Facebook reminded me today—as if I could forget, as if I were the kind of person who doesn't carry these things in my bones, a sort of person who doesn't viscerally remember each moment and hour of every terror, every poignancy, every moment where life changed, could have changed, every pacing manic moment—Facebook reminded me this morning, that a year ago, three and a half hours north of here, in a room I never saw, in a hospital by the water, a surgeon held my father's heart in his hands. A year ago I paced and babbled and waited. An old woman in a green vest—a vest that reminded me of Girl Scouts, thin and cotton, clearly intended to signify something—played Disney theme songs on the piano. It was a fancy hospital and the waiting room I sat in was just for cardiac surgery. There was a large fish tank and a tv screen with a color coded system and a scrolling list of patients represented by private identification numbers to keep us informed of their position in surgery: Who is being prepped, who is in active surgery, who is in recovery, etcetera. We were given laminated cards and a little buzzer that buzzed and flashed when we were to go to the phone at the information desk where the attending nurse called you to update you on the progress. She said things like, he's on bypass now... And they're just about to close. Her voice was cheerful and matter of fact. Or that's how I imagine it. The details are foggy.

The day is a blur, a blur punctuated by crystal clear flashes.

I remember waking up early in the dark in my father's house. I remember the palpable fear in the car on the drive to the hospital. I remember the quiet as we checked in. I remember the circuitous winding hallways. I remember the waiting. I remember the hand holding mine. I remember the puzzle in the waiting room. I remember drinking coffee. I remember not eating. I remember the dizzy spin and the buzzing in my head. I remember the delirious rush of joy of seeing my father awake after surgery. I remember the banks of machines, the countless tubes, the greyness of his skin, the washes of pain unlike any pain I'd ever witnessed, how he would blanch and shudder, how his eyes would widen and his pupils contract. I remember the clench of his jaw, the smallness of his voice, when he repeated over and over again, it really hurts. I remember my surprise at my intense gratitude for drugs, my gratitude when the nurses told me he likely wouldn't remember these hours. I remember the weight of my exhaustion, my feeling of helplessness in the face of his pain. I remember the way I literally shook with exhaustion and relief, trembling as the shock wore off, the cascading rushes of gratitude as it slowly sunk in that he'd survived, that it had gone well, the realization that I still had my papa.

I talked to him on the phone this afternoon, heard his voice bright and cheery. He has climbed mountains this last year; he has floated down rivers. He has has swam in lakes, and gone out for coffee, and made dinners, and done dishes, and napped in the sunshine, and all of the glorious and lovely mundanity of a life. He is here and he is strong, and I get to hear his voice. It does not escape me how lucky we are. It does not escape me how much I have to be grateful for.

Yes. I remember.

In My Grown-up Life

I wrote a poem once entitled my grown-up life. It was intended to be tongue in cheek—at 24, I was pretty sure I was already a grown-up. It spoke of returning to the halls of my alma mater ten years later, my hair speckled with grey. In my grown-up life I will have a fig tree, it began. I heard children's feet on hardwood, smelled coffee and last night's dinner in the kitchen. I'm guessing there was an artist's studio out back and dried paint in the creases of my knuckles, but I can't recall the details now.

It was the fall after the summer I wore polo shirts and gold hoop earrings ironically, the summer I laughed and wandered and wondered with an eclectic crew of fiercely tight-knit friends who worked at coffee shops and bars, the summer we sat on stoops and porches and drank brown-bag shrouded cans of cheap beer through straws, the summer I discovered the swifts.

It was the fall after the summer after the end of my first great love.

A classmate, an older man, came up to me after I read the poem for the class and said I hope you get to have that life. I was taken aback and then immediately dismissed him in my head. This was before I considered that I might not, before it seemed possible that that future life might not be mine. It was a matter of when, not if. I had suspended it, put it on hold, but it was still coming. It still belonged to me.

A few years later, driving to school, I burst into tears at the realization that this was, in fact, the life I had imagined for myself, it was just a different imagining from a different time. (There had been a brief phase in my early teens where I was sure I'd live in a modern house in the countryside. There would be snow in the winter, parching sun in the summer, and giant picture windows. I was to be a swimming coach. I'm pretty sure this version of my future life was set somewhere in Eastern Washington.) The one I was living as I drove over the Sellwood Bridge in tears, this was the life that unfurled from the seed of my lifelove of art. There was paint in the creases of my knuckles, and a palpable aching loneliness strung from the sky. I was fiercely independent, wildly in love with myth and metaphor, the poetry of turn of phrase or changing light. I wore high heels often and lived by the covenant of apocalyptic hilarity.

The ten fabled years of the poem have come and gone, and how many lives have come and gone with them? There is no fig tree, no backyard studio. Instead there is the podium from which I lecture, charcoal ground into my skin, curious and excited students, the drive through the hills to the campus out west of the city, my basement studio, this crazy wild chosen family of friends, my heart breaking and opening more and more deeply with each passing year.

There are bits and pieces of the different lives I imagined, there are slicing shards I never would have dreamed, and there are the threads that diligently and inelegantly weave them all together.

This is a patchwork life; this is my patchwork life.

It is here, and it is still coming, and it belongs to me.