With the death of my husband Oliver, my life ended. My goals and aspirations all died with him on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. Ollie was an organ donor. His eyes, spinal cord, lungs, heart... my Ollie's organs were directed to save other lives. And then his heart, beating in the chest of another person, returned to me, and I was faced with an incredibly difficult choice: to continue to cling to the past, to the pain and the beauty of memories of the man I loved, or step towards a new future, knowing that every beat of his heart will be a reminder of everything I've lost.

***

I shouldn't was to live to be thirty. My grandfather died at forty-five. Heart failure. Father died at thirty-five. Heart failure. All my life, doctors told me that I would not see my thirty-first birthday. My heart will fail. It was just a matter of time: a rare blood type and an unusually large heart gave almost zero chance of a transplant. I proved everyone wrong... by dying on my thirty-first birthday. And then I woke up - alive, with another man's heart in breasts and a feeling of guilt before his widow. All my life I have been preparing for death, and now I must learn to live. But I soon discovered that living is not the most difficult thing. To love and allow yourself to be loved... that is what is most difficult.