Heart-to-heart

Brian was a boy who grew up sad and repressed, without the care and nurture a mother provides. According to his father, who was a stern man, his mother suffered a harrowing addiction to drugs and had been locked up in prison shortly after her son was born. Yet, Brian still matured into a very successful and well-known businessman.

  One day, Brian felt a clenching pain in his chest and fainted in his office. After being rushed into the emergency room, the doctor informed him that he was suffering from severe heart complications, and there was a high probability that he would die if not provided with a donor. The problem was that Brian had a very rare blood type and so it would be difficult to find a donor in such short notice. Meanwhile at his office, talk was brewing that the cause of Brian’s heart failure resulted from many years of heartache due to lack of love and attention.

  Faced with the peril of his ultimate demise, Brian slept with his head clouded with worry and fear. He was awoken with a shrill beeping sound, which indicated a donor had been found. All of a sudden nurses filled his room and he was rushed into surgery. The following day, he woke up feeling fresh and energetic and realized that the surgery had been carried out successfully, and so he wondered who the mystery donor was.

   Brian turned on the television in his room and the news was about an old woman, who had been found dead after breaking out of prison and had a gaping hole in her chest, her hands drenched in blood and her heart missing. The report went on and on about how her blood type was extremely rare and stated that a letter had been found on her corpse. At that point, Brian sat upright and raised the volume. The letter plainly stated: "My dear son, happy birthday, take care of your gift and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.” Within an instant all sound drowned from the surrounding as Brian felt as if he was being sucked into the earth’s core. All that was going through his head was the repeating voice of the newswoman “rare blood type…rare blood type...” It all came to him in a blast as he said to himself, “it’s my birthday today.”

  Brian was so confused and asked himself constantly, “Why would she care...Why now?” As he later found out, after confronting his father, his mother was wrongly convicted of drug possession, and the drugs were actually his father’s. He also recalled one time when his mother tried to reach him and he scolded her and hoped she would die. Brian was filled with excruciating guilt and remembered saying how horrible and cold-blooded his mother was when anyone asked him about her. Now he knows it was the complete opposite. He never figured out how his mother found out about his heart problem; perhaps it was a mother’s instinct, but it only shows what a mother would do to save her son. From then on, however, Brian became a little conceited, for he would always brag about having the biggest heart in the world.