It’s also the title/first line of an Emily Dickinson poem. Maybe one day I’ll tell you the story of trying to come up with a title that my agent thought would help sell the book to a publisher, but for now here’s an excerpt from it:
Prologue: This Is Where the Story Begins
March 1988/October 2018 | Burlington, Vermont/Springfield, Massachusetts
I was 16 years old the first time I fell in love. The light that floated in from the hallway as I pushed open the hospital room door woke my mother, who lifted the small bundle from the bassinet next to her bed and placed it in my arms. It was love at first sight.
My youngest sister was 14 when she fell in love for the first time, not with a baby or a boy or girl she met at school but with a drug. Maybe this story begins with a powder, with a pill.
Maybe it begins 8,000 years ago, when a tired Incan hunter plucked a pale green leaf from a shrub growing on the banks of the river he was following home and found that chewing it both numbed his mouth and gave him the energy to keep walking. The divine leaf is what he called the plant that would eventually be renamed Erythroxylum for its red berries and coca after the Incan word for tree. A hoover for cocaine is what my sister will call herself during a rehab intake when she is 19.
Or maybe it begins with a different plant, with the first farmer to cultivate what will eventually be named Papaver somniferum—sleep-bringing poppy. Maybe it begins with a field of pale-green bulbs that were warm from the Mesopotamian sun when the farmer sliced them open to collect their sap, the plant’s value not in the papery red petals he had stopped from blooming with the slash of his blade but the narcotic gum that spilled from its husk. Maybe it begins with the German chemist who extracted morphine from that gum, or a different German chemist who created from it the active ingredient in the pill my sister will swallow at a party 90 years later.
Maybe it begins when my sister became addicted to opioid-based painkillers and would become sick if she didn’t take them, or when she could no longer afford to buy those expensive black-market pills and began injecting first heroin and then cocaine. Maybe it begins with a needle.Â
I don’t know where this story begins or where it ends, either. It would be ridiculous to suggest that everything ceased when she died. But for one instant it all collected there, caught inside her last breath—the sticky sap of a poppy plant and the sound of her voice as she sang to her son; the lilacs that bloomed in the backyard of the house we grew up in and her bare feet in the snow as she ran through the night looking for help; every laugh, every lie, every moment of her 11,148-day life—before she exhaled one last time and I was thrust forward without her.
Her skin was cool beneath my lips as I kissed her goodbye, damp from the washcloths my mother and I had smoothed over her face and chest; her belly distended from IV fluids; her wrist tattooed with a tree whose roots were the first letters of her name and the names of her son and son’s father. We washed her legs, the ankle that had been shackled to the hospital bed, her feet and track-marked toes.Â
If this story begins with the moment I fell in love with my sister, it is a story without end. It doesn’t end with that kiss goodbye. It doesn’t end when I glanced back after my mother and I finally forced ourselves to leave her hospital room and saw her face for the last time. It doesn’t end when the body I had kissed and held and bathed and fed, that had been loved and prayed for, incarcerated and raped, that had birthed a son and survived a decade of addiction and trauma, was burned to ash in a cremator's kiln.Â
This is the story of my sister’s life, and of mine, too, of the family we grew up in 16 years apart and the families we tried to make on our own. It is the story of all I’ve learned since she died and would give anything to have known when she was alive. It is the story of how my sister was loved, and how she was failed—by my family and me; by the systems she passed through; by a culture that doesn’t recognize addiction is a disease, even as that disease kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.