Patient Zero

I opened the email about the annual Family Christmas party for Susan’s side of the family. A little bile rose in my throat. I thought back on the party over the years—how we first attended, unknowingly, contributing to this sickness that ran in the family, and how our own crazy hockey schedule helped excuse our attendance. As our children grew into adults and one of the grandsons started a hard cider business, alcohol was finally allowed. I could use my token crutch. Yet now, after all these years, I finally have a diagnosis for this dysfunction.

I began typing a response.

Happy Holidays,

The house is finally quiet, and the only light in the room is the cursor blinking on this screen. I have deleted this draft four times. My hands are shaking, not from cold, but from the adrenaline of what I am about to do. I am breaking the seal.

I am writing to the girl I knew before we took on the heavy titles of "wife" and "mother." I am writing to a scientist whom I first knew as my sorority sister, now a cousin-in-law, the girl who I thought cared about results. But if the result repeats, over and over? That’s a pattern. That’s data.

And I am begging you: look at the data. We have a lot of it, and it just keeps piling up.

We initially thought of it as "bad luck." We have been calling it "stress." But I have spent the last nine months awake at 3:00 AM, mapping it out on spreadsheets, connecting the dates and the diagnoses. It’s not bad luck, and it isn't random. It is a pathology.

Look at the physical evidence, stripped of the family sentimentality. Your mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, her body calcifying against itself. Your son is losing clumps of his own hair—alopecia, the body rejecting its own protection. Monica is stumbling with MS, short-circuiting her nervous system. And now her son, at barely twenty-five, has a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis.

In the research papers I’ve been devouring—stacks of them sit beside me now like a paper barricade—the conclusion is terrifyingly simple: The body keeps the score. When an environment is toxic, the organism attacks itself. I am the control group in this experiment, the outsider introduced to the petri dish, and even I am failing. The anxiety I feel when I am around the family isn't emotional; it is physiological. My chest tightens—my cortisol spikes. If the air in this family makes me sick, imagine what it is doing to those of you who have been breathing it since birth. Not to mention epigenetics.

Nowhere is the toxicity more potent than in the DeYoung’s family business.

I know the official story about Sam and Tate. I know the script: Sam retired. A golden parachute. A generous buyout.

But I have seen the unredacted file. I know about the meeting in the attorney’s office. I can picture the room—the sterile, air-conditioned silence, the mahogany table wide enough to ensure no one had to touch, the faint hum of the fluorescent lights. I imagine Mark there, wearing that familiar smirk as if he had ascended to the throne, flanked by counsel. It wasn’t an agreed retirement; it was an amputation.

They didn’t push Sam out because he was incompetent. They cut him out because he asked for transparency and accountability. He wanted sunlight in a system that relies on shadow. The family motto is ‘secrets and lies.’ I’ve watched Susan and Mark operate for years—the way their smiles never quite reach their eyes, the way they rewrite history in real-time. They treat human beings like liabilities on a balance sheet. If you ask questions, you are paid to disappear.

I suspect Susan and Mark are dealing with undiagnosed personality disorders, likely on the narcissistic spectrum. But they are only symptoms. The real issue is deeper and extends further back. Your mother and Aunt Betty helped and learned to support a system where image is everything and truth is the enemy. Susan was your grandfather's favorite, just as Mark is hers. In a toxic system, they are the "golden children." But did you know your grandfather had a family before theirs? Someone else recognized his illness first and chose not to play in his game.

I know how I sound. You might read this and think I’ve lost my mind, that I’m the one who needs help. I know Susan has had a smear campaign about me for years; I'm used to being the problem. Perhaps I am obsessive. But I cannot un-see the pattern. I, too, have a diagnosis. I am the scapegoat, the one breaking the generational curse.

Worst of all, the contagion is spreading to the next generation. It is no longer just our problem; it is coming for our grandchildren. I have watched the dynamic shift at the holidays—the manipulation becoming sharper, the cruelty. The affection in this family has become purely transactional, a business deal rather than a bond, and our children have learned the family trade with frightening speed. They are becoming efficient carriers of the virus.

I cannot stand by and watch my own family become collateral damage. Because of this, we are permanently removing ourselves from the sample group. My family will not be ‘dusting off our party hats.’ We are done being variables in a study that only ends in sickness. We are opting out of the experiment. There is no immunity in this family, and we cannot heal while we are still being exposed to the pathogen.

I have attached a folder of resources—clinical studies on generational trauma, contacts for specialists, and the timeline I built. I don't expect you to thank me. I hope you are furious. But you are a scientist. You know that ignoring the data doesn't change the outcome. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Our family has chosen to change. To heal. We are the experiment, and it has failed.

My finger is hovering over the enter key. The clock just turned to midnight.

I’m pressing send.