The afternoon my husband left me, I collapsed on the floor in a fetal position, my face at the level of the birds on our stone patio. Through the sliding glass door, I watched juncos, sparrows, and chickadees alight to peck at seeds, jostle one another, then fly away. Over and over, they came and went as the sky darkened, then got lighter, and darkened again. There was an intimacy in it, me unmoving, thus unnoticed, my face behind the glass, inches from their iridescent feathers. I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. My heart was a deep pain, heavy in my chest. I assumed I wouldn’t need to kill myself. Surely, I would die there.

The heart pain lasted for months, as I came to understand my grief as a stand-in for my adoption grief, having been abandoned at birth. Once I processed childhood feelings, my chest was dotted with tiny windows. Light poured in. I’d now experienced what I spent my entire life trying to avoid feeling—being left by the person I most loved—and I had survived. Nothing could harm me now. Fear fled; I couldn’t find it anywhere.

I couldn’t even find fear later that same year, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time, worse than the first, and started treatment the week I entered a rigorous doctoral program, the same week my son, a Marine, went to war in Afghanistan. Friends commented about how hard that must be—all those events at once. They felt sorry for me having to start each stressful day at the hospital receiving radiation before going to class. They worried I was alone, my grown children living distant, no husband. They assumed I was afraid.

I was ashamed to tell them how much I loved it, the kind nurses who made me feel cared for. How, seated in the waiting area in my flimsy gown, I filled with anticipation, wondering which mother-nurse I would get that day, looking forward to their kind voices and gentle hands guiding me onto the radiation table, the way they asked me small questions about my life.

My adoptive mother and father wintered in Florida and after I told them about the cancer, they promptly forgot—not because of memory issues, but because my illness had nothing to do with them, didn’t affect their lives—and that was fine. There was no lack of care for me in the world. On the contrary, I felt the universe open to hold me securely against its breast. A few weeks into radiation, when exhaustion hit, I slept on and off during the day like an infant, secure in being held. Friends brought food and checked on me often. One college friend sent a box of twenty-one separately wrapped gifts so I could open one each day. Something, she said, to make it easier to get out of bed in the morning when I wasn’t feeling well. A set of chattering teeth made me laugh so hard, I spit coffee all over the kitchen table.

The worst of my cancer was found deep in my chest wall, so deep it couldn’t be biopsied with a needle prior to surgery. The doctor knew it was malignant only after he removed it. The radiation, too, had to travel deep into my chest. When I recovered, I ran more slowly and sometimes gasped for air. I told my doctor my heart “felt old,” like maybe the radiation had damaged it.

He ordered a bubble study, in which an agitated solution is injected into a vein in the arm and allowed to travel to the heart. I lay on the treatment table in dim light and watched on an echocardiogram screen the bubbles as they arrived in my right atrium, like a flock of white birds against dark sky, then migrated to the left atrium through a hole in my heart. A hole that shouldn’t be there.

“The test was positive,” said my doctor. “The radiation may have widened and hardened a previously small, unnoticeable hole in your heart.” He said I was born with it, this hole, I’d just not been able to feel it before.

Of course I was born with a hole in my heart, I thought. Of course I couldn’t feel it before.
___

Jillian Barnet’s writing explores family, the fallout of closed adoption, and transplantation to a rural farming community. Her essays and poems and have appeared in Best American Essays, the New York Times, North American Review, New Letters, and Image, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the poetry chapbook, Falling Bodies. Links to some of her work can be found on her website, on Instagram or at her free Substack, It Takes A Village.

Artwork by Tyler Haberkorn