262. Breakthrough in Despair - Cleyvis Natera
Samuel Jackson, The Dawn of Creation (1830s)
There is no way to describe the way despair can alter our sense of reality.
When my husband and I decided to start a family, I’d been writing fiction for the better part of a decade. While in my MFA program, I’d written one novel that had failed. I’d quickly turned my attention to another project, a book I initially found easier to write, which made me confident I was guaranteed to succeed in publishing it.
Yet life has very few guarantees. As the years passed, the book became more complicated and difficult to write; the story seemed to slip through my fingers. Eventually I became so disappointed by the heartbreak of rejection I left this other book to the side. There were other ways to have a meaningful life, I told myself—after all, I had a thriving career as an executive in corporate America, I was a new wife, and I wanted to be a mother. I repeated it often, especially when I felt the book and its characters tugging at my imagination.
There is no way to describe the way despair can alter our sense of reality. During some routine pregnancy tests, my husband and I found out our first child, a son, would be born with a dangerous blood disorder, sickle cell anemia. It was a terrifying disease; I’d seen my older sister suffer from it since childhood. I was determined to do all I could to prevent my child from experiencing such pain.
After my son, we were blessed to have a daughter who was a perfect bone marrow match. But the blessings during that time in our lives are difficult to calculate. The first bone marrow transplant failed to engraft. After many difficult conversations, we decided to try again. Then only days after the second bone marrow transplant, while we rested and played silly games in a light yellow hospital room, our son’s appendix burst. It was a dire situation. He had no immunity, so the surgery could be fatal, but the appendicitis might also end his life.
We lived suspended for three days while the doctors treated our son with antibiotics. Each day extended before us endless and sepia-colored. I remember not sleeping. I remember trying to eat and having the sensation that everything tasted either of cardboard or too salty. I remember having a thirst that overwhelmed me, that wouldn’t go away no matter how much water I drank.
I found myself oddly dissociated from my life, and I felt my mind drifting to the characters in my long-untouched novel time and time again.
But suddenly I had an unexpected understanding: the fear of losing my child brought into stark relief the losses my characters had suffered. It also made clear an error I’d made—attempting to write about gentrification, womanhood, about grief, about displacement from the self, the community without talking directly about love. This was the breakthrough I didn’t realize I needed.
My son recovered from the appendicitis after those terrible three days. A few weeks later we learned his second bone marrow transplant was successful. He emerged sickle-cell free, ready to rejoin the world after many months of isolation with health and an endless curiosity that blooms and blossoms as he gets older.
The breakthrough I experienced in that moment of despair injected life to a story that might very well have remained buried. Neruda on the Park was born out of the deepest moment of despair I’ve known as a parent, as an artist, and as a human. Every time I hold my book it sparkles with all the love and grief I lived through to earn the right to write it.
- Cleyvis Natera
