I’ve had a lot of roommates. The first one in college was so different than me it was almost comical. Waking up several hours before her first class, Lisa would wash and blow dry her hair, apply makeup, and dress in something she had chosen the night before. I either went to bed with wet hair, which was still damp in the morning, wore no makeup unless I was on a dating warpath, and dressed in whatever emerged from my closet. Lisa had moved in with two dozen frozen steak dinners but after they ran out, I discovered she couldn’t cook, I mean she really couldn’t cook. Once I asked her to boil water for pasta and she put a box of noodles into cold water and turned on the heat. I returned from a late class to find a ball of starch floating in a pot of water. Lisa wanted to marry a Jewish dentist. I wanted to live in sin with a gorgeous man.

I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed, and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold, and dangerous, but somehow it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. Through my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, and the relationships I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, deserted except for an unhoused man who gestured to me to come closer.

Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. There is an ongoing conversation about Black Americans carrying the DNA of former slaves. I am a white, second-generation Irish American, whose father was placed in an orphanage for a year as a child, whose grandfather, whom I never met, was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow.