For many years, it was the story that contained me.

It was the story that came out of my mouth soon after I met someone new. The story that I told as a way to share who I am, why I am the way I am.

I was about 15 when we received the news that my dad had terminal cancer. The doctors told us he had, maybe, six months to live, albeit through will and experimental procedures, he survived for 2 1/2 years. In that period, one remarkably filled with grace, Dad gave me the enduring foundations which have helped me navigate through crises, however many or few have come my way.

I stood there completely covered from head to toe in personal protection gear to safeguard against the contamination of an unseen enemy. It looked and felt like a space suit of sorts. I wept with sobs of grief as I stared at the comatose body of my oldest sister as she lay hopelessly in an intensive care unit hospital bed. It was about seven o'clock in the evening.

Soon after our El Al 747 touched down in the Holy Land, and after we had successfully negotiated Israel’s tight security controls at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, we found a cab—our third-grader Nick, our first-grader Mary Claire, Paula, and I—for the ride to the apartment we had rented, but not yet seen, in the neighborhood of Beit HaKerem in Jerusalem. It was the middle of August and very hot.

There was a point in March, six months later, when I walked in a downpour along the lakeshore in Chicago, crying for her. Lunatic, really. Too dramatic. In that moment, though, it was just how I felt. So full of grief that it was absurd to me. Grief in every pore and sinew. I was a stranger to myself, and could find no comfort.