My Heart has a Shadow
By Jessica Girardo

You could say that hearts have been following me for as long as I have been on this Earth; I was born just a few minutes before Valentine’s Day in 1983. My mother, in full transition at the time, fought with my grandmother who was begging her to wait just a few more minutes to push so I could be a cupid. Unfortunately, nature won out and I was a bit shy of February 14th. As I grew up, almost every picture and doodle I drew had a heart on it somewhere. My mother, sisters, and I even see hearts; we see hearts everywhere! Sometimes it may be in a stray cloud, a spot of oil on the ground, or a scratch or dent in a tabletop. It has always been sort of an inside joke between the girls in the family and when we see one we just smile and show the others.
For some reason, I decided at the age of five that I would grow up to be a doctor. And not just any doctor, but a heart doctor. I didn’t even know what that was at five years old, but I knew that it was what I wanted to be; I wanted to be in the medical field and to fix hearts! That is not what would be in the cards for me, though. I became very sick with a disease called systemic lupus when I was twelve years old, fulfilling part of my wish to be in the medical field. I just ended up on the wrong side of the fence, was all! And it had a big sign marking it that said “PATIENTS ONLY”!
When I got sick, my mom and I came up with our own version of the ‘Pennies from Heaven’ scenario; we decided that whichever of us died first would always remain connected with the other one by sending hearts. This is how we would always know that the other was alright.
Millions of hearts later, when I was twenty-one, I thought things were going swimmingly! I was still very sick, but I was also alive, engaged to be married, and expecting my first child (very much against my doctor’s wishes!). John and I married in April and my pregnancy seemed to be progressing normally; shockingly normal, though. For someone as sick as me, they expected far more complications. By June I was six months pregnant and I had just begun to show, so I was beginning to get excited. Things were going well enough that I felt comfortable with buying things for our baby-to-be. Then, the situation took a devastating turn.
On June 19th, 2004 I went to the hospital with abdominal pains that were just not normal; this is the day that we would find out that our son had passed away. They could not detect any heartbeat, although they tried and tried to find any glimmer of hope. I would then go on to spend the next 2 days in intensive care with doctors fearing that I had a blood clot. I spent those days weeping and in labor with a son that I knew would never smile or walk or call me ‘mama’. It was literally the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced in my life. On Monday, June 21st I was cleared to deliver the baby; when they came to wheel me down to the delivery room I became so overwhelmed and scared that I got physically sick. My mom stayed by my side the whole time but nobody else had the courage to be in there. They had all decided to stay in the waiting room because they knew that if they couldn’t hold in their emotions, they didn’t need to be there. Unfortunately for my sister Sara (who had just given birth to her first daughter a few weeks earlier), the decision got made for her because she got trapped in the room with us! It had to be God’s will, though, because I couldn’t have done it without the two of them flanking me on either side. When it was all over with I had delivered a perfect little boy, Dustin Andrew Ham, who weighed 9 ounces and was 10 inches long. He had ten fingers and toes and long, blonde eyelashes. Dustin was everything a baby was supposed to be… except alive.
Somehow, though, God sent me an angel in all of this tragedy. A local woman, whom I never got to meet, had made it her mission years ago to help families through this situation by using her gift of photography to give them one last photo session with their baby. She came in without me even knowing it to the room where they were keeping my son before he would be buried, and she took pictures of him. Since Dustin was so small and bruised from the traumatic delivery, there was only one picture that came out good enough to be framed. I was woken up by my family and presented with a wrapped gift box that I had absolutely no desire to open. After all, there was nothing anyone could give me that would make things better. Or so I thought…
Inside this box lay a black picture frame with white matting around a single, beautiful picture; this picture was a tiny little foot and perfect toes sticking out of the blanket that he was wrapped up in. One foot the size of my thumbprint; but, right below this little foot was something that washed a river of peace over what had, only moments before been horrible pain. The light that had shined upon my son during the photo shoot had created a shadow that printed right below Dustin’s little heel… in the perfect shape of a heart. It was the very first thing I noticed about the picture and, after almost four days of non-stop tears, I finally stopped crying, because I knew that my son was alright.
My family still sees hearts, even five years after the burial of our little Dustin. Sometimes they come at times when one of us really needs it; like on the day we buried my grandfather and I ended up with a scuff on my shoe that was a perfect heart. And then there are other times that it is just random, but we always say the same thing: ‘I love you too, Dustin!’