There are spiritual, even mystical parts to having a surgery like open heart surgery, I have received all kinds of messages – letters, e-mails, e-cards and I must confess that all have mattered to me, I read them all – you can write me at P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816 – , they remind me that we are all one thing, as the great thinkers say, connected to one another. They also remind me of the great mystery and wonder at having one’s heart stopped and reconnected to my body. It is not something I can yet comprehend, or perhaps will ever be able to comprehend.

But the messages are quite compelling, even mysterious. I was, of course, anesthetized during the surgery, I was on life support machines, all sorts of tubes and lines inserted into my body. Yet my body – my heart, my chest – seems to remember the surgery, I can sometimes  feel it very clearly, I sometimes get flashes of people talking around me, of my body being touched. There is not great pain involved in these messages and memories, but there is sometimes the feeling of my chest being hollow, of it being opened up, vulnerable and exposed to the world.

Once or twice, it has felt as if my heart existed outside of my body, entered into a space of its own, was part of a different life system than mine.

I take a deep breath when this happens, and I freeze. I asked a nurse/friend about it, and she says she is sure the body and the heart do remember, not in words but surely in feelings and triggers. That kind of surgery, she says, is not something the body or the heart would soon forget.

I do believe my body remembers the surgery, I am certain my heart does, once in awhile, in the dark, while I am sitting and resting, I feel my heart beating in a particular kind of way, then stopping in a particular kind of way. Then I feel as if there is a hole in the center of my chest, that I am being prodded, entered. It is not an awful sensation, it is sobering. It is sometimes frightening, sometimes bewildering.

I ask my heart about this feeling, and she whispers very softly to me, a heart does not forget.

I also have this sensation that I am certain comes from the Intensive Care Unit, where I lay for hours after the surgery. Maria and my daughter Emma came to see me in the ICU, they each touched me on the shoulder. The nurse cautioned them both to be light and brief, they said I was almost certainly aware of their presence, and it could be upsetting to my heart, fragile at the time. I sometimes hear their voices, hear them speaking, talking to me, telling me that they are there, comforting one another at the sight of me. I imagine it must have been so much worse to see me than to be me at that time.

Then, I hear them saying goodbye, I tried to reach out to Maria, but I could not move, she could not hear me or understand me. I needed to say goodbye then.

There are so many messages. One from Frank, who was in the hospital with me, “I feel like I am lost in space,” he wrote me, “I wish I could write about it like you do, but I can’t even talk about it, I can’t bear to be around anybody. I watch TV all day and wait to heal. I have nothing to say to anyone. God bless you, keep walking.” The good people at the Palo Alto Humane Society, where I spoke last year sent me a card, wishing me well, congratulating me on being a “kick-ass writer” even a few weeks out of surgery, they are reading the Recovery Journal.  I liked that message.

Betty wrote me that her husband, who had a tougher surgery than me, was caught in an awful depression, she was reading my Recovery Journals to him, and he wanted to hear them, every word. A humbling thing.

There are other messages,  angry animal rights people calling me names for supporting the carriage horses, that is a daily thing these days, I’m afraid, those are not messages of love and healing. And then, in the hospital, I will tell you from the bottom of my healing heart that I heard from the carriage horses, I saw them in my head soon after I woke up in the ICU. They were there in the room with me, some of the drivers too. The drivers are idiosyncratic and wonderful, readers of my blog ride in their carriages all the time, and they all send me back messages of love and support and healing. I do not hear from them except when I am in New York, and then they all know me by sight, call to me by name. There is much love there, it is one of the purest relationships I have known.

But the horses were a presence in my room, they were gentle and giant spirits standing on either side of me as I struggled to wake up, they were silent and steadying, as if to guide me, help me to stand up, to pull me along if I needed them to. I heard them snorting, pawing the ground, they were steady but anxious to get out and pull me along, they kept calling me to get up, get up. And they were in my head, in my heart. The second they took the respirator out of my throat, I gasped to the nurse, “let’s walk,” and we did, I shocked her by walking several times around the floor and in my mind, the horses were standing on either side of me, keeping me from falling. They gave me strength and power, they helped me walk all of those laps.

I can’t say I have usually believed in such things in my life, but open heart surgery, as the name implies, does open you up, death is also dancing around the room and the surgery, he is tiptoeing around the edges, showing himself fleetingly, then vanishing. He gets you focused on the things you ought to be focused on.

Seven months ago, the horses came to me and said they had come to urge me to speak for them and about them, but this visit was different. They just came to show me they were there, and to remind me to remember them and to work to keep them in our world. You were there for us, we are here for you.

The thing about all of these messages – every one – is that they are each healing in their own way. They connect me to the world I nearly left in the past few months, they remind me that what the spiritualists say is true. We are all one, we are all connected to one another.