The Healing of Hearts and Lungs

On this weekend six years ago, two hearts abruptly ceased beating. One heart was mourned as the loss of a beloved mother, wife, new grandmother, respected civil servant and dear friend. The other heart was only a couple months away from also being mourned but because of this first heart’s tragedy, the fatigued and unsuspecting heart was intentionally and temporarily stopped so it could receive a gift: a beautiful pair of lungs, not yet finished on this earth.

It took many weeks for that heart to learn how to welcome these strange and shocked lungs — when you’ve spent years adjusting to the darkness, the sunlight can blind and overwhelm. But through a relentless medical team and a body’s basic will to live, a balance was found and the rebirth was complete.

—————

Although my thoughts are mostly consumed in the day-to-day, the mundane, the hustle and bustle and the first world problems, it’s lovely to take a moment to reflect on these past six “bonus” years I’ve had. I’m certain I don’t have any life lessons to pass along but I do see things in myself that are different than before. The two are most pronounced are 1) the trite but true, “life’s too short to be unhappy” and 2) an awareness and acceptance about death, at least in theory.

Through my divorce, the first has played itself out quite acutely and has had an unwelcome ripple effect across dozens of my most cherished people. But while it’s still sorrowful we couldn’t find our happiness with each other, I think we’ve both found our own “happy” and it’s made us better people for ourselves and those around us. And as Scot and I said to each other the other night, “If you’re going to divorce anyone, you should divorce one of us.” We seem to have found a way to be both successful co-parents and friends. It’s more than I could have hoped for though I can’t imagine it any other way.

And the second, the thing that we rarely confront except in hushed tones and awkward conversations: death. I ran across this quote from author Barbara Ehrenreich and I think it’s perfect: “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

As always, I also want to express my profound gratitude and love goes to everyone who was part of a huge network of support throughout my disease and my subsequent recovery. It has been everything.