A Good Death

Adina Talve-Goodman lived with an awareness of her own mortality that most of us will never approximate. Born with a single-ventricle heart and pulmonary atresia—a condition where the valve that controls blood flow from the heart to the lungs doesn’t form—she had two surgeries in her first week of life alone. By four, she had undergone two open-heart operations; by twelve, she was in heart failure. “I was a happy kid even though I did not know what wellness felt like,” Talve-Goodman explains. After spending nearly two years on the waiting list for a new heart—a process she describes as “an exercise in how close you can get to death”—she received a transplant in 2006, at the age of nineteen. With her new heart, she adjusted to blood that coursed quickly through her body, pinking her previously pallid cheeks, affording her energy and strength she had never before known.