The Heart of Gratitude

Thanksgiving Synchronicities. Wow. I’m sitting in the waiting room at the Heart Hospital while Ray’s getting his fluids topped off through a femoral artery. We’ve been through this before, so I’m worried but not panicking. This is his 3rd heart attack, 4th if we count the time we got here just early enough to head it off with another stent. He’s a pretty fit, active, non-smoking guy, still working past his retirement age, who eats a healthy diet of mostly unprocessed, home-cooked food. But he has a genetic history of heart disease and high cholesterol, and he probably has some damage from his earlier life as a smoking, fast-food-eating road musician. Anyway, we ignored the medical advice of our Little Town ER doc to go home and follow up with a cardiologist in December, and we drove ourselves here to the Big City in time. Again. 

So I’m sitting here, and I must have my invisible I WILL LISTEN sign flashing, because an older man sitting across from me says, “Where are you from?” I tell him, then he starts talking. He doesn’t stop for at least 30 minutes. He tells me everything about his life—his wife’s dementia and recent falls, the blood clot they’re blasting in her, their kids and grandkids and where every one of them lives and what they do, his and his wife’s childhoods (they went to different schools in the same town…their birthdays are two days apart…they’re both 78), his military service, his career as a buildings and maintenance specialist with Indian Health Service.

Then he tells me about his family growing up: his white father, his Native mother, his siblings. Then he tells me about how his mother had been sent to the Indian boarding school in Pine Ridge as a kid, and how, when she was 16 and operating the mangle (a giant industrial hot roller machine, like the Godzilla version of rollers on old wringer-washers), she lost her left hand in the machine, and how he could still see her, diaper pins in her teeth, diapering his baby brother one-handed, and how, because of her, he and his wife and kids got free Covid vaccines and boosters at IHS.

I’m mostly silent, with a nod or a “wow,” now and then, and I’m grateful that I can give him this space to talk. Finally, he says he should probably get back upstairs to his wife, and I say, “We have a lot to be thankful for, don’t we.” And I really mean that. We DO have a lot to be thankful for. We are both going to leave the Heart Hospital with the people we love.

But I’m also a little stunned by his story, thinking again of the girls and women of the Magdalene laundries, and what so many of them, like this man’s mother, may have lost to the mangles, the ironing machines, the industry and cruelty of institutions that take children away and lock them up. I’m also thinking that we cruel humans seem determined to make Magdalenes wherever we go.

Today, Ray is home and resting. That he’s here is a testament to the brilliance of modern medicine, to compassionate, skilled caregivers, to our willingness to trust our own intuition, and maybe mostly, to the miracles of the human body—as one arterial branch in Ray’s heart clogged, shut down, and died, his heart was already busy making a new branch to replace it.

This Thanksgiving, we will have to miss an epic family gathering in a lovely southern location, with four generations of family, including my 80-something mom, all my siblings, and their partners and kids. I will miss the Bailey’s and eggnog, the dominoes, the moons over the lake, the cut-throat Scrabble matches, the singing, laughing, and non-stop grazing. Still, I’m SO grateful they can gather, that they can Zoom/Skype/Facetime (so we can witness the mayhem), and that Ray and I will be here together to appreciate life, this unending, unfolding trail of miracles.