Women's Lifestyle September 15, 2026 0 Comments

How Seven Years After Losing My Husband, a Shocking Health Crisis Nearly Took My Son Too—And What It Taught Me About Fighting Back

Ever wonder how life can go from totally normal to utterly chaotic in the blink of an eye? On a bright September morning in New Haven, my 19-year-old son Simon was just like any other college junior—attending class, feeling fine—until suddenly, he wasn’t. A heart attack hit him without warning, a brutal “widow-maker” clot blocking his artery. No history, no signs, just sheer terror and pain. It’s not every day you get a wake-up call like that, especially when you think heart attacks only happen to “others.” What makes this story hit deeper? It’s tangled with loss, mystery, and relentless hope tied to the heart of a family that knows all too well the shadow of death—because Simon’s father, my late husband Ficre, also succumbed to a heart attack years before. Yet here we are, still grappling with “why?”—a puzzle wrapped in DNA, memories, and the streets of New Haven where love and resilience live side by side. This isn’t just an 8-minute read; it’s a raw dive into survival, science, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and her sons. Ready for a story that punches you hard and lifts you even higher? Let’s jump in. LEARN MORE

8 min read

On September 4, 2019, my younger son, Simon, had a heart attack, in New Haven, Connecticut, on Broadway, one bright sunny morning after a class at the start of his junior year in college. He was 19 years old. He had no history of illness of any kind. One step he was feeling normal. The next step he was having a heart attack, though he did not know it at the time, only that he was experiencing overwhelming pain and terror, a story that is his to tell in full. He somehow made his way to his apartment building and up three flights of stairs, where his roommates—who are now, forever, my sons too—rushed him first to student health and then to Yale New Haven Hospital, where my other son met him. The doctors saved his life. He spent days first in cardiac intensive care and then in the cardiac unit.

As we moved through the crisis, we learned what happened: His left anterior descending artery was suddenly and completely blocked, with a blood clot of still uncertain origin. This type of heart attack is known as “the widow-maker,” we were told many times. My son Simon could have died. He almost died. He did not die. We still do not know why it happened.

My late husband, Ficre, was pronounced dead of a massive heart attack at Yale New Haven Hospital on April 4, 2012. The heart attack happened at home. We later learned he was dead before he hit the ground, but the doctors and nurses at the hospital tried all they could to save him, before my eyes, as I anchored myself with my hand on my husband’s left calf, willing life from my body into his. I could not save him; he could not be saved. And so his DNA has now been tested—having made its way through bureaucracy and pandemic-related delays—to see if there is any clue that might be relevant to this very different but eerily resonant cardiac event in his son. Ficre died at fifty, a longtime smoker with high cholesterol whose
arteries were almost completely blocked with plaque, though he felt healthy. Young Simon had whistle-clean arteries and the heart attack was caused by a single clot.

My older son, Solomon—the two were in college together—ran through New Haven to the hospital to his brother before we knew exactly what was happening, called me with steady authority in his voice and said “I need you not to freak out, Mom,” and told me Simon was in with the doctor—having the clot blasted out of the artery, we later learned. Simon was having his life saved when Solo called, but we did not know that. While I was in the car on the way from New York the doctor emerged from the procedure room and Solo put us all on the phone together. Your son had a major heart attack, he got here just in time, it was very, very serious, we removed the blood clot with angioplasty, your son is resting, your son Simon is alive and will recover.

Here we were again, the same hospital, staring death in its shaggy, monstrous face. When I arrived there one of the nurses in cardiac intensive care touched my arm and steadied me. “I remember those boys,” she said. “I remember those boys when their father died. I remember you with those boys, telling them their father died. All of us
nurses were crying. We see sad things every day, but somehow that was the saddest thing we had ever seen.” I have held on to that story as evidence that sometimes the energy of intense love is visible to others.

The formation of the clot that completely blocked Simon’s artery remains a mystery. We have received opinions from brilliant and kind professionals at multiple institutions who give this strange story their time and expertise. Each time, we end up at the phrase, We may never know. Simon’s treatment has been successful and—knock wood, spit spit—he is truly healthy six years later. He made his peace with not knowing long before I did. I still have not, not completely. I will never not want—not need—to know why. Because why means we can keep it from happening again, I tell myself. Why will keep my child safe. Why will keep my other child safe. In why is the answer, the power.

So that is why I had Ficre’s DNA tested. Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic halted everything, I was in Chicago, walking through a department store looking for winter boots because I had unexpectedly been caught in a storm on a work trip. Simon’s cardiologist called me. She told me that the hospital keeps tissue samples of people who have died there, and that she has checked and found they have a sample from Ficre, and she thinks we should have a genetic analysis. I imagine a tiny Ficre sealed forever in a test tube, sleeping in his jeans and favorite lime green sweater with a smile on his face. I imagine, horribly, a chunk of flesh in an aldehyde that keeps it from rotting. I imagine a slip of paper with codes on it, infinite numbers and symbols representing his DNA.

Ficre would do almost anything for most people, but anything at all for his children. When they were babies, he would chew their food to soften it for them, like a penguin mother. Later he fed them delicious morsels of bread dipped in cream-topped yogurt or his freshly made Bolognese sauce. He never did not have time for them. It was like him to reach back from the dead nine years after to try, with this tiny streak of information-filled blood, to help solve the still unsolved mystery of what happened to Simon.

Ficre himself is still in New Haven. I see him on every street corner when I go back there. It is a good feeling to see him everywhere I saw him and to remember. Here you picked me up when the car was towed because I got too many tickets. Here you brought me a takeout cappuccino, by surprise. Here you came around the corner and we literally bumped into each other and laughed with joy at the unexpected encounter. Here you fell off your bicycle years before we met and cut your head badly, which left a ribbed scar your children would one day trace and ask you to tell the story, again and again. Here is the converted cash register factory where we first lived in your painting studio and were once driven out by fire. Here across the street is the closed firehouse we wanted to convert into a cultural center and café. Here is where you always gave Margaret or Junior a dollar and some chat. Here is where while walking we first encountered danger, and you tightened your hold on my arm and rerouted us, keeping warning eye contact with the people who would harm us. Here is where an accidentally unbuckled Solo popped out of the stroller as it rolled over a large rock hidden by leaves, and lightning quick, you caught him. Here is where you waved at me outside my office window. Here is where you used to wait to pick me up. Here are the sites of Cutler’s Records, York Square Cinema, places you loved that now are gone. Some errands you loved: green market, fish market, The Owl Shop for smokes. Some you did not: bank, Stop and Shop, cobbler. Here are the places where we did those things, together and apart and mostly together. Ficre’s body is in the Grove Street Cemetery, as far as can be from Asmara. He is buried beneath a gravestone etched with an image from an angel in one of his paintings and a bench with a line of Derek Walcott’s poetry he loved: “Oh, Beauty, you are the light of the world.” One son visits and talks to him from time to time; the other says, Daddy’s not there. He is everywhere. There is an empty plot next to his and a certificate of ownership in my files that says that is where I will one day lie down forever.

When the testing on Ficre’s DNA was complete, I found myself on the phone with a geneticist at the hospital. “We have found one genetic variant of uncertain significance,” she said, “for Von Willebrand disease.” She spelled it out for me twice. I Googled as she continued speaking. “It is a bleeding disease. There is one paper that suggests it can lead to thrombus, but it is only one paper and likely irrelevant.”

She emphasized that my husband had one variant and in order to have the disease, or to pass it on, you would need two. I asked many questions and learned that this was one variant floating in the 30,000 some genes in the human genome. Not acting, not meaning, just floating, it appears. It explains nothing about Simon’s “event” nor anything new about Ficre’s death or his life, for that matter. It is what is called a floater gene variant in Ficre’s genetic chain. And this genetic mutation does not show up in Simon. It is not even present to tell us the nothing it would tell us if it were. It is a red herring in the story of Simon, and in this story. I turn this information every which way. I ache for it to have meaning. But it seems to have none.

And yet, being a poet means making meaning of small things and seeing meaning that is not at first evident. The meaning is not to be found in the DNA. The meaning is to be found in New Haven, Connecticut, the city that called two people from across the earth to find each other and make a family and holds us in memory in its streets and in our bodies. New Haven is the city that my sons and I left, that they returned to, a year apart, to be educated, for a little bit longer, living together as brothers, where Simon almost died, where Simon got well, and where there was a clue their father left behind to try his best to unravel the mystery. New Haven is where two young men would learn at nineteen and twenty-one about second and third chances and their own resilience, and where I would uneasily but once and for all learn as a mother that my sons must survive outside my body. I can say I gave them life but I cannot protect them from lightning bolts. Meeting death directly not once but twice leaves you knowing in your body that the earth has sinkholes. It also leaves you knowing that you can survive many things. From here the story is Simon’s to tell, and he has already begun to tell it in writing.

This is a mother’s tale.