n a dark box somewhere, a tape recorder holds all my grandmother’s memories.

Ever since I was little, my mother has wanted me to write a biography of my grandmother’s life. The story is simple and appealing to audiences, an instant bestseller: my grandmother, a Filipino immigrant, moved to the United States with her four daughters and worked as a prominent OB-GYN. She delivered many babies, made a lot of money, and married four men.

“You should really write a book about her,” my mother said. “She hired some writer to do it, but I don’t know what happened.”

I didn’t say anything. I had just returned from my freshman year at Harvard, and we were driving back from the airport down the first familiar highway I had seen in a while. An email reminding me about my makeup exams popped up on my phone. I tucked it under my thigh.

“That was one thing she feared, not being remembered,” she added, adjusting her grip on the steering wheel of her car.

When my grandma was pregnant with my mom, she slit her wrists, my mom told me. I don’t remember exactly why she brought it up, but suddenly it felt hard to breathe.

hen I was younger, I looked up my name online, and the only article that popped up was my grandmother’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune.

There was a time when I searched my name every day, just to see if something would change. It was my own kind of digital séance, a silent prayer that one day Google would show I was separate from her.

Still, until I was about 13, it was the only digital evidence of me. I would show friends in middle school study hall. “Look,” I would say, morbidly. “I exist.”

The obituary said my grandmother delivered an estimated 5,000 babies in her lifetime, advocated for women, and had an Executive MBA program named after her. According to the Tribune, everything that ever happened to my grandmother happened in August. She was born on Aug. 7, 1945, married Aug. 19, 1995, and died Aug. 29, 2009.

I became afraid of late summer. My birthday is Aug. 16.

he summer I returned from Harvard, my mother knew something was wrong. She said she could see it not just in my face, but all over my body. She sensed it the way only mothers can, said she could feel it radiating off of me.

At home, I slept in most days until 1 p.m. and did nothing productive. She let me.

“I like being with you,” she texted me one day, unprompted. “I feel like you have this tremendous shame about a lot of things.”

My mother likes to talk about the past when she is comforting me. She FaceTimes me, and I keep my face out of the frame because I don’t want her to see me.

“I think I was the one who made my mother sick,” my mother told me. “I knew I was different. I was darker, and was smaller than all the other children.”

It’s distinctly Filipino, my mom reminded me, to use stories of failed relatives from different generations as a warning. I think she hoped learning my history would make me feel better, or at least less alone. I think it just made everything seem more inevitable.

y grandmother was always done up, and she lived in a decade where everyone had to have it all. She kept working until she did.

She grew up in a strict household in Cebu, where girls were nurses and boys were doctors. She was the fifth girl, and her parents didn’t support her going to medical school. My mom says she married my grandfather early because she realized that she would have to marry rich to pay her way through medical school.

Even though she was a career woman, she still had to be a “perfect” wife. On top of her long shifts in the maternity ward, she did the laundry, the dishes, and ironed her husband’s shirts.

When my mother was young, my grandmother left to work in the United States. She was a part of a broader emigration in the 1970s, one that my mom called the “Asian Brain Drain.” She sent money and Christmas gifts, mostly dresses, back to her family in the Philippines, but didn’t come back until her brother was assassinated in 1988. My mom didn’t meet her until she was 11.

My grandmother and her daughters settled in Pekin, Illinois, a former regional headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. The high school’s mascot was a Chinese caricature – its name and the school’s roller rink rhymed. My grandmother forbade my mom and her sisters from speaking Tagalog.

After she divorced the third time, she got plastic surgery to make her nose thinner. She bleached her hair and whitened her face. She ran 10 miles and ate one meal a day. She was a terrible cook, and she was obsessed with her weight. When I was in seventh grade, I tried on a pair of her leather pants. They didn’t fit.

There are no baby pictures of my grandma and my mom. She graduated from medical school at 24, the year my mom was born. It wasn’t easy, or typical, to stick around. But there is an image in my head of my mother born premature, squalling, the cuts on my grandmother’s wrists still fresh.

My mom said she didn’t learn about it until she was 30. Her aunt told her when she went back to the Philippines for her dad’s funeral. She didn’t have much clarity on the details – on whether they sent her to a psych ward or didn’t.

I imagine that my grandmother’s scars stay there, and that years later, as my mother grows, they fade into white lines. And in my head, I envision her heels clacking, red and crisp, away on the floor.

n July, I lay on a beach in Provincetown 15 pounds heavier. I hate my body and my swimsuit from Target.

“Baby now, or baby never?” my friend asks me. It’s the 4th, and everyone is celebrating and sweating.

“Baby never,” I say.

As my friends swim, I disappear to sit in an air-conditioned bathroom for my first online therapy session. The white lady sits blurry on my computer screen.

The first thing she asks me is about my history of mental health. As if I could draw a line for where this started and where it will end. As if I could chart the dawn of time, could spell out definitively what it takes to survive as a woman when there’s always something more to prove.

I talk about how my grandmother bought an airplane ticket for my grandfather the day my mother and her sisters flew to the United States. He never showed up at the airport.

She asks which part of my body it hurts. Her voice is tinny as the air conditioner beats. I get upset, and the 30-minute session ends. I don’t talk to her again.

spent a lot of August at home in my childhood bedroom, regretting things. Harvard is a place of inheritance, and I spent most of my freshman year oversharing mine.

People talk a lot about natural talent here — the type that comes from parents, grandparents, genetics. When I couldn’t grasp concepts fast enough, I felt like I had been born defective.

I thought to myself: how could I possibly change nature? I got angry when I struggled. I talked about how I would learn things quicker if I had grown up speaking two languages. I explained to people at dark parties why I couldn’t speak Tagalog, that I tried to understand Spanish. I struggled to remember my grandfather’s last name.

lost the ability to write in May.

I cried on the phone with my mom about it, 1,000 miles away. She said that this had happened to my aunt in college. I got upset, and I hung up.

It was inexplicable, the doctors said. I got bloodwork done, spent days with my arms bandaged up. My middle knuckle swelled like I had punched something, and I couldn’t pick up a pen.

I pushed my exams to August. I sat in libraries until early morning and watched friends struggle through finals with light detachment.

I talked to five different doctors and my resident dean. They floated the idea of me receiving outpatient care outside of Harvard for a few weeks, framed it as a “break from the world.” They used words like “candid,” and “transparent,” and “rest.” They re-wrapped my arms, tighter and better.

I wandered with a friend through the Yard that night. It was spring, and still cold. The bright orange metal seats were wet.

“You used to be so pretty,” she told me.

I asked myself: how much of this past year could I blame on inheritance? The sky itched its way into a familiar teal blue before dawn. The world tilted on its axis, and the pendulum swung back. I slept.

y grandma delivered me two years before she died. She already knew she had lung cancer. She never smoked.

When they pulled me out, I was silent. My grandmother waited, and after a few seconds, she slapped me. I cried out — a signal that I would live.

When they named me after her, my grandma told my mom I would have big shoes to fill.

I was born premature, like my mother. They thought my lungs would be damaged for the rest of my life. I had asthma in middle school — but that went away by the time I was 14. I ran three miles in the mornings and played varsity tennis.

I tried to run in June on an ordinary, sweltering night, after everything had happened. My lungs felt like sharp razors for the first time in years.

ometime over the summer, I fumbled through the mildew-musk scented depths of my family basement, looking for a loose cigarette. Tripping over old bicycle helmets, my fingers desperately seeking, I sat in a loose circle of Christmas ornaments, my mom’s old CDs, and old photo albums.

I never found a cigarette, or what I was looking for.

Every time I sit down to write my grandmother’s story, I never know where to start. I get angry at the page, and my prose shows it. I dodge direct meanings, circle the narrative. I get critical, mean, stray from objectivity.

When I try to tell it, I feel like I am losing control. Like it will too easily become mine, like I could slip and our threads could cross into one continuous line.

Days after my birthday in August, when I flew back to Cambridge from Illinois, I thought about my grandmother alone on an airplane to America. I realized I love her, but I am terrified of becoming her.

I will never find that tape recorder. Some things deserve to be kept in a dark box forever. If I could interview her about her life, I would ask her what the difference is between writing history and telling the truth.

I think she’d understand why I can’t answer it.

—Magazine writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected].