Losing his father at age nine fractured Thomas Fiffer’s heart, but he found his way back to wholeness.
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When my father died, when his heart stopped beating on a cold, sunny February day much like this one, I lost a piece of my heart with him.
My mother did her best to fashion a new piece that would fit into the hole. She made it from parts of him she thought I would need, which did not include all the parts I wanted. For this, I both thank and forgive her. She did the best job she could.
She placed the piece in the hole, hoping it would soothe me, fill my emptiness, heal my pain. And it did. For a while. Until its imperfect fit, imperfect not in shape but in constitution, began to become uncomfortable. I tried, for a long, long, time, to ignore that feeling.
I was terrified of taking the piece out, afraid if I did I would die of an incomplete heart.
But I realized, after experiencing much emptiness in my own life and never being able to fill it, that the alternative to taking the piece out was a different kind of death—living without a whole heart.
So I took the piece out, sanded a little here, polished a little there, incorporated what I wanted to keep of my father into it, and put it back in again.
It fit.
Better.
But still not perfectly.
That realization is what set me free.
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This post was previously published on the Tom Aplomb blog and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
“Mended Hearts” was the support group I belonged to after a quintuple bypass
Dear Thomas, Thank you for this text! You put something into words that I always felt too. My mother died when I was seven, and the picture that people around me painted of her was very vivid – but it didn’t show me the person I had known and still remembered. It took me years, lots of counseling, conversation with old friends and family, to make the picture more accurate. Lots of people around me didn’t understand this quest to discover my mother, to get to know her better all these years later. But it was the only way for… Read more »