Put your hand here,” a teacher told us when I was a child, guiding our small palms to our chests. “This is where your feelings live.”I believed her. Children do not separate the body from what they feel. Happiness rises from the chest, fear tightens there, and when someone we love is no longer around, something in the same place seems to fall quiet.

I learned this painfully as a teenager, when my mother was suddenly taken from us by proxy violence. Much of that time has blurred, but I remember the pain in my chest. I knew nothing about grief or how the body carries loss. I only knew that the voice I had grown up hearing, the presence I had taken for granted, had suddenly become a memory. Strangely, I felt that absence exactly where my childhood teacher had told me feelings lived.Life went on, as it quietly does, and I learned to live around my mother’s absence. Somewhere in those growing years came a small, unspoken attachment—a familiar face that could brighten an ordinary day, a few words that stayed longer than expected. It never became a story, but it taught me gently that some people do not remain in our lives and still leave something tender behind.

Then I entered medical college, and the heart became something else. I learned its chambers and valves, traced its arteries and electrical pathways, held it in the anatomy........

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