I’m twenty-two, working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, newly and quite miserably single. I’ve just finished forty-eight consecutive hours on call. It’s been a rough couple of days. Leaving the hospital, I can’t believe how bright it is outside, or how alive the air feels. I get into my car and stare for a while at the parents and kids walking in and out. I play “New Partner” on my car’s tape player.

A child had died for no reason the night before—sudden infant death syndrome, a disease that in its name acknowledges our ignorance of it and powerlessness before it. He was a beautiful baby, and he was gone. His mother had asked me to baptize him. In my faith tradition, you’re not supposed to baptize the dead, but then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. He was the first person I ever baptized. His name was Zachary, a name taken from Hebrew words meaning, “God remembers.”

I’m twenty-eight, newly married, living in a basement in Chicago with almost no furniture. I’m in the midst of a series of oral surgeries to try to repair my mouth after a bike accident, and I’m in pain all the time. The pain is maddening—I’m trying to start work on a new novel, but all I can write is a series of stories in which a young man tries increasingly absurd strategies for pulling out all his teeth.

I remember lying in a borrowed bed in that apartment, listening to “New Partner” to calm myself down, staring at the ancient ceiling tiles with their tea-colored water stains that looked like continents on another world’s map. Sometimes, the song will take me back there so viscerally that I can smell the antibiotic mouthwash I gargled with while the wound in my mouth was still open. I can even feel the pain in my jaw, but in a way that feels survivable as things only can once you’ve survived them.

I’m thirty-two. I have a baby of my own now. I knew, of course, that the act of becoming a father does not suddenly make you qualified for the work, but still, I can’t believe this child is my responsibility. Henry is only a couple months old, and I’m still terrified by the idea of being someone’s dad, of how utterly he depends upon me, when I know myself to be profoundly undependable.

I roll the word father around in my head all the time. Father. What a loaded gun of a word. I want to be kind and patient, unhurried and unworried. I want him to feel secure in my arms. But I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve literally read more books about Hamlet than I’ve read about parenting. He won’t stop crying even though I’ve changed his diaper and offered him a bottle. I’ve tried swaddling and shushing and swinging and singing, but nothing works.

Why is he crying? Maybe there is no why, but my brain needs a why. I’m so incompetent, so quick to frustration, so totally unprepared for every facet of this. A baby’s cries are piercing—it feels as if they cut through you. Finally, unable to get him to stop crying, I put him in his car seat and rock him slowly, stick earbuds in my ears, and turn “New Partner” up as loud as I can, so I can hear Will Oldham’s plaintive wailing instead of my son’s.