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Sometime in the middle of the night I rose and ran a glass of water from the bathroom tap. I paused outside my bedroom door and listened to her snoring softly. Such a soothing sound: a human being near and warm and safe and at rest.

On other nights, when I wake suddenly in the dark, my thoughts often turn to my brother. I find it impossible not to judge everything I do now against his ultimate desperation. It is the salient fact of my existence. My brother chose death over life, and I could not help him. His decision has become an act of ever-evolving significance, an echo set in motion that never quite falls to silence.

In the months after his suicide I experienced a condition I can only compare to quarantine. The shadow of my grief was so long that anyone who came near me fell under it. Aware of this, and not wishing to darken the hearts of others, I lived alone in a tiny apartment, reading and scribbling in black notebooks, going whole days without so much as exchanging a single word with anyone. My loneliness was excruciating—but not so terrible that it compelled me to risk infecting anyone I cared about. It was a kind of fear, too. I didn’t dare reveal the enormity of my sorrow, which I believed would not truly exist unless someone else observed it, verified its existence—and if that happened, I thought, I might dissolve in a mist of tears that would never cease.

Over time, starved for human contact, I tentatively began to seek the company of strangers—men and women who knew nothing of my past. Trained in the practice of journalism, I found it easy to ask the most intimate questions. 'Think of it as a ticket,' my mentor used to say about my reporter’s notebook. 'Think of it as permission to ask the things that everyone else wants to ask but doesn’t, believing they’re being polite. Everyone has a story. That’s the thing. And everyone wants to tell it to someone who will listen.'

I came to understand that the notebook was merely a prop, a tool that induced an inquisitive and receptive state of mind. Eventually, seeking to escape my own oppressive thoughts—which, for several long months, perversely included suicide—I slipped into that state as a matter of survival. I became a collector of stories, boring toward the tragedies that lay at the heart of so many human lives. On trains and in bars, from people I would never see again, I heard stories of divorce and early death, abortion and molestation, eating disorders, cancer, HIV. In some perverse way, these stories eased my loneliness. They helped me understand that everyone had suffered, and my own suffering seemed insignificant for it. I turned out to be lucky, really: twenty-eight, healthy, gainfully employed, a white-collar pilgrim from the prairie who worked at one of the most venerable institutions of American journalism, dealing with words for a living—a decent approximation of the life I’d imagined for myself.

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