After he passed, as I left the hospital, his doctor rushed up with a small teddy bear. “Press its paw.” I did — and Mark’s recorded heartbeat filled the hallway, the sound I’d slept against for three years. “He wanted your daughter to hold her father and hear his heart every day of her life.”
“And there’s a letter. It explains what he did with his real heart. Once you read it, you’ll understand why he couldn’t tell you until now.”
Chapter 2: The Afternoon He Recorded His Heart
I sat down in the hospital lobby, the teddy bear in my lap, and I read the letter my husband had written in the last clear weeks of his life, and I learned what he’d been arranging in secret while I thought he was just saying goodbye.
The bear came first, in his letter. Mark had learned, somewhere in those private conversations with his doctor, that hospitals can record a dying person’s heartbeat and place the recording inside a stuffed animal — so that a grieving family, especially a child, can always hold something and hear the heart of the person they lost. Mark had thought of our daughter. Our daughter, who would be born weeks after he died, who would never be held by her father, never fall asleep on his chest, never know the sound I knew by heart.
