I am not getting a new heart. Not really. No, nothing has changed in my listing status, there have been no red flags thrown. I am still waiting and hoping. That hasn’t changed. But the truth that we all know, and seldom let ourselves think about, is that the heart I receive will only be new to me. It isn’t new to this world. It has lived, it has sustained a whole life in another body.

I imagine my donor’s mother, the first time she heard that heart beat, perhaps in a dim room, with jelly on her stomach. A fast, strong rhythm fills the room, announcing “I’m here!” to the world. At the same time I wonder what it was like on the playground, if it pounded during a foot race, or kept time on a swing. I’m sure it has known both the calm, steady beats of comfort and the quick, sometimes erratic beats of excitement. The heart I receive will have lived a life before it beats in my chest, and that is something I won’t ever forget. It won’t feel entirely mine, it will always carry someone else’s story with it. And that story will not end with them; it will continue with me. So no, the heart I receive will not be new.

Some transplant recipients deeply struggle with the notion that in order for them to live, someone else has to die. And while that is true on its face, it is more complex than trading one life for another. There is no intention behind a person seeking a heart transplant beyond a wish to live a better, healthier life. That desire doesn’t make them responsible for what happened to their donor. 

I try to hold that truth without simplifying it or turning it to blame. 

I understand the guilt—I do, I have my own struggles with survivor’s guilt—but right now, and I say right now because I know that feelings change like the wind in this process, I don’t feel that guilt. Guilt to me implies responsibility, blame for something that you truly had no part in. The emotion I feel most, in thinking about the circumstances that will surround my transplant, is gratitude, and maybe even a sense of honor.

Don’t misunderstand me. The loss of a donor’s life is tragic and unfair. That truth does not disappear, and it should not be softened or ignored. But accepting the gift that they or their family chose to give does not need to be carried with guilt. I think there can be a quiet kind of honor in carrying that choice forward, in being the one entrusted with what comes next. 

As one mother of a donor hero put it to me: “Your donor wants you to live and to thrive that’s why they said yes. And when their time comes, I have no doubt it will be their honor to help you do exactly that.”

And in doing so, their story does not end with their death, but with their gift. Their heart is carried forward with a new rhythm, in a new body, shaped by a different life but never stripped of where it’s been. I think of our mothers, each hearing our heartbeat for the first time—one on a sonogram and one in an ICU. Two moments connected by the same heart, announcing a life beginning in different rooms and circumstances, separated only by time. One heart. Two lives.

When all is said and done, our heart will beat through my ordinary days and extraordinary ones. It will learn my laughter, my fears, my quiet moments, my stubbornness, and my hope. It will adapt to my pace, my breath, my way of moving through the world. And in that way, it becomes something more than just a continuation—it becomes a kind of connection between two people who never met, but whose lives are forever entwined.

Two stories, not merged into one, but moving alongside each other, carried forward, one as an extraordinary gift, the other with endless gratitude.