My natal chart—the cosmic 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?
At times we all grapple with the meaning of our existence. For me it became an obsession.

Some 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 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.

It all seems so random. Nine months after a moment of passion we arrive whether wanted or not. I begged for an explanation. What were my parents thinking when their fluids brought me to fruition? Dad mailed a ten-page document entitled, "The Status of Your Maternal and Paternal Souls Around the Time of Conception." Mom printed a one-page list 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. Mom's story: I was the epitome of a planned pregnancy. She compared genetic material from a number of men and selected my dad. In January 1967, she stopped the pill and handed him her menstrual calendar. Her science experiment worked.

I was conceived 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, 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.

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. Dad polled his students for a name. They voted—Pamela. 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 specimens all over our house—brains, kidneys, miscarriages, gallstones. Dad was a real pack rat. I watched saturday morning 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 Dad.

Mom was long gone. We tracked her through media appearances. Featured in newspapers staging protests in businessmen's sections of restaurants, she freaked out our suburban neighborhood of "Mrs. His-name" homemakers. Mom always seemed bigger than life; I lived in awe and in fear of her power.
With an absent parent and unpredictable childcare, I grew up in the hospital halls alongside my father.

I've 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. Dad was fun. He even talked to the dead people in the coolers. So I did too.

Then I followed Dad 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 Dad's name on the door. Bored coloring the policeman on horseback week after week, I got clearance to interview the inmates. I lost myself in their drama, snuck in cigarettes when they needed a fix, and kept things upbeat.

At the methadone clinic, Dad introduced me as a doctor-in-training. I was six years old. I'd sit with clients while Dad instructed them to show me their track marks.One day he gave a transsexual client ten bucks and told us to "go have fun." So I spent the afternoon on a street corner with recovering heroin addicts eating pizza and learning Puerto Rican slang.

On call for the Philadelphia Fire Department, Dad would lift me and my little brother from bed 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 force my way through police lines and into the lead fire truck where we'd sip hot chocolate with Dad and the crew.

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

At nine it all ended. Mom lost custody. After one failed kidnapping, she wiggled her way back into Dad's life, piled us in the car and took off. During our trek cross-country, she pulled up to abandoned houses and announced, "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 escaped into comedy, fairy tales, and religion. Maybe Jesus could save a Jewish girl. If not, I knew my father was coming for me any day...

I spent afternoons in the barn out back with a dog, a horse, and a feral cat. Curled up in a cobweb-covered hayloft I yearned for Philadelphia—the City of Brotherly Love. 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.

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.