Observations placeholder
Mary's heart fights back
Identifier
005646
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
A Change of Heart [Case Histories gathered by William Novak]
Only one participant [in a group for transplant patients], a social worker named Mary, claimed that she never experienced her new heart as "other." But within the confines of our tight circle, Mary spoke movingly about how, when she experienced an episode of rejection shortly after her transplant, an image came to her of two spirits who were fighting inside her body.
"One of them was me," she said, "and the other, I guess, was the donor, who didn't want me to have this heart. I know my new heart came from a woman, and this struggle between us felt like a catfight."
During this period, Mary dreamed that her dead grandmother appeared to her with a message: "Just give something away and you'll be all right."
Mary took this to mean that she had to stop fighting for control of her heart and start dealing with the fact that it wasn't entirely hers. When she did, her health improved.
Even so, Mary told us, she occasionally spoke directly to her heart in blunt and unequivocal terms:
"You belong to me now. You were somebody else's heart, but now you're mine." These were provocative words from a woman who insisted that nothing unusual or mysterious was going on within her.