My natal chart—the astrological map of my life—provoked serious questions. Why did I go to medical school? And what kind of healer am I? These questions inched me closer to the ultimate question: Why am I here?

We all grapple with this at some point in our lives. For me it became an obsession.

Some cultures believe we choose our parents. I picked a lesbian psychiatrist. Together we seduced a meticulous medical examiner, a hopeless romantic lost in a world of minutiae. Perhaps his affection was the antidote to her loveless life.

 

 

Yes, I thought he
could break through
her hardened shell
and maybe. . .

if their love prevailed. . .

my pre-embryonic foray into the world of matchmaking would turn me into a brilliant healer.

I was rooting for him.

In a way it all seems so random, so messy. Nine months after a night of passion we arrive whether we are wanted or not. I begged for an explanation. What exactly were my parents thinking when their fluids brought me to fruition? My dad mailed me a ten-page document entitled, The Status of Your Maternal and Paternal Souls Around the Time of Conception. My mom printed out a one-page Internet run-down of pertinent world events from 1967.

My father, in the midst of a divorce from another psychiatrist, claimed my mother was a Nordic goddess, heaven-sent to save his lost, tormented soul. In love, he longed to create someone wonderful. My mom's story: I was the epitome of a planned pregnancy. She compared genetic material from a number of men and selected my dad, a guy she couldn't get out of her apartment. In January 1967, she stopped the pill and handed him her menstrual calendar. Her science experiment worked.

I was conceived by this unlikely pair of physicians around Valentine's Day and gestated during the Summer of Love, race riots, and Vietnam War demonstrations. They married on April Fools' Day, the only date my mother would approve. In a world of turmoil, a marriage of uncertainty, maybe this was the perfect Petri dish for a healer-in-training.

My medical education began early—in utero. While my father taught pathology at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the original training ground for women physicians in the United States, I apprenticed under my mom at the Holy Redeemer Emergency Room.

The ER is where life and death collide. Birth is most dramatic. I used to think of balloons and sticky children in polka-dot birthday hats. Now I know better. Birth is brutal; it's bloody. We all owe our lives to a woman who was willing to be ripped, shredded, and torn to her very core emotionally and physically. And she did it with love. It's the ultimate act of surrender.

On my birthday Benjamin Spock was arrested in a Vietnam War protest, my mother was diagnosed with an inadequate pelvis, and I was yanked out by C-section. Our car sat abandoned at a short-term parking meter. My father, inconvenienced by the ordeal, polled his students for a name. They voted—Pamela. My mom insists he completed my birth certificate while she was sedated.

My studies continued with anatomy, first my own, and then I examined the human remains stockpiled all over our house—brains, kidneys, miscarriages, gallstones. My dad was a real pack rat. I watched cartoons with a heart floating in a plastic tub atop the TV. Bedtime stories came from pathology textbooks. In my pink footie pajamas, engrossed in horrific photographs, I was tucked into bed by my dad.

For a child, there's no easy answer to life's most difficult question:

Where's Mommy?   

Why does a parent—a father or mother—abandon a child? Often it's poverty or mental illness, immaturity or maybe a failed marriage. I never understood why she disappeared. Maybe nobody knew how to explain it. The truth was my mom went missing for weeks, even months at a time. Fortunately, we tracked her whereabouts through media appearances. Featured in newspapers staging protests in male-only businessmen's sections of restaurants, she freaked out our suburban neighborhood of "Mrs. His-name" homemakers. It wasn't hard to do. Sometimes I accompanied her to bra-burning marches in my stroller. My mom: She always seemed bigger than life; I lived in awe and in fear of her powers. I was convinced she was the Bionic Woman.

With an absent mom and unpredictable childcare, I grew up in the hospital halls alongside my father.

The smell of formaldehyde brings back fond memories of building paraffin statues, jumping in boxes of Styrofoam squiggles, and peeking in on autopsies. Blood, guts, and stainless steel—I loved it all. My dad was really fun. He even talked to the dead people in the coolers. So I did too.

Then I followed him to three part-time jobs. At the Philadelphia jail during pre-breathalyzer days, on-site doctors examined drunk drivers. Every eighth night our slumber party included a police department coloring book, a fresh box of crayons, and a squeaky bed in our very own room with my dad's name on the door. Bored coloring the policeman on horseback week after week, I got clearance to interview the inmates. Sucked into their stories, I lost myself in the drama. I snuck in cigarettes when they needed a fix and tried to keep things upbeat.

At the methadone clinic, a world of track marks and despair, my dad introduced me as a doctor-in-training. I was eight years old. Once he gave a transsexual client ten bucks and told us to "go have fun." I explored an urban wasteland while eating pizza and learning Puerto Rican slang from a sleek, hip-swinging, bronze beauty with huge biceps.

On call for the Philadelphia Fire Department, my dad carried my little brother and me into the car for late night drives to industrial warehouses engulfed in flames. He'd cover us with blankets, kiss our foreheads, and lock us in the car. I'd eventually wake up, grab my brother, and investigate the scene. We clambered over fire hoses, through police lines, and into the lead fire truck where we'd all sip hot chocolate at midnight as huge buildings burned to the ground.

         I fell in love with adventure and misfortune,
                        with people of every race and ethnicity,
    and with the man of my dreams—my dad.
              He was my hero, my rock, my everything.

At nine it all ended. In that courtroom I saw my mother cry for the first time. She lost custody. After one failed kidnapping, she wiggled her way back into my father's life, then piled us in the car and took off. During our trek cross-country, she pulled up to abandoned, gutted houses and said, "We're home!" I tried to laugh, but nothing came out. Home was a desolate place with "I found it" bumper stickers plastered on every car—Lucas, Texas. Here, I found loneliness. I survived on rancid peanut butter, bulging, out-of-date cans of five-for-a-dollar vegetables, Mrs. Baird's white bread, and Budweiser. Life with two lesbians on the buckle of the Bible Belt forced an odd sense of humor into my repertoire. I needed an escape into comedy, fairy tales, or religion. Maybe Jesus could save a Jewish girl. If not, I knew my father would whisk me away on a white horse.

My heart ached. Crouched in a small barn, I received endless affection from a dog, a horse, and a feral cat. From that cobweb-covered hayloft I yearned for Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love. Bittersweet memories of east coast addicts, inmates, and corpses were my lifeline. Their tragedies distracted me from my own pain. Comforted in the universal womb of human suffering, I transcended loneliness and despair. Four years passed. Everything had changed, yet nothing was different when I went back to work with my dad. Standing in the morgue, we recaptured those sacred father-daughter moments when time stood still just for the two of us.

Tragedy and loss compel a return to my existential question: Why am I here? After interrogating my parents and asking the stars, I went on an archaeological dig through my childhood hieroglyphics for one last clue. I found, affixed to a piece of cardboard, seven seashells covered in colored symbols with random pictures glued to the shells. In the center it read, "I love everyone." As my earliest piece of writing I had to believe it was significant.

In a way, I've been a healer-in-training my entire life. By puberty I'd seen it all. Life was gay, straight, transsexual, and everything in between. It was marvelous, yet callous and cold. I felt the terror of mental illness, poverty, racism, and war—and the hopefulness of marriage, the idealism of youth. Life was good guys, bad guys, and heroes who would save us. But the mystery of life always ends in the certainty of death. I spent my childhood playing with the shadow of death—the shadow that follows us all.