In the transplant community, today is called my One Month Heartaversary. 

I received my gift of life on July 22, 2018. 

At 5:57 a.m. that day, an anesthesiologist wheeled me into an elevator where I said goodbye to The Boy. He took a photo of me in that elevator, clowning and waving and trying so hard to be brave when all I wanted to do was scream and run and hide. I can see it on my face in the photo and it feels so strange.

Because how do you calmly lie on a gurney and smile and willingly let someone take you to a place where someone you've never met is going to cut your heart out of your chest? It must be very similar to what a condemned man feels as he walks towards the hangman's noose or the guillotine. My fight or flight instinct was going insane. I do remember that once we exited the elevator, the doctor stopped for a moment and gave me a sedative through my IV. And I remember thanking him for the mercy.

I then have the vaguest of memory of arriving just outside the Operating Room and being overwhelmed by the number of people, of feeling deeply self-conscious at how they were all staring at me from behind their blue masks and blue paper hats and gowns. I remember making some stupid jokes (and getting some sympathy laughs) and fearing the machinery on the other side of the door and meeting my transplant surgeon, Dr. Atkins, who honestly I expected to be a little taller for some reason. 

And then I left any sort of memorable consciousness behind for at least 48 hours. 

I do know that they removed my heart at 9:48 a.m.
I do know that my new heart was in place at 10:56 a.m.
I do know that between those two times, a heart and lung machine circulated my blood and kept my brain and body alive while I lay suspended between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

I know all of this because The Boy has painstakingly created a timeline for me, for us, for the book we plan to write. But I cannot begin to process it. I cannot begin to understand how I lived for over an hour without a heart beating inside of my body and it's like it physically hurts deep inside of the thing that is the primal me when I try to contemplate it.

I was empty.
And then I wasn't.

I had a heart, the heart that I was born with, and it was beating laboriously in my chest... and they took it. Then they put someone else's heart in its place and I somehow walked away from this experience with that beautiful gift beating strongly and soundly in my chest. And you guys, this makes no sense to me, even though I can FEEL it in there (well, not the same way you do because all of the nerves that attach one's heart to one's brain have been completely severed-- but I can often feel my pulse pounding in my temples), and I cannot comprehend that this has happened.

Or why.

So like anyone would, I spent some time today picking blackberries. 

In my part of the world, mid-August means our 10-acre property is a mass of overgrown wild blackberry vines... and after all of the sun and warmth the Seattle area experienced while I lounged in UWMC with tubes and wires and all manner of things poking me and keeping me alive-- these vines are drooping and heavy with fruit that is just begging to be plucked and eaten directly from the vine. Or gathered into bowls and made into cobblers and cupcakes and red wine reduction sauces. And usually, at least for this girl, lots and lots of homemade blackberry jam.*

So today I held a bright green bowl in my left hand and plucked tender, fat berries with my right, enjoying the slight breeze and a small feeling of independence. As I relaxed into my task, I watched the light filter and flit through the tangled branches, how it hit the glistening berries and the gossamer spider webs and threads... and I was struck by how it was all a perfect metaphor for my truth, for what is happening in my head right now.

I was absolutely euphoric when I left the hospital last Tuesday. It was like I had crossed some finish line and all I needed was a good night's sleep and my life would fully begin again. But that euphoria evaporated within 24 hours and I'm exhausted and still in pain from my final lung surgery and dealing with lots of side effects related to my medications. In the few days I've been at home it has become clear to me that there is a long road ahead of me to full recovery. That finish line just keeps getting pushed back onto the far horizon. 

I'm also fairly certain I'm dealing with a pretty powerful case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I mean, it's wonderful the way our minds shield us until we are ready to handle things, but now that I'm safe in my own house, there is a screaming cyclone of emotions in my head that just doesn't stop.

So what is my truth? 

What is truth at all, if not a plump, sun-ripened berry suspended among thorns, tantalizingly just beyond arm's length? I reach for it with fingers already stained with the juices of the other blackberries I've stuffed greedily into my mouth, my wrists and forearms getting lightly prickled by thorns. I stand on my tip toes, wishing I'd brought a step stool or The Boy or a bigger bowl. I gaze down at my dogs who are eating the low-hanging fruit directly from the bushes, each of them looking up at me now and again with their warm brown eyes and their silly smiles, waiting for me to knock some of the sweetest berries to the ground as I fumble around. It's all exactly like last year and the year before it and the year before it... but something is different. Something is larger and incomprehensible and waiting to gobble me up, as if I'm a plump blackberry too.

But the sun is warm and everything is so green and for a moment it's like none of it ever happened. For a moment I forget the gnarled incisions criss-crossing my torso, I forget the 4 surgeries, the 24 days in the hospital, the 131 days I waited on "The List" with my breath held each time the phone rang. I forget the pain of learning I was being referred to UW for evaluation for transplant. I forget the moment I died on August 26, 2017. I forget the feeling of my own body winding down as my time was running out.

Because I just breathe.

I taste the sweet tang of the berries on my tongue, vaguely aware that I really should probably wash them first, not for pesticides (which I don't use), but maybe just for any possible bugs because my immune system has been nuked. I feel the sun on my shoulders because of course I'm wearing boxers, an exercise bra and slippers because I'm an invalid and I should be wearing sunscreen because of my new increased risk of skin cancer.

I know the air is too thick with particulates from the Canadian wildfires and I should be inside with an air purifier or at least wearing a mask due to the risk of a lung infection, but I've been inside for so long and a mask would keep the berries from my mouth.

And right up there and to the left is the perfect blackberry-- I can almost reach it. I know that if I do, I will quickly pop it into my mouth and life will make sense again. The sweet flavor will explode on my tongue and silence my head and I will finally understand how I lived without a heart. Not the mechanics of it, I get that. I will understand the how and the WHY behind that because there simply has to be more to this than the machinations of men and medicine.

I don't mean God. I don't mean that I have been blessed or chosen or saved. It's beyond all of that. It's something else, something other, something even larger and transcendent and impossible to understand.

I lived.
I'm here.
And I'm so grateful.
But I don't understand WHY.

And I need to. I truly have spent no time crying a plaintive "why meeeeee?" in all of this. I don't pity myself, I'm not wallowing, I'm not seeking sympathy or platitudes. 

I am seeking timeless truth. I am trying to understand the absolutely enormous WHY. 

I hope you'll come with me. I hope you'll give me the time and space to figure this out and to heal my brain the same way my doctors are healing my body. I feel like we will all be better for it. Who knows, maybe by this time next year, blackberries will just be fruit again.

And also in the meantime, I made a really great cobbler.


*(Sidenote: We run an Airbnb/VRBO here on our property called The Fun House in the Trees. Each year I set up a pretty elaborate jam-making operation and I give each of our guests a small mason jar of homemade blackberry jam with a custom label that reads "Fun House Jams: Good Food, Great Times." But there is no energy for jam this year. Still, sweet treats will abound!)