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My husband's open-heart surgery fell on March 12, the day the hospital closed to visitors. Michael came home five days later, a purple suction pump taped to his chest. The pump sucked moisture from the man-made wound splitting his ribs. Whoosh-click, whoosh-click. I buried my grief in the garden. There was little hope to be had elsewhere; I feared we might need to live off the food I grew. In the garden, I learned the taproot of human is humus—we are people of the loam—which explains why I felt calmer, more connected, when I plunged my hands into the earth. I couldn't hug friends, but I could stroke the floppy grass-green tops of onions with my bare fingers, soak their skins in my unspent affection. When they ripened, the juicy white baubles were sweet as apples. I bit into them, raw, and thought: This is what love tastes like. Millennia before my ancestors sautéed onions—cipolla, the Italian derivative of the Latin species name, Allium cepa—ancient Egyptians hung garlands of onions on their rulers' tombs for protection in the underworld. Onions, a symbol of wholeness. Eternity in layers. Patty Duke compared onions to forgiveness, suggesting that we start with others before attempting the harder work of going inside ourselves. In Western culture, crying in public isn't socially acceptable except when slicing onions. A cut onion releases sulfuric acid which is acted upon by an enzyme—lacrimatory factor synthase (lachrymal = tears)—that produces syn-Propanethial-S-oxide, a volatile liquid expressed as a gas. A biological weapon. Sensory neurons in the eye produce tears that clear the irritant. An onion's pH is 5.5, meaning it is acidic, while the average pH of a human being is 7.4, meaning human tears are slightly basic. The composition of our tears shifts with its source. Emotional tears flush hormones and toxins from the body, which is why a good cry feels cathartic. Our blindness cured by tears and dirt. I broke down in the waiting room when the surgeon said he needed to operate on Michael a second time—this after an eight-hour surgery. The surgeon suspected Michael was bleeding internally based on the copious crimson fluids seeping from his chest drains. He told me to go home. There was nothing I could do. I felt the eyes of strangers on me as I wept, but I was too exhausted to cover my sadness. No—actually, I wanted them to see. I couldn't cry when my mother died, blue and bloodless, before midnight, before Christmas. I was sixteen. At her funeral, her friends commended me for holding myself together, but it was shock not strength that kept me from falling apart. I've never forgiven myself for that. As he slept, intubated, in the purgatory of ICU, Michael's yellow hospital sock peeked out from the cloud of bedding, a sun setting or rising, no one would say. I went home and did pointless things. Lit candles. Fell to my knees and sobbed. Begged a faceless god for Michael's story to turn out differently from my mother's. She never cried when slicing onions; perhaps she was immune to their assault. I pictured the surgeon's gloved hands plunging into the loam of Michael's chest and thought, I should have fed him more onions. It makes no sense, why some bodies collapse beneath a single flaw, one encoded aberration repeated a million times until the layers fold in on themselves. After nine p.m. I got the call: Michael survived. I struggled to believe it was true, that he was for keeps. The surgeon had told me exactly what I wanted to hear.

N.B.: 1. The diagram is an imagined chimera of two molecules present in onions: quercetin, a powerful flavonoid found to have beneficial effects in people with cancer and cardiovascular disease, and syn-Propanethial-S-oxide, a volatile irritant produced by a chain of chemical reactions that serves as an onion's defense mechanism. 2. The sentence that begins "It's toughest to forgive ourselves" is attributed to Patty Duke.

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This piece is part of a larger project called A. refuge, a hybrid collection of flash essays and visual collages that examines the relationship between American loneliness, ancestry, individualism, and nature. I call it an unwinding and reweaving of self from elemental forms. By breaking ideas down into atomic parts, I'm inviting the reader to consider the way they perceive the self and their biological connections to the earth, other living creatures, and the environment we share. If she were alive, my mother would be relieved to know I've finally found an outlet for those years of study in molecular and cellular biology!