When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she’ll explore the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.
At the children’s hospital, we followed the stars on the floor. This was how we reached outpatient registration, where we checked in for Gus’s appointments and received his ID bracelet, then continued to the elevators that took us to whichever specialist we were visiting. If the stars changed color, we had gone too far.
