Judith Freeman - The Latter Days: A Memoir

I have an image of myself at twenty-two: I have recently decided I am going to be a writer, but instead of writing I am working in the cookware department of the church-owned department store in the town in Utah where I grew up. My mother works in the same store, in gift wrapping. Its just before Christmas and both our jobs are temporary, meant to last only through the holidays. I have a son, now four years old, who has endured two heart surgeries, one when he was three weeks old, another when he was two and a half. According to the heart surgeon who performed the second operation, my son should not be alive, so serious are his problems, but he is alive, thanks in large part to the superior skills of the heart surgeon.

The heart surgeon, who is already a rising star in his fieldthe field of pediatric thoracic surgeryhas become my lover, though he is married with three children of his own. He is a number of years older and lives in Minnesota, which is where my son had his surgery, but he is planning on coming to Utah very soon to visit me. I have recently left Minnesota myself, where I lived for the last few years, and I am in the process of divorcing the man I married five years earlier, when I was seventeen. I have returned to Utah with my son to live with my parents. I came back because I didnt know where else to go, because I have no money and no education and no way of knowing what sort of work I can do, and because my parents agreed to let us live with them until, as they put it, I can get back on my feet.

I am on my feet all day long in the cookware section of the church-owned department store, which is called ZCMIZion Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Its the biggest department store in town, located on the main street, and everyone shops here. The year is 1969. Things are happening in the world. But Im not really thinking of them. I am thinking about my son and his slow, steady improvement following his heart surgery, and I am thinking about the heart surgeon, whom I love very much, and I am thinking about a cooking pot I really want that sits on the shelves at the front of the display in the cookware department which I know I cannot afford but which I have not yet given up on owning. The pot is heavy cast iron, with red enamel on the outside and a lid to match. Its a Graham Kerr pot. Graham Kerr is an English chef who has a cooking show on TV called The Galloping Gourmet that I watch sometimes. Hes not only an exciting chef but hes also a very funny one, always cracking jokes on his show, and then theres his accentthe way he talks with that English accentwhich makes him seem even funnier than he really is. I dont know why I want this pot so much, but I do.

Sometimes I think of my son as the blue-lipped boythe beautiful blue-lipped boyalthough since his open-heart surgery his lips are no longer as blue as they once were. He was born blue, his color caused by a lack of oxygen due to a malformation of his heart. He has a congenital defect, whats called a transposition of the great arteries, meaning his aorta and pulmonary arteries are switched, causing the oxygen-deprived blood coming back from the body to be sent out again without going to the lungs to be replenished, while the blood returning from the lungs full of oxygen is simply sent back to the lungs. Were it not for a small hole between the ventricular chambers in his heart, which allowed for some of the oxygenated blood to mix and go out to his body, he would not have survived. An attempt by nature, perhaps, to offset one abnormality with another.

His heart, due to the surgical reconfiguring, now pumps backward, reversing the normal flow of blood. And still it works, this fragile heart, stitched together from inside and pumping backward day and night, keeping my son alive.

He has blond hair and pale skin and little bulbous fingers also tinged blue and he is a small boy because the lack of oxygen has made it difficult for him to gain weight. His teeth are dark as well because they too have been deprived of oxygen. Oxygen is what he doesnt get enough of and what is causing all his problems. He is among the first children with a transposition to survive after undergoing a recently invented surgery to reconfigure the inside of his heart since the arteries themselves cannot be switched. Still, theres no guarantee he can have any sort of active life, with his damaged little heart. He will be a pioneer, the heart surgeon says: if he survives he will be a model for what is possible. Since I come from a long line of pioneers, this somehow seems appropriate.

He has already confounded expectations: before his first surgery, at three weeks, his father and I were taken aside by the surgeon, a man with very large handshands with thick, blunt fingers and black hair growing on the backs, not at all the hands of a surgeon who would be operating on a heart the size of a walnutand told that should he survive, our son would most likely be mentally retarded, due to the lack of oxygen to his brain. But he is not mentally retarded. At four he is a very bright little boy. Very, very bright.