It never occurred to me, as I got into the front seat and drove off with Mandy Adelson and Rhonda Schlossberg in the backseat, to explain to my mother why I was late that day—just as it had never occurred to my mother to ask me why I was late. We didn’t do that in our family—relate to each other in the moment, with curiosity or empathy. We didn’t interact in an interactive way. My grandparents had all survived the Holocaust and there had always been a very high bar set for true suffering. We never shared even the most basic facts of our days: “I just ruined Michael Wasserman’s diorama and now I want to die.” “One of my students called me fat when I was passing back their spelling tests.” We never would have said those things. We didn’t know how to commiserate or comfort each other. We were three circles, occasionally just barely overlapping, a Venn diagram of connected separateness. Which had always seemed to me to be the loneliest feeling of all: having people around you who you could see but couldn’t ever reach.

Even if my mother had asked me, I probably would not have had the language to explain the sadness I felt when I looked at what remained on the floor after Michael left the classroom—the little bits of uncooked elbow macaroni and broken Necco wafers and the focal point of the diorama—the Ten Commandments itself—that the janitor would sweep away. To confess how inanimate objects could sometimes make me feel incredibly sad, those two Bit-O-Honeys stuck together to look like Moses’ tablets from God that had landed under the chair. That right before running out of the classroom I’d picked them up and slipped them into the pocket of my ski jacket, the one I’d never actually skied in because the Jews in our world didn’t actually ski, and noticed that the number “10” had been etched into each beige sticky candy rectangle, maybe with a paper clip or a pocketknife or the tip of a dead ballpoint pen to make the indentations. Michael Wasserman, whose mother had died the previous autumn of breast cancer, right before the High Holidays, had taken the time to etch numbers into his pretend Ten Commandments and I had ruined it. How could I ever have explained the sadness of that?

Even if I could have, I wouldn’t have: telling only made things worse. Reassurance, the erasure of worry, the absorption of anxiety—for the most understandable and saddest reasons, those were not part of my parents’ skill sets. They were barely part of mine, though I’m working on them. I will always be the survivor of survivors, of catastrophizers; always the one to say the darkest, bleakest thing at a moment when a shred of levity could save the day. Just ask Gary.

“Oh, Judy Hope Vogel, the irony of your middle name,” he always says, when my negativity bleeds unexpectedly into a conversation or an exchange, a permanent marker through paper. But for me it’s never been irony. It’s always been the weight of that middle name, the burden of being the one to carry a positive life force for the three of us. Which is why my Bird on Your Head success had been so sweet, and why my now-descending star is that much harder to bear. I’m letting my whole family down, not just myself.