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.

Old friends

(a re-post from Facebook)

Am I dissertation-ing while on retreat this week? Why yes, I am.

Still, it's not a bad life: Sitting in a bagel cafe with unlimited serve-yourself coffee, surrounded by mountains in the Monadnock valley, returning in a couple hours to family and very, very dear friends.

One of the greatest helps of our Moriah-life has been, in fact, these old friends. Jason's college roommate became a good friend of mine, too, as Jason and I began dating, became engaged, and were married (his buddy was in our wedding and was a sort of go-to guy in lots of ways in those early years; he and Jason even worked for the same engineering company for some time together in those early dating and married days). Later, when his buddy married (an amazing woman Jason and he had both known from college), Jason was in their wedding, and we were both there to celebrate the start of their life together.

Years later, they birthed a child with Down syndrome. Nearly two years after that, we did, too.

How does that happen? How do two college buddies both end up with very similar sorts of kids, and struggles, and heartache?

It's the most weird and delightful sort of mystery. But I know this: Without these friends, we would not have survived that first week of Moriah's birth; they came and sat with us in the hospital, and were among the few who dared to weep with us. They completely accepted, permitted, and understood our shock, terror, rage, and devastation. A couple months later, they sat with us through Moriah's open heart surgery. And they have been there--especially when we've been able to make these summer retreats--in countless ways for us since.

Sometimes when I'm with them (as we are this week), I have the strange feeling that we are the people we were 20 years ago when we first met. Or 16 years ago at our wedding, or a dozen years ago at theirs. And then I see all our kids running around, and how tired we all are, and how much more resolutely and realistically seeking God and love and hope, and I realize we are in so many ways not those people at all.

It makes me sad and very, very happy, both.

Here's what I'm loving this week: The familiar ways of old friends, the tried-and-true hugs, the mugs of coffee we share, the laughter that stretches back for decades, and the circle that continues to widen as we welcome new friends to our fold. Being with them is a re-tracing the history of us, finding our mooring again, and gaining the courage and the hope to open our arms to change and transformation one more time.