Healed Heart Day Anniversary

Tomorrow marks four years since Moriah's five-hour open heart surgery. Four years ago, they broke my daughter's chest open, cooled her body, placed her heart on bypass, and put their fingers on two very large holes in her heart, patching them up perfectly.

In honor of the anniversary, I re-read tonight my posts from that day and the days that followed.

And I cried. It is no small thing to remind yourself how hope and grace surrounded, even on such a difficult day. It is no small thing to have a child resurrected. It is no small thing to give thanks for a gift so very, very large.

Tomorrow is Moriah's Healed Heart Day. I am not sure what your plans are tomorrow. I teach a full schedule on Tuesdays, instructing writing students at the community college from 9:15 until 1:45, without a break for lunch. But tomorrow we are talking about an unusual speech--David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" commencement address--and as so often happens as a teacher of writing (or rather, a teacher of thinking), I have opportunity to talk about really important stuff with a group of really important, really cool people. So tomorrow we'll talk about the speech and about the mindfulness practices of our lives and the choices we make about how we think about living. And I will pass around a photo of Moriah post-surgery (the one I've posted below); I keep this very one in a beautiful glass frame on my desk at work. Tomorrow I will tell my students why it sits there.

I keep this photo near me at work because we all need reminders--in our every day lives--of the sacredness, the extraordinary-ness, that living itself can be. Moriah's photo marks the holy for me, and calls me into the wonder of long, ordinary, and sometimes tedious or suffering-filled days. Moriah's photo says: I am here. I have survived. I am alive. And life is a gift, not a given.

Wallace would say, this is water. I say, this is grace. And tomorrow I will ask my students to honor Moriah's healed heart day by healing their own heart or someone else's with forgiveness; by extending a bit of kindness to a stranger; by taking a minute to slow down and breathe and see existence for what it is--fragile and awful and beautiful and all.

Sometimes, we pass through the terror and have just a chest-scar to show for it. But if we are lucky, and Moriah and I have been, we pass through with the scar...and a sense of wonder at the grace that is sometimes, unexpectedly ours.

I hope you will join my students and I tomorrow in making your day a day for healing hearts, especially your own. You are alive. You are a gift. And this is no small thing. This, friends, is grace.