GET A HEART TRANSPLANT , Mom42

This may seem like a crazy statement, but when I was 14 years old, my mother died at the age of 42 of the genetic heart condition hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Five months before her death, when I was 13 years old, I was diagnosed with the same genetic heart condition.

She died in the kitchen of my childhood home. We had been chatting while she was cooking when she suddenly said she didn’t feel well. I watched as she collapsed to the floor. I frantically gave her CPR that I had recently learned in a babysitting class and, as I held her in my arms, I begged her to wake up. I called 911 and my father, who was at work, to tell him the unimaginable. The woman we loved the most in the world was gone. That night after returning home from the emergency room, now as a family of two, I watched as my father slid against the front door sobbing.

THE POWER OF Photography

The next day, our beloved Great Dane, Ringo, died suddenly. We had learned about his heart condition less than a month earlier and without warning on a normal Friday afternoon he was gone. That weekend we didn’t get out of bed. I didn’t do anything but cry and sleep. When Geoff and I finally got to a place where we had the strength to talk, we decided that I needed to do everything I could to try to get a heart transplant. So, I texted my cardiologist and told him I would start the listing process.

I can’t articulate what it was like to lose my mother that way after being diagnosed with the same disease. I just know that the fear of having that same fate was something I carried since that hot July day. The number 42 has followed me around throughout the past 29 years—I always seem to grab the 42nd ticket when I am at the deli counter, when I walked the Turkey Trot 5K my bib was number 42, when I moved my father to an assisted living home his room number had 42 in it.

I was 42 years old when I was given this news of needing a heart transplant. For so many years, I looked at it like a curse, but then I started to see it as signs from my mother. I have always believed she is watching out for me.

While most kids my age were excited to start high school, I was suddenly a kid who had a team of cardiologists and specialists. I felt lost in my grief. My father, who was now a single parent to a teenage girl, taught me how to develop film and enlarge prints in a darkroom he built for me. I had become obsessed with the candid photos he and my mother had taken of me and of themselves. I used many of them for the photo wall I was put in charge of at her funeral. There were photographs they had taken that I had never seen before and that were now my most prized possessions. I used my mother’s camera as a way to navigate my sadness and I fell in love with photography and how powerful it is. I would eventually shoot my very first wedding at the age of 18.