from a hospital cardiac floor and a directed donation and a letter he wrote knowing he wouldn’t be there to see it work.
I am not alone. That was his last wish, the real one, and he made sure of it with the same fierce, planning love he’d shown his whole life. I lost my son, and it is the great grief of my life, and it always will be. But he did not leave me with nobody. He left me with everybody. He turned his death into a family for the mother he couldn’t bear to leave alone.
And every so often, when the grief gets too heavy, I do the thing he told me to do. I put my hand on Lily’s chest, or I lay my head there, and I listen. And there he is. My son’s heart, beating, in the world, in the chest of a
