Before my 19-year-old son di3d, he donated his heart to an 18-year-old girl — after the transplant, her mother handed me a letter from my son that began, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”

And she went through all four. And at the end she closed the last one and sat back and said: “He looks nice.”

And I said: “He was, mostly. That was the problem.”

And she nodded, and said, “Right,” and did not ask to take any.

And the last thing.

In the February, on the anniversary, she asked me if I wanted to listen.

I had not asked. I would never have asked. I did not know it was a thing people did until the transplant coordinator mentioned it, carefully, about a year ago, and I said no thank you.

But Lena asked me. On the doorstep, with her coat still on, as if she had been rehearsing it in the car.

And we went into my front room, and she sat on the sofa and I sat next to her, and she gave me the stethoscope she had borrowed from her clinic.