I’ve been thinking all night about our conversation with Sam. And what keeps coming back to me about this condition—OCD, I guess, if that’s what we’re calling it—is how normal it is, even as it’s also not normal at all. Haven’t humans been doing this kind of thing since the dawn of time: crossing our fingers and knocking on wood, trying to ward off bad luck any way we can? Evil eyes to stop boats from sinking, and horseshoes over the door…we tell ourselves we can keep life’s chaos at bay by offering the darkness this odd little dance. Because accepting that terrible things can—and do, and will—happen, and that in the end we cannot protect ourselves against them or trick them into leaving us alone, is sometimes more than our minds can accept. It occurs to me that it doesn’t really matter all that much whether a therapist ends up putting the label “OCD” on whatever Sam’s going through. What matters is that he’s dealing with something that’s hard and hard to control, and that we have to make sure he knows he’s not alone.

When I asked him if he could remember when all this had started, he said it was probably not that long after Dad died. He told me how he said goodbye to his grandpa and then went to basketball practice—and a few hours later, Dad was dead. It happened out of nowhere, Sam insisted, looking at me. For no reason. Of course I could have reminded him that there was a reason: that there was something that wasn’t working right anymore inside Dad’s body; that Dad wasn’t young anymore and that these things happen. But I didn’t, because I knew Sam was right: what he meant was that Dad wasn’t supposed to die, and he was right. No one we love is ever supposed to die.

I don’t think Dad’s death “caused” it, exactly. From what I read on the internet, it seems like OCD is mostly one of those things that you either get or you don’t, rarely something you cause through bad parenting or even a traumatic experience. But still, there can be triggers.