“Matthew 19:26.”

My whole life, my mother had been quizzing me on Bible verses. Sometimes the verses were obscure, so obscure that I’m sure she looked them up moments before asking me, but I prided myself on getting them right. Now, from time to time, a verse will come to me at the oddest moments. I’ll be at a gas pump or walking through the halls of a department store and a voice will say, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him! And I’ll reply, Psalms 34:8.

    “What is prayer?” my mother asked.

This question stumped me then, stumps me still. I stood there, staring at my mother, waiting for her to give me the answers. Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my Bible cover to cover, a feat that even my mother admitted she had never done. I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.

“If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as prayer.”

I was disappointed by her answer; she could see it in my face. She said, “If you find it difficult to pray, why don’t you try writing to God instead? Remember, everything we do is prayer. God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers. From your pen to God’s ear.”

Later that night, I would write my first journal entry, and get hooked on how clearheaded I felt, how even just the act of writing to God made me feel like he was there, reading, listening. He was there in everything, so why couldn’t prayer be a life lived? I watched my mother continue to pour used oil through the sieve. I watched the sieve catch the hardened, charred bits of food left over from the day’s cooking. I watched my mother’s tongue peek out from the corner of her lip, a snail slipping out of its shell. Was this pouring prayer?

    I slurped the last sip of soup. My mother didn’t stir; she didn’t turn. I watched the slope of her back rise and fall, rise and fall. Was this prayer?

11

        Dear God,

    Buzz and I raced to the car after church today. He won, but he said I’m getting faster. He better watch out. Next time I’ll beat him.

    Dear God,

    Please bless Buzz and TBM and please let Buzz get a dog. Amen.

12

In deep brain stimulation, or DBS, the areas of the brain that control movement are stimulated with electrical signals. The surgery is sometimes performed on people with Parkinson’s disease, and the goal is to improve their motor functions. I sat in on one of these surgeries during my first year of graduate school, because I was curious about how the procedure worked and whether or not it could be useful in my own research.

The patient that day was a sixty-seven-year-old man who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years earlier. He’d had a moderate response to medication, and the neurosurgeon, a colleague who’d spent a sabbatical year in my lab doing research, kept the patient awake while he carefully placed an electrode in the subthalamic nucleus and turned on the impulse generator battery. I watched as the patient’s tremor, most pronounced in his left hand, stilled. It was amazing to see, as if the keys to a car had been lost while the engine was still on and thrumming, thrumming. And then, keys found, ignition turned off, thrumming stilled.

“How you doing, Mike?” the doctor asked.

    “Pretty good,” Mike said, and then, again incredulously, “Hey, I’m doing pretty good.”

Seconds later, Mike was crying. Desperate, inconsolable crying, as though Pretty Good Mike had been nothing more than a figment of our imaginations. I got to see firsthand one of the problems with DBS and other methods like it, the fact that magnets and electrical signals cannot differentiate between individual neurons. The surgeon moved the electrode in Mike’s brain one-tenth of a centimeter over to try to correct the wave of sadness that had suddenly gripped him. It worked, but what if it hadn’t? One-tenth of a centimeter is all that stood between pretty good and unimaginable sorrow. One-tenth of a centimeter in an organ about which we know so very little, despite our constant attempts at understanding.

One of the exciting things about optogenetics is that it allows us to target particular neurons, allowing for a greater amount of specificity than DBS. Part of what interested me about Parkinson’s disease studies was my research in optogenetics, but it was also my memories of Mr. Thomas. When I was three, the old man died. I wouldn’t find out what Parkinson’s was until many years later, in high school, when reading about the disease in my textbook conjured up an image of the man my mother used to work for.

There’s a picture of my family at his funeral. We are standing near the casket. Nana looks like he is both bored and angry, the first signs of a look that my family will come to know well in his teenage years. The Chin Chin Man is holding me, taking care not to ruffle my black dress. My mother stands next to him. She doesn’t look sad, exactly, but there’s something there.

This is one of the only pictures of the four of us together. I think that I remember that day, but I don’t know if I’ve just turned my mother’s stories about it into memories or if I’ve stared at that picture long enough that my own stories started to emerge.

    What I think I remember: The Chin Chin Man and my mother fought that morning. He didn’t want to go to the funeral, but she insisted. However horrible Mr. Thomas had been, he was still an elder and therefore deserving of respect. We’d all piled into our red minivan. My mother drove, which was rare when both of my parents were in the car together, and her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard I could see her veins pulsing.

Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids were there, all three of them. The two sons, who were around the same age as my father, were crying, but his daughter is the one who stood out the most. She was stone-faced, staring at her father in his casket with an unmistakable look of contempt. She came up to my family as we took our turn viewing the body, and said to my mother, “He was a god-awful man, and I’m not sorry he’s dead, but I am sorry you had to put up with him all these years, I guess.”

She was the one who took our picture, though why anyone would want to commemorate that moment, I don’t know. On the way home, my parents couldn’t stop talking about what she’d said. It was a sin to speak ill of the dead like that; worse than a sin, it was a curse. As my parents discussed it, my mother got more and more agitated.

“Pull over,” she said, for my father was driving this time. “Pull over.”

The Chin Chin Man got onto the shoulder of the highway; he turned toward my mother, waiting.

“We have to pray.”

“Can’t this wait?” he said.

“Wait for what? For that man to jump out of his grave and come and find us? No, we must pray now.”

Nana and I already knew the drill. We bowed our heads, and after a moment or so, the Chin Chin Man did too.

“Father God, we pray for that woman who spoke ill of her father. We pray that you do not punish her for saying those things and that you do not punish us for hearing them. Lord, we ask that you allow Mr. Thomas to be at peace. In Jesus’s name, amen.”

* * *

—

    “In Jesus’s name, amen,” the most common ending to a prayer. So common, in fact, that when I was a child, I felt that no prayer was complete without those words. I would go to dinner at friends’ houses, waiting for their fathers to say grace. If those four words were not spoken, I wouldn’t lift my fork. I’d whisper them myself before eating.

We used those four words to end prayers at Nana’s soccer games. In Jesus’s name, we would ask that God allow our boys to defeat their opponents. Nana was five when he started playing the sport, and by the time I was born, he’d already made a name for himself on the field. He was fast, tall, agile, and he led his team, the Rockets, to state finals three years in a row.