/her/ our choosing” twenty-seven times in Dr. Sick. Because that’s what we sought. That’s what we created. Really, it’s as simple as that.

“Sasha Stein, aka Five, was born and raised in Fort Collins, Colorado. She was one of three children. She married when she was twenty. She became a nurse. She volunteered at her synagogue and she gave blood quarterly. A coworker, Shelly O’Rourke, described her as ‘the most giving human I’ve ever met.’ In 2009, her husband of eleven years died of prostate cancer. Both Sasha and her husband had lost their jobs the previous month. Sasha Stein was widowed and owed the hospital over two hundred thousand dollars.”

I’d not known Five was Jewish.

I’d not known Eleven was a Gulf War vet.

I’d not known Twenty-Four had served five years in the penitentiary for possession with intent to distribute.

I’d not known One had been raised in a two-million-dollar condo in Manhattan.

One always said that we were not our pasts. He said we were not our differences. He said we were people dedicated to living Honestly among a loving family of our own choosing.

I think about the million people who’ve read Dr. Sick: The Survivors and The Day of Gifts. I think about them having a morsel of empathy. I wonder if they do what their religions preach: see themselves in somebody else’s shoes. Dr. Turner was the first one to bring up this notion. We sat in her office. She asked me why I was crying. I didn’t know because I was far from Honesty. I told her it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

“Be like what, Mason?”

“Murder.”

“What was it supposed to be like?”

“Love. Community. Family.”

She nodded. She crossed her legs and I thought about running my hand up her thigh and then about Jerome and then about my father.

“But why are you sad?” she asked.

“Because they had no choice.”

“People always have a choice.”

“Not when there are no accidents.”

“It sounds like you are speaking about powerlessness.”

I nodded.

“What, in your own life, do you feel powerless over?”

“Everything.”

“Like?”

“When I eat and sleep and what I do and what I watch—” Dr. Turner held up her hand. She said, “What about before you arrived here?”

I thought for a minute. I wanted to say anything but my father. “My father.”

Dr. Turner smoothed out her skirt. The skin connecting her ear tightened, but not in an aggressive way, more like she had an idea. She said, “Could it be that you, like The Survivors, experienced a powerlessness so absolute that violence felt like the only option?”

I conceded with a shrug.

“And perhaps, you’re drawn to The Survivors because of this similarity?”

“I was drawn to them because we created a loving family of our own choosing out of shit. Out of death. Out of betrayal. Out of—”

“Abuse?”

“Yeah.”

“Acceptance,” Dr. Turner said. “It always comes back to acceptance. How to find it, where to find it, how to achieve it of our own actions.”

“We had no choice,” I said.

“You’re exercising empathy,” Dr. Turner said. “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is good. This is really good.”

I stared at Dr. Turner like she was an idiot. I said, “Isn’t everybody who reads this book able to do the same?”

She shook her head. She said, “Not to the same levels, Mason.”