family

A heart, a gift, and wonder

My father-in-law had a heart transplant on November 26, 2002. I think about it all the time, but especially around Thanksgiving. Grace was born on October 26, 2002. That was, needless to say, an emotional and scary time. I was in the deep dark hole of postpartum depression, Matt was at the hospital every evening after a horrible day at more-people-laid-off-every-day work, and Grace was screaming her head off 20 hours a day. Oh, and John was at MGH where he was basically going to leave with a heart or in a coffin. It was not a fun period.

He received a heart a dark, damp November night. There are many amazing things about that day. His surprise granddaughter who is named Grace for many reasons, not the least of which is her appearance being an act of grace for its correlation with his illness, was one month old. It was two days before Thanksgiving. It was also his and my mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary.

It is truly a miracle, the fact that someone else’s heart beats in his chest. All we know is that the donor was 28 years old (the age I was at the time of the transplant). And I imagine that the donor’s death was likely untimely and tragic. But oh what a gift they gave. I was always a organ donor but am now an evangelist for the cause. And please, everybody, know that just having it on your license is not enough. Your next of kin and family need to know your wishes, because it is they who will be in the situation of making that call should the worst case scenario occur.

It is an absolute miracle. I wish I had better words that didn’t sound trite, but I don’t. He was released from the hospital after two weeks, which shocked me at the time (seriously? four days for your c-section and two weeks for your heart transplant?). It was a slow road back to feeling good but honestly his quality of life has been excellent.

So excellent that I often forget to remember what tremendous good fortune we have had. I remember that first Thanksgiving, Matt, Grace and I drove to my family’s big (usually 30+ Meads around tables) celebration in Marion. We were both shell-shocked, from the transplant and the post partum and the sleeplessness and the sheer earthquake quality of the last month. Everybody was incredibly gentle, with kind and generous words about John (at that point he was not even out of anesthesia yet, and much remained uncertain). The theme, though, over and over, was “Wow, you have a lot to be thankful for.” And I’m not proud of this, but I remember thinking: No we don’t. Are you crazy? To be in this situation in the first place?

Oh how selfish those thoughts were, I see that now. Of course we were – and remain – wildly lucky, fortunate, and blessed. And , yes, yes, deeply, deeply grateful. I am only ashamed that I am not more actively thankful every single day of what a gift it is to wake up in the morning and have an able body and a sound mind. It is so easy to lose track of that good fortune, to dwell only on my anxieties and fears and issues and small pains. I try to remember, to bring myself back to the core of gratitude, to the awareness of how hugely blessed I am.

Today, I guess, is one of those days, where I am trying to tug myself back to the perspective I know I ought to have. One of those days that I am aware of how our everyday lives are absolutely laced with miracles. May I learn to remember this more often. As my father-in-law, with someone’s extraordinary gift beating in his chest should remind me.

A letter on the first day of kindergarten

Lisa Belkin at Motherlode today published a letter from a mother to her son, marking the occasion of his starting kindergarten.

I read it with tears streaming down my face. And then I remembered that on precisely the same occasion last year I wrote a letter to Grace. Rereading that made me cry even more.

That day feels like yesterday, and in two weeks I will send both of them off together to the Morse Building, Grace to first grade and Whit to Beginners.

Another year gone by, both endless and so fast my head spins.

Apnea Babies


Read a really interesting piece today about how writing – and writing for the internet in particular – should be about telling authentic stories from our lives. About the importance of returning to the crux of narrative, whatever the topic.

And it made me think of little stories from my life that I can tell.

For some reason, I feel like I spent a lot of time as a child in the backseat of the car with Hilary. I realize that this can’t really be true, because I think when we lived in Paris we barely drove anywhere. Certainly I have vivid Paris memories that have to do with other forms of transportation, the sing-song way I used to say Sol-fer-ino every time we passed that metro stop being one of them.

But, the car. I have a lot of memories of time in the backseat of the boxy navy blue Volvo station wagon. This was before the Volvo designers got all aerodynamic and fancy. It was a navy blue rectangle. And I used to chant, as Mum tried to get it to start in the morning in the freezing cold North Cambridge morning, “Go car go! Go, car, GO!”

I have no recollection of carseats. Am pretty sure there weren’t any, because one of Hilary’s and my favorite games was to each sit with our back against one of the backseat doors (obviously impossible had we been in carseats of any kind). We then bent our legs and put our (always bare, always dusty and dirty) feet against each other. The game was to see who could straighten her legs first. Apparently we had a lot of faith in the Volvo designers’ mechanisms for closing those doors – some of these battles were heated enough that I’m kind of surprised neither of us got ejected onto the highway.

Another game that we invented was called Apnea Babies. Hilary, who was a preemie, had apnea as a baby. I understand this now to be a serious and scary disorder, but for some reason she and I both saw great comedy in it back then. The game was simple. One of us had to stop breathing and hold our breath until the other one noticed. Then the other sister had to rush to stuff a McDonald’s straw up the non-breathing sister’s nose. Thus, by putting our sister on a “respirator,” we had saved a life. There was no winner in this game, but we played it incessantly.

The final thing I remember is the ankle grab. We used to sing a fair amount in the backseat, or talk, or ask questions, or, likely, argue. When my parents had tired of our noise my father would reach back with his big hand and grab the nearest ankle. Whoever had her foot closest to the hump on the ground in the backseat was shit out of luck. Wow did he have hand strength. I remember those ankle grabs and the subsequent, agonizing squeeze that followed. Unfortunately for Dad, I think that move resulted in more and not less noise, but it definitely made an impression.

Redheads

Well, I have seen this referred to anecdotally, but now there is data and the official imprimatur of a New York Times story.

Redheads require about 20% more general anesthesia to knock them out. I have always viewed this as all the evidence we need that my kind (which includes my sister, my mother, and some of my dearest friends – two minority groups wildly overrepresented in my close friends are redheads and lefties) are just a little more feisty than the rest of the world.

Currently 4% of the world’s people carry the gene for red hair, which was only discovered in the 1990s (what??? not a priority, people of science? how can this be?). I’ve heard about this frankly terrifying claim that redheads will be extinct by 2100, but I cannot reconcile the tenacious, hard-to-knock-out (is it any surprise that I sometimes need elephant tranquilizer style drugs to help me sleep?) reality of redheads I know with genetic extinction. No sirree.

And MMG, about to turn one, I have great hopes that you will carry the flag into the next generation … no pressure, babe, but the Sun In is coming out for Grace if your hair doesn’t bloom into redness!

middle places

The Middle Place made me think about the various contradictions we hold in our hands at any given time. Our lives can be defined, I think, by the tensions between these contradictions, and by the ways that we address their competing needs and implications.

Tonight, I am holding a difficult set in my palm.

Young – Old
Lost – Trapped
Daughter – Mother
Wired – Tired