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The last year we lived in Missouri, I was a fourth grader, and my father had taken over the division chapel where the basic trainees came every Sunday by the hundreds (if they went to a church service, they didn’t have to participate in drills). What I remember most from that year, was a family that moved in down the street from us, and discovered, in a heavy trunk in their garage, the body of their four-year-old son, who had climbed into the trunk with three newborn kittens and suffocated. My father performed the funeral. He cried when he told us.

It was called a family tragedy, as though it could be contained by that single group of people.

In January of the following year, the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Someone came to the door of our classroom, and Ms. Moos, our teacher, announced the news in a trembling voice. We watched the shuttle explode again and again that afternoon. The teachers consoling one another, while we sat at our desks, awestruck. Alive and then not. Momentum and then pieces. I had just turned eleven and was startled to discover that it could all be over so quickly. Blinked out. That’s what could happen. 

It was connected, the boy in the trunk and the astronauts in the shuttle. The horror of it. The senselessness. And I was too young to know there is never sense in it. Never reason, though later someone might offer explanations. That is how tragedy binds us, how we are drawn together by the weight of what we cannot set down. 

I got sick when I was twenty-five. Actually, the story must begin differently. I want to tell about the time I went to Pipeline, my first summer in Hawaii, with my family and some of our friends. I’d swum out maybe twenty feet when a wave rolled me, and held me under. I came up in time to be nailed and pinned by another. Over and over. I’d fight up in time to be taken down again. How long this went on, I’m no judge. Finally, I realized I’d have to go down rather than up. I swam down, against every instinct, felt the sand, dug in, and dragged myself out. I might have been six feet from the beach. No one had noticed I’d been gone. No one had noticed anything.

So, I’m twenty-five, explaining symptoms to doctors, who tell me that it’s probably just stress, but they’ll run some tests. Then I’m sent to specialists for more conversation, more tests, different drugs. The dialogue always begins with, “It’s probably just stress.” I hear them, of course, saying that it’s my head that’s sick and not my body. But even as they’re saying this, the tests and procedures keep finding blood where it shouldn’t be. Ulcerations. Spasms. Faulty mechanisms. This kind of thing. 

I see an acupuncturist. Practice yoga. Meditation. Search for my calm. I read an article in the New Yorker about hypochondriacs. Worry I am one of these. Vegan, I have given up alcohol, and for a time, gluten. I have kept food diaries. 

When I am twenty-eight, my anger is volcanic. My mutinous body. This thing must have a name. This thing must be named. And I go to a specialist on my own. He listens very quietly, and then, as he begins his examination, he talks to me about Kurt Vonnegut. I am instantly calm. We are discussing literature. Everything is new.

A month later I have had a surgery that is painful beyond expression. A recovery that will require months. I will lose weight I cannot spare. It will be weeks before I can sit without trembling, sweating. By January, three months after the surgery, I can walk the dogs for forty minutes, only pausing once to catch my breath. 

In February, I return to my regular doctor. Tell her that I am sleeping twelve hours a day, have dropped back to part-time at work. I ask for a blood test. She has my file in her hands, knows all they have found, and what has happened to me medically. An intern is in the room with her: tall, blond, too young. My doctor looks up from my file, to smile at me, and say, “Tiredness is the number one complaint among young women.”

And it is clear to me, as instantly as that day at Pipeline when I knew to swim down. The doctor orders a blood test, though the test misses what I know. What I am certain of. On the way home, I stop at the grocers. Buy a test. 

My mutinous body. Oh, my marvelous mutinous body. My son was born in October of that year.