Reverse Remodeling my Heart

some thoughts on memory. and paint.

I recently stood with my daughter in my local Sherwin Williams, choosing paint for her living room in the small row house she shares with her housemate. When the cashier asked if we had an account, I gave her my phone number, but unlike the many many times I have purchased paint at this store before—often to paint my daughter’s bedroom when she was growing up—it was she who pulled out her credit card to pay. At 26, working on her second masters and completing her first semester as a public school teacher, my baby girl is now quite the adult. I was exactly her age when her other mom and I bought the house she grew up in, the house I remodeled and redecorated so many times and over so many years that I had actually forgotten some of them until my daughter was regaling her housemate with stories of the various iterations of her childhood bedrooms.

I left that house behind when I left my first marriage to my kids’ other mom. It was a painfully messy divorce in which my ex-wife got “custody” of our family home and our entire wide-ranging community. It wasn’t how it was meant to go, and for years the shock of it stunned me. Broke my heart. I was unmoored, home-less—not unhoused, I always had a roof over my head—but still very much without the sense of home I had painstakingly embraced as my vocation for most of my adult life until then. There is much that I regret about those messy years, but what I don’t regret is leaving in the first place. That was a courageous and necessary act of survival on my part … but I still often find myself stunned. And still heartbroken.

But this side of that rubicon, the only thing I really miss (other than, maybe, our epic family car trips to beautiful places far from the city)—the one painful casualty that doesn’t fade with time but instead grows more and more acute—is having lost all connection to the people who can tell me stories of my past, and the places and rituals that might serve as Proustian madeleines, evoking the sense of what it was like to be me in other eras of my life. The divorce now feels like a fulcrum, and the me of before, five whole decades of her, now often feels more like a movie I once watched, and less like a flesh-and-blood life that I actually lived. 

My memory has never been great, but how could I have forgotten that I once painted my daughter’s bedroom with a blue ceiling that wrapped down the walls about a foot, and green walls, and a beige floor, inspired by the blue sky and sea, the green salt marshes, and the sandy dunes and beaches of our favorite family vacation spot? I wonder what other rooms I painted in colors I’ve now forgotten, what quilts did I sew, what gardens did I grow, what meals did I prepare, long before I ever thought of myself as an artist and my home as my canvas?

Who can remind me now of the forgotten versions of myself that I was then? 

Perhaps I am feeling these questions more acutely these days because of my recent diagnosis of heart failure. My cardiologist has assured me that it is possible I could still live a normal lifespan; but when one has had a fairly charmed life of good health, being told one’s heart is working at only a quarter of its capacity is bound to make one reflect a bit more deeply on one’s mortality.

And by one, of course, I mean me.

I am finding that my heart failure diagnosis in late middle age has me taking stock of my life, and wondering, what has it all amounted to? One of the biggest challenges in making some sense of it all is this problem of memory. Lately Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” makes me cry every time I listen to it, but in many ways my problem is the opposite: I don’t remember well enough.

In the world of heart failure where I now reside, my doctors speak of “cardiac remodeling.” Unlike the home renovations my daughter is doing, cardiac remodeling is a decidedly *bad* thing—more like some terrible house-flipping show on HGTV that turns a perfectly lovely little cottage into a McMansion, tearing out all the period architectural detail, slapping on tacky cathedral-ceilinged additions, and leaving ugly vinyl scars where the original wooden windows used to be. This “remodeling” is precisely what all the treatments I am on—the four medications, the low-sodium diet, the pacemaker—are meant to slow down, or even stop. In the best of all worlds, we can even hope for what they call “reverse remodeling”—a return to the size and shape and capacity of my heart before disease began its crass and unlovely renovations. 

It felt very much like a full-circle moment, to be standing in the same paint store with my daughter, decades after I picked the paint for her nursery (pale yellow, I do remember that!). On a previous trip we had purchased three tester pots, one a very light and bright blue-green, another a light teal, and the third a pale muted blue with a gray undertone. I surprised myself by counseling my daughter and her housemate toward the muted blue-gray, which was not a color I would probably choose for myself, but which really seemed to suit their space, a light-drenched room that they wanted to feel calm and open and airy.

This post is not sponsored by Sherwin Williams!

They were hosting a book group for brunch in a week and were very eager to transform their we-graduated-from-college-in-the-midst-of-the-pandemic rental house from landlord-beige-with-grimy-used-oversized-furniture into a lovely young adult space in which they can feel excited to entertain friends. With the landlord’s permission (it never hurts to ask!) we spent a day together painting the walls blue, and then went to Ikea for a rug, some throw-pillows, and a few plants. My daughter bought a couch online and put it together herself. I donated a chair and some art.

It was lovely to once again be creating a home for my daughter, but this time simply in an advisory/worker-bee capacity. It was especially lovely to hear my daughter declare how satisfying it was to create such a dramatic transformation of their space with their own hands. Over the next few months, she has her first summer break as a bona fide public school teacher, and we plan to transform the rest of the house as well.¹

When the Sherwin Willians cashier asked if I had an account, it suddenly occurred to me that they have a record right there in their computer of every can of Sherwin Williams paint I have ever bought. I bet if I asked, I could get a print-out of every color I have used in a lifetime of home renovations.² All those colors of my homemaking from the other side of the fulcrum of my divorce—before grief and loss remodeled my heart in the very most ugly of ways. I doubt I will ever ask them for the list, but its mere existence makes more memory feel possible, which is oddly comforting.

But even that is nothing compared to making a home again with and for my daughter, which has truly been the medicine that is reverse-remodeling my broken heart these days.

1. I don’t yet have many photos, or permission to share them, but let me know if you’d like to see the progress and I’ll talk to my daughter and her housemate.

2. It’s possible that some of them were Behr, before I realized you really do get what you pay for with paint; and recently I have expanded to Benjamin Moore and Farrow and Ball, but that’s all post-divorce and so this side of memory.