The presence of another's heart
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The heart produces a stronger electromagnetic field than any other—5,000 times greater than the field generated by the brain. Simply by looking at each other and smiling, a mother and her baby can synchronize their heartbeats to within milliseconds. When we feel in love, we feel the presence of another’s heart.
I thought a lot about hearts after we received our baby’s diagnosis. Their development in utero, the mechanics of how they work and all the metaphors we ascribe to them. How would my own heart be changed by the experience of being pregnant with a baby who I knew was going to die?
My son had an incredibly rare condition call ectopia cordis: his heart had grown outside of his body. It is usually a fatal condition, though in a handful of cases around the world surgeons have placed tiny hearts back inside babies’ chests.
When I was 18 weeks pregnant, my partner and I met with a paediatric cardiologist to determine if surgery was possible. After the scan, the Dr quietly delivered his findings.
“Along with ectopia cordis, there are other issues with your baby’s heart. One of the ventricles is smaller than the other and the aortic valve that carries oxygenated blood to the body is much smaller than it should be. This is called hypo-plastic left heart syndrome.”
I concentrated hard to try and understand these unfamiliar terms.
“Your baby is not a candidate for surgery,” he continued. “If you continue the pregnancy, he is likely to die at birth or shorty after… if he makes it to full-term.”
I had been calm up until this point of the consultation. I burst into tears and couldn’t stop.
My partner Roy and I had an agonizing choice to make—to terminate the pregnancy or to continue, knowing our son’s birth would be followed by a funeral. Roy and I are both pro-choice. We debated and cried and searched our souls for weeks looking for the right answer, but a right answer didn’t exist. Whatever we did was going to be a leap into a big black unknown.
What does it mean to ‘listen to our hearts’? Perhaps it’s about letting go of the rational brain, tuning into bodily intuition. Physiologically, our hearts reveal something about how we’re feeling. They pound in our chests when we’re scared or distressed.
As my pregnancy progressed, I became drawn to images of the sacred heart, haloed with divine light, resting on the chest of Jesus or Mary. I wasn’t Catholic, but the sacred heart was a figurative depiction of my son’s physical condition, a way to imagine a kind of beauty in it.
We continued the pregnancy.
We named our son Jesús—not after the Messiah but because it’s a common name in Peru, my partner’s country. I added the name Valentino because I’d found out I was pregnant on Valentine’s Day. Jesús Valentino. An extraordinary name for a boy with an extraordinary heart.
People were surprised by how happy I was, given my son’s prognosis. I was surprised myself. It’s been said the building blocks of happiness are purpose, love and connection. During my pregnancy all these things were amplified. I was taking a crash course in living in the present moment. Everyday trivialities, worries and gripes slid away as we focussed on what was important: loving our son and each other.
When he was born, we had what will always be some of the most precious days of my life. With Jesús cradled in my arms, all was well in the world. It was love without a smidgeon of ambiguity.
Up until this point, I’d mostly dealt with my challenges privately, but now I felt like I was the eye in a storm of compassion. Jesús called forth the best in everyone. With his heart exposed to the world, he opened up hearts around him.
But then he died. Even though it had been expected, it still came as a shock. Grief felt like a fall from the grace. The love I had felt during my pregnancy and after his birth dissipated, replaced with deep disorientation, rawness, and anxiety. My heart felt broken, void.
Jesús never wanted to bring us sadness. Like any child, he wanted to be loved and celebrated for who he was. After those first aching months, my heart recalibrated. It is a different heart from the one I had before him. Perhaps it is more reluctant to hope for things, sometimes more fearful for the future.
And yet it’s a heart that knows love can be found in even the darkest of places, and in the presence of others’ hearts.
Guest writer Emma wrote about the loss of her son in her memoir The Heart of Jesús Valentino.
If you experienced some form of choice or chance for intervention one way or another in the journey of growing or parenting your child, how do you carry that choice and that love post-loss?