Long before I began wondering about biology, my mother had already given me a place in which to wonder.

She gave me a House.

My mother, Marian E. Blake, wrote poetry throughout much of her life. Her poems grew from faith, family, hardship, humor, observation, and the ordinary experiences of being human. Years ago, I published a collection of her poetry because I wanted her words to continue living beyond the pages on which she first wrote them.

One of her poems imagined a house inside of us.

At the time, I loved the image for what it was: a spiritual and personal metaphor. I did not know that many years later, after illness entered my own life, I would return to that House and begin looking at it quite differently.

Cancer made me curious about biology.

I began asking questions I had never thought very much about before. What actually happens when cells change? What happens when something in the body does not work as expected? Why do some biological changes disappear while others persist?

Eventually I began using a simple phrase for some of these events:

biological misfires.

I did not mean that a person had misfired.

That distinction became increasingly important to me.

A cell may change. A repair process may fail. A biological event may unfold in an unexpected way.

But the person is not the misfire.

The more biology I studied, the more another realization surprised me. I had begun by looking for what went wrong. Instead, I became increasingly astonished by how much goes right.

Every day our bodies carry out enormous numbers of successful biological activities without our ever noticing them.

Repair happens.

Communication happens.

Adaptation happens.

Life continues.

Disease is memorable partly because health is so abundant.

And somewhere along the way, my mother’s House returned.

I began imagining that perhaps illness changes something within the House without necessarily destroying everything that lives there.

There may still be memory.

Curiosity.

Love.

Humor.

Faith.

Relationships.

Choices.

Wonder.

The ability to participate in life.

The House gradually became more than one metaphor. It became a place from which I could ask a much larger question:

What remains alive underneath biological change?

That question eventually carried me far beyond cells and repair mechanisms.

It led me back through decades of work with people living with disabilities. It led me to people whose abilities were sometimes hidden beneath what others immediately saw. It led me into my own experiences with cancer, treatment, uncertainty, gratitude, and the unexpected business of continuing to live.

And eventually those ideas became a new illustrated book I have been working on called Life Beneath Uncertainty.

The book has now reached the physical-proof stage.

That still feels rather astonishing to write.

But perhaps the book did not truly begin with cancer, biology, or even Misfires.

Perhaps it began many years earlier when my mother quietly left me a House.

I simply had to live long enough to discover what was inside.

— Mary Blake Huer

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