I answered everything. As best I could. And at the end, they let me go. I went home, drank a whole bottle of wine, took four Xanax and woke up two days later.

There is a very fine line between the world of the dead and the living. The notion of what is life and what sustains it can be debated, as it has been for centuries. By scientists, philosophers, artists, writers. All life embodies breath, form and matter. A building also encompasses that. It breathes, and it excretes waste in many forms. But some human beings don’t do either. There is a young man in Nepal who has not eaten in years, he has only lived on the air that surrounded him, beneath the Bodhi tree that he has meditated under for years.

In life we are expected to be heroic, as buildings are, in the very desire to make ourselves be seen. A building has to extend itself into the sky, a monument of pride, exuberance. Human beings are expected to do the same. The verticality of life has to sustain itself in all that we do—to strive upward, to go forward, to not look back, to go into an uncertain future with bravado and strength. With restraint, so as to not offend or condemn, to be humble, to do good. For the world, for humanity. To love all mankind as your own. To contribute to society, to be heroic. Heroes, heroines. The world needs them, otherwise there would be no salve. Who would save us from ourselves?

The übermensch, the man that was more than human. The hero’s journey, where man has to go in order to grow, to experience the “dark night of the soul”, to face the abyss and then climb upward to the light. Mythology colliding in an age where it was impossible to be good in a bad world. Why do good when only bad prevails? Why live when all we face is death?

I grappled with these questions, vacillating in between the desire to slash my wrists with every knife in the kitchen, creating a splattered painting, and running screaming into the streets, and checking myself into a psych ward. I did not know what to do. I could not articulate anything without lapsing into a crippling silence. I no longer knew how to behave. I no longer understood the notion of humanity, when the child I had birthed into the world had been taken from me. Taken.

I woke up every morning as if I’d slept with my eyes open. Omar and I no longer shared the same bed. He had taken to sleeping on the couch in his study. We simply avoided each other. Once we collided in the living room hallway, and I saw a look so haunted in his eyes, rippled with a kind of anguish I had only ever seen once before, on my father.