The last thing the endoscopist asks me before I go under is my ethnicity. Jewish, I say. Already it sounds like a joke out of my father’s old orange jokebook.

Ah, the endoscopist says. Crohn’s is more prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews.

Whoa, I protest. I’m only half Ashkenazi; I’m Moroccan on my mom’s side.

It makes no difference in the end, half-Moroccan is not protection enough. I tell the joke to my friend who is waiting for me outside the procedure room. I also tell him how angry I am at myself: I could have found out two years ago if I had just done the tests the doctor ordered. But I didn’t do the tests then, for the same reason I’ve avoided them this year: it’s March. When in my last months of school was I going to justify taking two days to, as my specialist calls it, “get scoped?” 

The joke, the real joke, is that it takes more than two days. The diagnosis comes after two weeks of visits to Yale Health, after which more only follow. Twice a week for a month I stand outside Linsly-Chittenden Hall and decide which class to skip, the 1:00 p.m. or the 2:30. They’re both English classes, I tell myself: skip the one you’ve done less of the reading for. Then one Wednesday I am at the door to LC, not having done the reading for either. That is when the problems start.

*

I meet with my thesis advisor over tea every week of the semester. This week he can’t do tea and asks to meet in his office instead. I’ve barely touched my project, I say, I’ll have to turn in work I’m not proud of. He lets me talk. He is quiet but sharp and has always looked out for me. When I’ve exhausted myself he does not take over, does not try to change the facts. Don’t beat yourself up over the project, he says. There will be time to write the rest of it. You will. Then he points to the kettle on the shelf behind me, asks me to press the switch. So there is tea. 

*

It is almost May, two weeks before the end of the term. My brother and sister-in-law in London have a baby boy. I fly to meet him. How am I managing? My family asks. Managing, I say. I have to find a place to stay for my second and third infusions over the summer, then a job with insurance that will cover the injections to follow indefinitely. Worse are the inquiries after the fellowships I didn’t win: the Cambridge ones? The poetry one? It’ll be good for me to try my hand at real life, I tell them. I do not say that it is the first time in my life that I’ve yet to impress, that I’m lost.

My nephew is five days old when I hold him in my arms. He looks up at me with the blue eyes of my late father. At the synagogue my brother explains that his name — Shimshon, Samson in Hebrew — means “little sun.” I am responsible for you, little man, I whisper. You are worth it. Little sun. I think, if I am to be responsible for him I will have to be responsible for myself, too.

*

The infusion center is on the fourth floor of Yale Health. My girlfriend insists she come with me for the first dose. We eat bagels first. It is the kind of kindness you can’t pay back.

Any questions? The nurse asks. 

What if I need to go to the bathroom in the middle?

“You see her?” The nurse asks my girlfriend, pointing to the IV pole where my medication hangs in an amber bag. “This is gonna be his second girl while he’s here. Everywhere he goes she goes too.” 

We laugh. “She’s not supposed to know,” I whisper to the nurse. I think, my girlfriend has done more for me than two or three people could hope to do for a fourth.

*

My papers are due. The Renaissance paper has not shaped up to the masterpiece I wanted. Neither will the Old English. Only my paper on Robert Frost’s A Masque of Reason — his parody of the book of Job — comes easily. Frost’s revision, I argue, is to shift Job’s complaint against God from theological to aesthetic grounds: it isn’t about life being fair, it’s about life exhibiting a form we can appreciate. If all the world’s a stage, Job asks, then why does the drama so rarely hang together? 

I run into a student of mine in Sterling nave. I was his TA for Hebrew in the fall. He asks me how it feels to be graduating. I regurgitate the wisdom that is proffered to us at the end of college: good things are not supposed to last forever. I shake his hand, ask him to keep in touch. And the voice of self-pity whispers to me the new word I carry around: chronic. It enters English by way of Latin and French, from the Greek “khronikos,” or “of time.” It should be a neutral word, just as “sonic” means “of sound” and “lyric” means “of the lyre.” But in English we reserve “chronic” for diseases that persist, that stick and poke and ache. Chronic, Crohn’s: it’s in the bones of those words, isn’t it? There’s at least one thing you’ll take away from this place that’s permanent, the voice says. 

Back in the reading room Frost’s Job goes on arguing with Frost’s God. As in the original, Frost’s God fails to explain himself. Finally Job concludes that whatever sense we can make out of life will not be beyond chaos but in chaos itself, in the shapes that chaos takes: “Yet I suppose what seems to us confusion / Is not confusion, but the form of forms, / The serpent’s tail stuck down the serpent’s throat, / Which is the symbol of eternity / And also of the way all things come round, / Or of how rays return upon themselves. . .”

Not confusion but the form of forms. At the end of college the illusion of order that brought us here is over, no matter how secure the job or fellowship to follow. We perform ceremonies like commencement to mark the time whose passing we did not control, to give order to the confusion we feel at the base of our experience. 

Still, some things do ease. I finish the papers. I find a way to keep my specialist without Yale insurance. I close on a sublet for my treatments. In exchange I do not get to say goodbye to everyone I want to, or feel like a serious scholar, or find the job I want with the insurance I need. There isn’t time. There won’t be. Next week my mother and brother are coming from England, along with cousins, friends, professors. My father will look on from his own place; probably he will make an awkward and endearing toast.

We will toast to my accomplishments, yes, but I will more readily celebrate the experiences I didn’t curate, the relationships I couldn’t have predicted. I will celebrate that I came to Yale in part to escape my Orthodox upbringing, only to find myself writing my last papers on Jews in English literature. I will celebrate the faculty who have supported me and the best friend I found here who picked me up from my colonoscopy and called me every day afterward. That I and my friends and my friends’ friends find ourselves surrounded this way, that we stumble and are caught — that is cause enough for celebration. It is not that aches alone can be of time, that good things must end. It is that more good things like these must come.

NETANEL SCHWARTZ is a senior in Timothy Dwight College studying English with a certificate in Hebrew. He can be reached at netanel.schwartz@yale.edu.