My first Thanksgiving. I brined the bird, he’s outside in a big white paintbucket on the back porch. Made the spinach and the stuffing and cut up the squash and parsnips. Set the table and did some flowers. Tomorrow will be the real challenge! It feels like a rite of passage – in keeping with a sentiment that’s been a theme lately, I really feel like an ADULT right now. With all the good and bad that that entails.
I was IMing with Lacy recently and got deep into reminiscing about 5 years ago at this time. Grace was 4 weeks old, Matt’s father had his heart transplant: the memories are both vivid and murky. I remember the night that the phone call came, like it was yesterday. Matt, Mark and I had visited John in the hospital in the late afternoon. John was a little bit out of it, and as we left everyone was feeling a somewhat down. As we walked out, John announced, apropos of nothing, “I’m getting that heart tonight.” We all smiled, resignedly aware of the statistics that 75% of those on the heart transplant list die waiting, and walked to the elevators. Another thing I remember from those days is watching a lot of TV, nursing a newborn – whenever the local news would announce an accident, a car crash, an electrical worker who had fallen to his death, Matt and I would look at each other with a surge of guilty hope: is that his heart?
In the middle of the night the phone startled us out of sleep. It was Mark: “There’s a heart.” Matt rushed to MGH, I stayed home with Gracie. Midday I went over to sit with them while we waited. Mark, Marion, Marti, Matt, and me (I clearly have the wrong name to be a member of this family). We sat and we sat. Matt was so agitated; we walked miles through the MGH halls when the sitting grew unbearable. The surgery went on much longer than expected. I remember feeling as though I was going to burst with milk, and felt the incredible, poignant tension between a newborn at home who needed me and Matt’s father and family who also wanted me there. Youth and age. I wondered, also birth and death?
One month to the day after Grace’s arrival, that surprise baby that we did not plan for or anticipate, John underwent a successful heart transplant. Thanksgiving was the next day. We drove down to Marion to spend the day with my parents and my Mead relatives. The memories are a haze of exhaustion and emotion. I remember feeling shell-shocked, somewhat removed from the traditions and celebrations. I did know, in some visceral way, how tremendously much we had to be thankful for, but we were all still paralyzed with anxiety about John’s still-tenuous recovery.
I also remember taking Gracie to Dr. Goldstein for a checkup, and asking about whether it was OK to bring a newborn into the MGH ICU to see her grandfather, who was asking for her. You can’t imagine how much John asked for Grace in those first days post-surgery, as he faded in and out of consciousness. Of course it is a bad idea to have a newborn in a hospital. Dr. Goldstein, however, looked at me and said, quietly: “Take her. Feel her power.” I will never forget the look in his eyes at that moment. So I took her, in the bucket carseat and covered with a blanket, and I do believe that she provided a fixed point for John to focus on in his recovery.
Five years ago. Extraordinary. We will celebrate on Friday night, with Marti and John, Mark and Marion. November 26, 2002: Grace’s one month birthday, Marti & John’s 36th wedding anniversary, and John’s new heart.