I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere)
I go you go. . .
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)
- e.e. cummings
. . . being reflections on the 30th anniversary of my heart transplant. . .
Driving north on I-35 after having just left a powerful Somatic Experiencing® training session in which I relived significant moments of my heart transplantation, tears streamed down my face as I blasted the musical “Rent” at full volume on my car’s CD player.[i]
♪There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret or life is yours to miss
No other road no other way
No day but today
There's only now
There's only here . . .
No other path
No other way
No day but today♪
Deprived of the pounding music and lush harmonies, the words lack the same senses of urgency, pleading, and poignancy that ring throughout every cell of my being as the song escalates, but the sentiment -- the exigency to live each day fully and deliberately – stands. Living in such raw awareness of the precarity of life, as certainly I do after surviving multiple cardiac arrests, illuminates life’s sheer preciousness in a way that moves one to tears, at least it does me. The looming awareness of mortality forces an examination of one’s life. “Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder,” wrote Audre Lorde after learning of her breast cancer diagnosis. “ . . . It helps shape the words I speak, the ways I love, my politic of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living” (Cancer Journals,16).
I have lived with that consciousness since I first came face-to-face with my mortality when, at the age of twenty, I was struck down in my prime by an infection in my heart that took me within moments of death, and left me hospitalized and bed-ridden for months. Like Lorde, it made me evaluate my purpose, my relationships, my politics, my daily actions through the lens of the brevity of our existence. It made me different, odd, diving too deeply into questioning the meaning of life, living and loving too intensely than was comfortable for most people my age. “You’re so deep!” “You’re so intense!” people would say to me as they backed away. I was simply too much.
I found camaraderie in books – in Albert Camus’s The Rebel, the whole premise of which stands on the politics that follow once having decided that life is worth living, his journals of his youth spent in hospitals with tuberculosis at about the same age I was, and his essays expounding his deep love of the sea, the sun, and life; in Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” requiring us “to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of” (57); in Adrienne Rich’s mandate for living an honorable life in her demanding “Of Women and Honor,” [ii] and most especially in the resonance of her poem “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” -- “I have never loved/like this I have never seen/ my own forces so taken up and shared/ and given back . . . We will not live/ to settle for less We have dreamed of this all of our lives.”[iii]
I took risks in my work and relationships. I dived into feminist movement and action. I gave birth to myself, and then to my child and experienced a love beyond telling. And then, a little over a year after my child was born, my heart stopped in the middle of giving a concert. They said I played my heart out. Having survived. back out in the world a little over a year later, undaunted, I ignored advice and in the midst of an impassioned speech to save a beloved stretch of beach, it stopped again. I’m one of the lucky few to have survived not one, not two, but three cardiac arrests. My passions and actions, now tempered by an implantable defibrillator that would shock me into quietude lest my heart rate rise past the threshold of safety, I awaited, and finally received, a life-giving transplant from one whose life ended too soon. And yet it had not ended entirely, for her heart continued beating, but in my body. So now this question – what does it require of my life, dear Jodi, to carry your heart in my heart?[iv]
To carry -- the meanings are multiple: to support while transporting; to convey; to contain and direct the course of; to harbor within the body; to sustain the weight of; to provide sustenance for; to be solely responsible for the success, effectiveness, and continuation of; to prolong and maintain over time; to gain victory for – to name only the most pertinent ones. For all of these are now my charge. How best do I support you? Sustain the weightiness of honoring your life? Provide the appropriate sustenance to prolong your/our life over time and to be solely responsible for the success and continuation of that life? To gain a victory in that way for you? To provide safe harbor, security, and comfort for your/our spiritual well-being? How do I convey to those who loved you the sheer amazement at the steadiness of this new heart, the exquisite enjoyment of sunlight streaming through a window without fear, the gratitude for the years and precious moments you have given me? How do I direct the course of my/our life? It is as if I am living poet Mary Oliver’s query -- “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”
I’ve heard these words from Oliver’s “The Sunny Day” quoted so many times that they verge on becoming trite, so I hesitate to use them here, except to recount the first time I heard them. I had taken students to the local Benedictine retreat center where we spent time walking the labyrinth and talking about prayer. Sister Lois, the retreat center director, began our time together by sharing Oliver’s poem. I must have been a few years post-transplant at that point, and those final words grasped me by the heart and wouldn’t let go. Knowing viscerally how wild and precious this life is, the poet asked me not only to acknowledge that, but also to ponder what I was going to do with it. More than this, she asked how was I going to honor it, for that is the meaning of “precious” after all – something worthy of honor. But now this task carried a deeper responsibility. How was I to live a life worthy of this honor, and not just of my own, but also of her life– the child’s whose heart I now carried in my heart?
I had delved into Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor” dozens of times, and knew that honoring this life -- our lives -- required at the minimum my honesty with myself, my loved ones, my life pursuits. It demanded that I live in line with my values, that I act so as to enhance the possibility of life for every living being, and that I not settle for anything less than living “in accordance with that joy I knew myself to be capable of.” Above all, honoring this life asked that I not let a day go by without fully appreciating the opportunity to be a part of it. Of course, I have – days when I’ve been so sick, or in such desperate grief, or gutted with worry, or simply bogged down with papers to grade or bureaucracies to navigate, that just getting through the day can feel like a chore. But then a glorious sunrise, or stunning hoarfrost, or an unexpected kindness will remind me. Or a political issue – an injustice being perpetrated on another, a threat to the land and the water, a violation of rights will stir me from complacence and require my action and speech. Or the aching need of a friend, a loved one, a small child will remind me that, in the words of my favorite book on childrearing – “You can postpone anything but love” – and that the greatest and perhaps rarest gift I can give to anyone with the time that I have is generous, loving attention.
A transplant of any kind is often referred to as a “second chance.” Thirty years ago today I received that gift -- not only of life, but of the chance to live more deliberately, to live well, to do good, to become love, in deepest awareness of the preciousness of each day. And so, it is in gratitude and prayer that I repeat these words of e. e. cummings:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings . . .
We fly together, you and I. I carry your heart with me, you carry me with your heart.
Sources
Camus, Albert. 1968. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage.
______. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage.
cummings, e.e. 2016. Complete Poems:1904-1962. New York: Liveright.
Larson, Jonathon. 1996. Rent.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.
______. 1980. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink.
Oliver, Mary. 2017. Devotions. New York: Penguin.
Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose: 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton.
______. 1978. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W. W. Norton.
Rolfe, Randy. 1985. You Can Postpone Anything but Love: Expanding Our Potential as Parents. Edgemont, PA: Ambassador Press.
[i] For those who do not know the story of Rent, it revolves around the precarity of life living impoverished and unhoused in the city, all in the context of the AIDS crisis. The composer, Jonathon Larson, himself tragically died at the age of 29 of an aortic dissection the day before Rent opened on Broadway. Perhaps on some level he sensed the precarity of his own life for certainly his music pulses with that awareness.
[ii] The essay appears in Rich’s collection of essays, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
[iii] Elvira Shatayev was the leader of an all-women climbing party on Lenin Peak. A sudden storm, considered to be the worst in 25 years, trapped them near the peak without anything to break the ferocity of the winds. They did not survive. Her husband later found her diary when he climbed the peak to retrieve their bodies. Adrienne Rich put Shatayev’s words to verse in her poem, “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” The Dream of a Common Language.
[iv] My donor was a 9-year-old little girl whose name was Jodi. She died far too young of a brain injury following a small plane crash. Waiting for the helicopter to take me to the transplant hospital was a very sobering time, knowing that at that same time, someone was saying goodbye to their loved one.
At that time, a transplanted heart was sewn into the upper chambers of the receiving heart, so I do carry Jodi’s heart in my heart.