Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen - 53

On the night before my father’s funeral, I have the dream again: my heart, coughed up, beating in my hand. Again, I turn to the faceless passersby to ask if I need it, if I can survive without it.

This time, there is no sign of Seth, but after a few minutes, my father ambles through the crowd. He is young and vibrant and confident. “Give me that thing,” he says, holding out his hand. I put my heart into it, and he puts it in his pocket. “Be patient, Cricket. Your new one is almost ready.”

I wake up to darkness and grab my chest. Everything seems intact. I can feel my pulse; my organs are all accounted for, as far as I can tell. Though it’s only 5:00 A.M. , I decide to get up and work on the remarks I plan to give at today’s ceremony.

As I head downstairs and make coffee, the dream keeps tapping me on the shoulder, asking for attention.

It’s an interesting idea: the regenerating heart. After all, we do go on, no matter how much we shudder with grief. And maybe our hearts don’t ache because they’re scarred or broken or because something is wrong. Maybe they ache because they are shape-shifting. Like the growth spurts of our youth, they make us quake with change; but once weathered, they leave us stronger and even more ourselves. Not our final selves, or our best selves, or even our improved selves, but just our next selves. As I now know, we are always between selves. It doesn’t mean we are lost—it means we are growing.

Throughout our project, I never asked my father to give me a prophecy of my own. At first, it was because I was scared of what he could reveal about me. I didn’t want to know what the future might hold. But over time, as I listened to him carve meaning out of other people’s lives, I gained an insight here, heard a whisper there. Fear was replaced by curiosity. Even now, I remember the specific prophecies that stirred something within me: the career change, the great romance, the man who finally bought a horse, the woman who felt most alive just before she died. Each of those supplicants went away with a single jewel to polish; but I received the whole trove.

In the end, I never needed my father to tell me what my future would hold—I simply needed him to show me what it could hold. And now, as his premonitions echo through my memory, I can use those threads to weave my own prophecy.

When I was younger and living in the city, I distracted myself with activity; busyness was a balm. But up here, in the quiet, the truth has infinite patience. It waits until we have run ourselves ragged and are finally ready to come home, to remember who we have always been.

As the sun starts to rise, I make my way into the great room and light a fire. The flames begin to hiss, and I get an idea: one final brush with bibliomancy for old times’ sake.

I walk over to the bookshelf and say, “Dad, give me something good.”

Closing my eyes, I run my hand along the spines, feeling the paperbacks, the hardcovers, the ones that are so old that pieces of them come off on my fingertips. Finally, my hand stops on a smallish book, and I pull it off the shelf.

I look down and see that it is an original copy of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. I remember reading it, somewhere, sometime, but I didn’t realize we owned a copy, let alone a first edition. I must have forgotten—we can’t remember everything, after all. I open the cover, and inside is an inscription from my father, back when his handwriting was replete with confident swoops and playful flourishes.

For Cricket, on her tenth birthday:

The truth is yours to divine; the future is yours to design.

With love from your many animal friends—and of course, your adoring father.

I snap the book shut as my body floods with a feeling so overwhelming that it can only be love. Though I have said it many times, only now do I fully believe it to be true: a good oracle shows you what you already know.