‘My mother wore her heart on her sleeve’, is based on a personal narrative, but opens the dialogue of the phenomenological, emotional and cultural impacts of organ transplants. The gift of life for one is the loss of life, the absence, for another. Notions of embodiment, kinship and identity play out between recipient and donor, often an anonymous process. Because the heart is thought to rest at the core of human selfhood, heart transplant patients not only take on a hybrid body, but a hybrid mind. The hearts significance as the archetypal symbol of love seems evident as heart recipients, and their families, often report shifts in personality. Heartache, heartfelt, heartless.