Reflections

There is a clause in the contract of being alive that everyone carries and almost no one reads. It is not hidden exactly—it is simply located where fine print tends to live, in the back of the document, in language nobody reaches for until they have to. The clause is straightforward: this arrangement is temporary….

There is a moment in every transplant process when the psychological weight of what is happening lands fully. For some it comes at listing. For others, the wait. For others still, the operating table or the ICU or the long recovery after. It comes for everyone eventually—the moment the full cost of survival presents itself…

There is a sentence many transplant candidates never say out loud when the doctor first utters the words you need a transplant. But almost all of them think it. Someone has to die for me to live. It arrives immediately. Before the testing. Before the waitlist. Before surgery has become a concrete reality. Before the…

There is a practice I have kept for most of my life, and it is the only thing that makes the rest of this account trustworthy, so I will put it first. When something happens that I cannot explain, I do not explain it. I observe it. I hold it intact, exactly as it arrived,…

When the ancient Egyptians prepared a body for the afterlife, they pulled the brain out through the nose with a hooked instrument and threw it away. It was waste. The heart they left exactly where it was, because the heart was where the person lived—where judgment would happen, where the self would be weighed against…

There is a moment, somewhere in the recovery arc, when you realize the person you’ve been looking for has been there all along. Not rebuilt. Not reconstructed from parts. Just—retrieved. The way you find something you misplaced and recognize it immediately: yes, that’s mine, I know exactly what that is. For me the retrieval happened…

There is a version of this story where the voice is a side note—one complication among many in an experience that had no shortage of them. A temporary setback, eventually resolved, mentioned in passing alongside the hair loss and the tremors and the rest of what the medications and the procedures took and gave back…

The new heart was beating. The surgery was done. By any external measure, the crisis had passed. What nobody tells you—what the discharge packet does not cover, what the follow-up schedule does not account for—is that the emotional accounting hasn’t even begun. Before the Transplant: The Exposure Starts Early The prednisone didn’t begin post-transplant. It…

The number 55 had been hanging there for years. Not a premonition in any mystical sense—a calculation. The kind that runs quietly in the background when you know your body well enough and have been paying attention long enough to see where the trajectory leads. When things started going downhill fast after my 55th birthday,…

The new heart was already doing its job. Not metaphorically—physically. More blood moving, more oxygen reaching places that had been running on fumes for years. I had not known, until that moment, how far gone I had been. The contrast was available to me before I had words for it. And then, in the hours…