ABSTRACT
My mother died suddenly just before I turned three. Ten years later my father died. In between, my brother developed an addiction to drugs that would later kill him at 44. He was a psychoanalyst. These events marked me like none other. They crushed me, of course. But they also gave me intention, a way forward. I can’t conceive of the person I’d be if these things hadn’t happened to me, but it’s unlikely that I’d be a psychoanalyst. I don’t think my brother would have been one either.
