I had a hole in my chest.
Three weeks had passed since my open-heart surgery. My body was rejecting some of my stitches, spitting them out like rotten food.
“It should heal on its own,” the doctor said as she used tweezers to pack the wound with gauze.
She was perched just below my neck with her headlight on full blast. I wanted to turn away, but I needed to know: How deep did this hole actually go?
A few weeks earlier, I’d checked into this same building to undergo the surgery I had studiously avoided. There was no definitive sign or test to say “it was time,” but the worsening symptoms made my ailing heart impossible to ignore. A dash to catch a train sent me into a full asthma attack, climbing stairs had become a breathless activity. It was time to accept reality: This wasn’t the version of my heart that could carry me into old age.
At 43, there would be no “good time” to take 12 weeks off. There was a demanding small business and my aging parents.
“I just didn’t have the room in my schedule,” I told a friend.
“Listen to yourself,” she said. “This is not a conference. This is an organ.”
I worried about my husband. How would he manage? What about our kids? Would they be traumatized watching me go through this? And there was always the risk of complications and the fact that I might not be better off afterward. Still, like the good girl that I am, I picked a surgery date.
I prepared as much as I could. I read books, I meditated, I went to therapy. I talked with other people who had the same surgery. I prayed. I joined online support groups. But the one person who would really help me was the last person I expected.
She was on a table in front of me. Dead.
***
I usually don’t know the women I prepare for burial. As a member of a local hevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society, I was attending my last tahara, the ritual of washing and dressing the dead, before the surgeons would open my chest.
It was around 7 p.m. when I sat down in a nondescript conference room in a local funeral home. This group of women, most of whom I had never met, would work together in silence, following an ancient, well-established choreography.
The older woman lying in front of me had been loved; the list of survivors at the end of her obituary exceeded a paragraph. When we inspected her body, I noticed her abdominal scar and her immaculately painted nails. These already told me so much.
I can’t really explain, but I’ve felt called to this work. I held my grandmother’s hand when she died at home, and I sat next to my dad as he faded away in a hospice. I was devastated, but I was never scared. And I’m someone who is always afraid.
I worried about getting hurt, losing someone, falling down, offending people, making a huge mistake. So I decided to channel that very rare lack of fear into something productive.
At the orientation for joining the hevra kadisha, we sat in a room surrounded by coffins. After a rabbi spoke, a current member gave a talk, with a welcoming yet direct tone: “If you had a bad day at work, you have to be able to leave it at the door. If you just fought with your partner, you must be able to pack that anger away. This experience is not about you. Ever. This is about caring for the person in front of you, the deceased.”
Being completely focused on someone else felt very freeing at the time, but on that day in the funeral parlor before my surgery, I started to veer into the “me” territory. As I gently washed this woman’s arm, I thought about my own body. I was angry. Born with a heart defect, I had feelings of fragility that plagued me since my first open-heart surgery at 10 months old. My scar, or what my parents nicknamed my “zipper,” made me feel like damaged goods.
I massaged the woman’s hands to make them pliable, carefully scrubbing away the hot pink polish. Despite the confidence of my parents and my doctors, I’d always wondered if my heart would carry me through middle age. Could I manage a stressful career? Could I run a marathon? Maybe, yes, and no.
After closing the coffin, I joined the others in laying our hands on the simple wooden box, thanking this woman for giving us the opportunity to prepare her for her final journey. But I realized she had also given me a personal gift, the clarity I’d been looking for since scheduling my surgery: No matter the risk, I desperately wanted the privilege of getting older.
***
Weeks later in the operating room, I felt a new sense of opportunity. I smiled at the surgical team, as I scooted from the gurney onto a cold steel table.
Hey!” I waved.
They seemed a bit shocked at my exuberance.
I don’t remember much after that except waking up fully intubated in the intensive care unit, hearing my sister and my husband calling my name. Despite having both arms restrained, I remember communicating that I was ready to pull out the tube. A nurse gently told me that I still had a few hours to go. And between the painkillers and the power of persuasion, I closed my eyes and willed myself back to sleep.
The surgeons had replaced my pulmonary valve with a brand-new one from a cow, and only 72 hours later an echocardiogram showed that, maybe for the first time ever, both chambers of my heart were normal-size.
My heart had embraced this valve with little protest.
“The heart is the most grateful organ,” a cardiologist told me. “It is so trusting, so willing to accept help.”
Six months after surgery, I was called to do another tahara. My sternum had healed, but the scar took up more than half my torso. Although the purple would fade to white, the scar would be that way forever.
I walked into the funeral parlor, and again I was with a group of women I did not know. They had no idea about my surgery, the lingering pain, the complications around my incision, and the months of recovery. I was thankful that no one would worry about whether I could lift or stand or carry or push. We would focus completely on the person in front of us.
I held the woman’s head and rinsed her shoulder-length hair, combing out the tangles as gently as possible. We would be the last people to see her face in this world, a sacred honor.
I would get older like her, I hoped. I would live a long life like her.
Honestly, I never felt so alive.
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