Valentine

My grandmother died the night before her 50th wedding anniversary. My father was with her, having tea at her kitchen table, when she grabbed her chest and fell to the floor. The doctor said it was a heart attack. My father said she died of a broken heart because she had just heard some bad news about her brother. Our next-door neighbor had made a beautiful red velvet dress for me to wear to her anniversary party. I never got a chance to wear it. I was 11 years old and didn't know what a heart attack was. I thought a heart was the color of red velvet and the shape of a valentine.

Years later, I learned what a heart really looks like. I was a first-year medical student in anatomy class, dissecting the preserved body of an old man. I had looked forward to seeing a human heart seated in its throne of the chest, but when we opened the chest cavity and found the sacred organ, I felt like a child the day after Christmas. The heart was not the bright red color of the velvet dress my neighbor had made for my grandmother's party. Nor was it in the shape of a valentine. It was the color of wet red tissue paper, and in the shape of a birthday balloon that has lost most of its air.

A physician listens to the sounds a living heart makes when it beats in the chest, pumping lifeblood to every organ in the body. The sounds are crisp, rhythmic staccatos of heart valves slamming shut as the muscular pump squeezes blood through its chambers and into the circulation. Like a teenager listening to rock music on her earphones, I listen …