The Company of Others
By Deidre Price
for Josephine Ava, born 6:30 p.m. on March 29, 2013
You had only just arrived
when you flew to Washington, D.C.,
because of a “heart problem.”
Even though I am 961 miles away,
I can see all the way from Florida
that your doctors have misdiagnosed.
They’re looking only at the machinery of it.
They don’t know the whole story,
the history of hearts or the history of you.
- - - - -
The truth is that everyone has heart problems:
The fact is we begin with far too few.
We’re assigned two hands, two feet, two lungs, two kidneys,
pairs of eyes, ears, nostrils, lips—extras of all the ‘must
haves.’
God doles out three trillion pores per person,
100 billion neurons, more brain cells than we see stars in
the Milky Way,
while daughters get 400,000 potential eggs in their tiny
ovaries.
But we start with just one heart
and not a single spare in the trunk.
- - - - -
A heart needs an assist sometimes,
needs to confer with its peers,
for it’s a fickle, fragile thing until experience
teaches the memory that the heart works best
in the company of others.
We’re taught from birth to follow our hearts,
but having a change of heart means a new map.
A heart can make you fall in love,
but it can also make you fall out of love.
Some hearts go rogue and break others’ hearts,
and if a heart gets broken often enough or badly enough,
it can turn hard or stop.
- - - - -
If anyone’s heart ever could be perfect,
it would be yours, Josie.
So, I call this a simple case of heart amnesia.
Remember you come from a long line of good hearts.
Your heritage has been built up,
lining every chamber, every wall.
I’ve known your father’s heart,
soft but strong, movable but not faint,
a willing, open heart that risks itself daily and
fearlessly.
I’ve known your mother’s heart,
breaking and grieving for others’ brokenness and grief,
rebuilding itself because she lives to love, to serve
others.
These hearts came together to make yours.
Your atria are full of charity,
your aorta, full of God.
Both ventricles have enough room to hold the helpless.
Every valve is strong enough to watch the world’s weight
pass through.
You see, it’s exactly because you are not your own,
that your heart was designed to move and to be moved.
You arrived in the company of others
with hearts strong enough to beat for yours, too—
and they do, and they will—
until it remembers its name.
