Heartbeat
There was a day when my heart started beating again.
Once I was back at work, Penny and I signed up for a Thursday night beginners yoga class. We’d both done yoga before, but this was a back-to-basics approach—a careful and precise dissection of all the familiar asanas and the movement into and out of them. The teacher was a former dancer; tiny, delicate, but exact and rock-solid. I’d come to know and love the sun salute as my five-minute wake-up routine for the early mornings when I took the 4.30 a.m. train to Newcastle for work, back in the misty land of ‘before’. It shook the zombiness of deep sleep from my limbs. I could shower the night before and I could eat breakfast on the train, but without those five minutes of yoga I couldn’t gather the wakefulness to put clothes on and get out the door.
But now we took apart each step of the sun salute and pored over the mechanics, cleaned each component, moved and oiled it, and then slowly started reconnecting the pieces. We found the moments within the cycle to inhale into—opening, stretching—and the ones that need an exhalation, pushing with our breath, as well as with our muscles, to exact an alignment, to create momentum, to press our palms into one another or the floor, and release into a deeper stretch. It took us eight weeks of classes to complete the cycle, to return to an upright stance, hands in prayer position, bodies warm from the movement.
‘Press each point of your fingers and palms together, like mirror images,’ the teacher said. ‘Let your thumb bones press into one another and let the knuckles cosy into your breastbone, so you can feel your heart beating.’
I did, and there, against all expectations, was my heart—knocking warmly against my thumbs. Big, hot tears spilled out and scorched down my cheeks.
This is my heart. My big, noisy heart, which kept banging on as Z’s small, fast one slowed and then stopped. The enormity of that engulfed me, with anger, that my heart could so callously continue, and thankfulness that it did; that its familiar beat held her and sang to her as hers faded. And there was surprise; that I was, indeed, alive—that, despite the massive impossibility of continuing on without my child, my heart just kept on at its work, wearily, faithfully, persistently.
•
As I re-engaged with my PhD work, in reading my way back into the literature on DNA paternity testing, I came across a mention of a biological phenomenon called maternal-fetal microchimerism—the persistence of fetal DNA within the mother’s body for decades after a pregnancy. These were not just fragments, but whole new stem cells. One study found fetal cells replicating within the mothers’ bone marrow over fifty years after their children had been born. In mother mice with liver disease, fetal cells were found to ‘contribute to the repairing process’.1 Tears dripped onto my keyboard. Z’s cells were right here—pumping through my heart, replicating in my very marrow—and may very well have helped heal the liver and spleen lacerations I had sustained in the crash.
The question that had been dogging me, of where Z went; what if I could answer it literally? Rather than having to decide on a spiritual story for her, in some religion or other, or imagine her in a heavenly elsewhere, what if I could trace the different elements of her—physical and psychological—here in this world? What if she literally still existed in all of those places? As a memory in my brain; as dark and light specks of ash in the sandy soil at Somers; as a fragment of DNA still replicating in my cells; or as small units of energy, unleashed in the heat of her cremation and still bumping their way through the universe? I had half-expected that, in the wilds of my grief, I might find God. What I hadn’t imagined was that I could find solace in science.
There was something about the persistence of atoms and energy that I found comforting. Heaven, perhaps, was not a separate elsewhere, but a continuity in elemental form—a photon sparkling on water, or a molecule transforming from dirt to food to living thing and back again.