Broken Heart Syndrome
Hello friend,
There have been numerous versions of this post that I’ve wanted to write and even started a few, but they were too salty for public consumption. Anyway, all I wanted to do was hate on masks, which wasn’t going to help anyone. Probably just make all the breathing problems worse.
It’s an expedited form of growing up to realize this pandemic has put us in a position of hard choices. Some of us simply haven’t had to make these kinds of decisions before because we had options and resources which allowed us to remain passive, but because this thing has been no respecter of persons it has tested even the more privileged individuals and nations.
It’s probably the first time for many Gen X’ers, Millennials, and younger that our lives have been this reduced — brought to a place where our world and way of life is threatened. It may even be for some Boomers, considering how young they might have been for the height of Cold War tensions.
We’ve worked hard at modern technology to put layers and options between us and what seems an arbitrary universe, and though nature is a wild beast of it, civilization, tech and culture have done a fair job at taming it.
Until this popped up in a time of globalization and everything flew back out of our control, with updates every 30 seconds or so. Not the virus itself, of course, it doesn’t have a scary death rate, but the response of the people around us in dealing with it. The virus itself will run the course every other virus has had to run. Nature has checks and balances, even if they are cruel to us.
Possibly a greater frustration for everyone, no matter what you believe about the effects of the virus itself, has been the second-hand, conflicted response of humans. We either can’t believe someone could be so driven by fear, or we can’t believe that someone could be so disrespectful of the fears or health of their neighbor.
At this point, there is no doing away with the frustration except by personal choice. We can’t force the pandemic go away, which has been a big surprise to the billions of people who were more controlling about life than they thought they were previously. We can’t decide what our neighbor should think or do with health, and somehow we all got stuck on this planet together with our disagreements.
Yet we are tasked with stewarding of the earth so the burden of some kind of response lies with us. It is within humans to fight, either with courage and truth, or with fear and facts. While it is true that the virus can be dealt with using facts, either previous ones, or ones emerging — people cannot.
We have all had a crash course in how facts are rendered useless in the irrationality of fear and falsehood. Now, let me be clear. I do not mean falsehood in the sense of someone choosing to deliberately lie. Someone may prioritize honesty and build their life on lies. It is easier to do that than you may think, even if you grew up religious or intellectual (and those two are nearer than they seem). The things which form the foundation of how we understand the world are nearly always cracked and faulty. The only remedy for that is trust and surrender to God, and he does the work of restoration. The same is true of our work in the world. We may be lovers of truth, but we can’t fix this world.
Let us be extremely practical for a moment, because as of yet we’re floating in the Sea of Abstract.
THE REAL, THE PAINFUL REAL
I lost my uncle a few weeks ago. He was hospitalized twice, the first time when he tested positive for The Thing and the second time where it came back negative. He died anyway. The doctor told my cousin that in the end he believes it was ‘broken heart syndrome’ because my uncle had to be alone, away from his family.
Johns Hopkins defines BHS this way:
Stress cardiomyopathy, also referred to as the “broken heart syndrome,” is a condition in which intense emotional or physical stress can cause rapid and severe heart muscle weakness (cardiomyopathy). This condition can occur following a variety of emotional stressors such as grief (e.g. death of a loved one), fear, extreme anger, and surprise. It can also occur following numerous physical stressors to the body such as stroke, seizure, difficulty breathing (such as a flare of asthma or emphysema), or significant bleeding.
When I heard this I parted ways with the political systemic response to COVID, I say political because the medical protocol has been largely guided by politics. This is evidenced in one simple fact; face coverings were mandated from a political seat, not a peer-reviewed recommendation or request by health professionals. It was not the business of politics to leverage their position in this way. A few with political/medical intertwining spoke, and it was so to either align with or against — but this will be my last reference to that debacle.
My interest in COVID now is much more personal.
My uncle was a man who was loving, and loved. Out of a culture of emotional numbness he was one man I knew who knew how to feel, and yet to live with uprightness. His heart and feelings informed him and yet he lived by the truth. That’s a rare combination of wholeness.
He was probably the first man to ever give me a hug. I did not grow up hugging people, not even my family. You shook hands, at best. My family was sincere and lovely, but in many ways emotionally disconnected. What’s worse, we didn’t even know it.
So was I as an individual, until Uncle Earl started making me uncomfortable. Let me be perfectly clear. It was not at all in a way which crossed boundaries or was creepy. There are two kinds of discomfort. There is the one which indicates possible violation, and there is one which introduces love.
This one introduced love. He saw people. He cared. I was used to being cared for physically and spiritually but not emotionally, which turns out to be a lynch pin in understanding both those things… and vice versa. That is what I know now, but then it wasn’t even on my radar.
Probably everyone says the dearly departed had a big heart and sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn’t. In this case, even as an impartial bystander, it would be true. He was not a stranger to hearts. Uncle Earl was in some ways a second dad to me. He could also play harmonica and guitar at the same time which fascinated me. How even?
In later years his wife entered significant mental distress. There were some mistreatment for her, and much stress and trial for their whole family. He told my sister-in-law in June (at Grandma’s funeral) that he and his wife always wanted to travel, but when they were younger they had no money and little kids and didn’t. Now they had money, but her health didn’t permit it. That was the last I saw him, and I didn’t get to hug him because we saw each other in the Old Order church and it’s just not done there. This was something I was unable to reconcile until I remembered we would see each other again on the other side and there are no cultural inhibitions against hugs there.
He wasn’t a perfect man, which is the temptation for everyone to fall into when speaking of people who have died. Because their life is now in the perfect past tense (meaning completed, finished, etc) we see them perfectly, forgetting they had a similar set of progressive decisions to make in life just as we do. It’s kind of like when everything the hero or heroine does in a book is adorable, even when that way of flossing your teeth would drive any normal person insane. Somehow it’s redeemed in the light of something that isn’t happening now.
When a life is put in past tense it’s so easy to ignore the difficult chapters of the book and see the light spilling through cracks. In some ways, that’s good. In another way it’s dangerous because those of us still living may forget to remember that every human has to make choices without the benefit of hindsight. We may start living from a place of death rather than life.
Taking into consideration both his humanity and how much Uncle Earl sacrificed for his family, and other families, it is devastating to know he was forced to die alone. My coworker too, lost the opportunity to say goodbye to his mother.
Intimacy (or proximity) with these griefs forces me to acknowledge that our response to COVID in some part has been heartless and tragic. Is it a basic human trampling of rights to dictate that people must die alone? The question, when answered for a greater good, says that one person may sacrifice themselves for the sake of more. This, however, was not a question my uncle was allowed to answer. Had he chosen to die alone it would have been different. He was never given the option.
We believe he died alone, of a broken heart. You can die of a broken heart after all. I never used to believe it, preferring instead the line from an Elizabeth Gaskell classic:
Nay nay, it’s not that easy to break your heart. Sometimes I wish it was.
Broken hearts are a serious stain to have on our hands. Broken health is also serious, but unless the conspiracy theorists are somehow right, probably this virus is a freak of nature instead of humanity. But breaking human hearts, that’s a freak of humanity. No virus has that power.
I have been studying loneliness now for over a year. If there is one thing that the human heart cannot stand it is isolation and loneliness. In our answers, we should never choose total disconnection. We may be selective, we may be cautious, we may even seek solitude for a time, but we should never find an answer in isolation. It is wrong, it is dangerous. Even in the epidemics of the past, through quarantine, family was still allowed to be there. Those virus’ had a much higher death rate, and yet here we are with people dying alone.
I was silent about this for months, but for me the silence is broken.
No one should die alone by political mandate, or indeed by anyone’s mandate. Even soldiers, in the dangers of war, do not let a fellow soldier die alone if it can be helped.
I don’t know the primary doctor with my uncle, but I don’t blame him. He’s caught in a crossfire as well. Most of my ire today is directed at a systemic response to fear which has trampled many individuals already. In our greater good, we have forgotten how to put ourselves in danger’s way for someone else.
THE REAL, THE BEAUTIFUL REAL
A friend loaned me Andy Crouch’s wonderful book about Culture Making. It has been revelatory to me, to say the least. In it, he speaks of how the Christian church gained prominence so quickly from the time of Acts to the time of Constantine when the church was big enough to have gained a culture majority. What miracle was this?
We can all agree it was supernatural, but Andy uncovered a surprising fact about the early church I didn’t know. In the first centuries after Jesus’ death there were several debilitating epidemics which swept the known world. People were dying right and left, and those who could fled for their lives to the countryside. Guess who stayed behind to take care of the sick and dying? You got it, the Christians did. In this work, and especially during this time, it’s easy to see how the adherence to hope and faith in the face of so much death became an irresistible witness. Christianity spread so much more quickly then it might otherwise have done to healthy and satisfied people.
It is the dilemma of humans, no? You want to see change for good, but it often comes through a devastation of our comfort and life. Yet, it is within us to fight for peace and prosperity. It is coded into our hearts to be together in harmony. A “virus” called sin has really disrupted our ability to do that, and we became disconnected and apart from God. Alone.
The thing which stands between us and re-connection to God is a personal choice. No one can or ought to try and make this choice for us. Paradoxically, the one way we usually become open to a choice of this magnitude is through proximity to people.
As I thought about all this it hit me that in this pandemic the last thing I can do as a Christian is to perpetuate isolation. Now, don’t mistake me. I don’t mean to gather larges masses of people and preach to them, and then send them all home with COVID. Good grief no. I mean that in individual interactions I dare not withdraw.
I went to my local coffee hang this morning to try to catch up on journaling my personal life (which has been a two star roller coaster ride recently) and not at all sure that 45 minutes would be enough. I started it though, because that’s all any of us can do, and got about 30 minutes in when a man came and sat down in the alley across from me. We chatted a bit because he didn’t want to sit on a wet chair cushion, so I told him how I flipped mine over and it was still dry.
We kept chatting as he told me he comes to the coffee shop because the pain in his shoulder wakes him up around 4-5 am. Instantly I knew the voice of the Holy Spirit saying, “ya gots to pray for him.” (the Holy Spirit knows I respond better to casual <grins>) Truthfully, I can’t remember the words, but the injunction was clear. Pray for the man’s shoulder. Dang it, I really didn’t want to be that weird person, but after a few minutes I laid aside my reluctance to look stupid and told him that I had to go soon, and I knew it was strange, but could I pray for his shoulder?
He looked at me squarely and said, “that’s not strange at all! But do you pray in the name of Jesus?”
I replied, “yes, I do.”
I stood there awkwardly because usually when I pray for people it’s hands on. Touch is so important as a connection, but I’m also aware of our cultural (and pandemic) inhibitions around it and hesitated; he took care of it for me.
He said, “ok, take my hand and you pray.”
So here I am, holding the hand of a perfect stranger, asking God for whatever he wanted me to pray over this man. I listened, and prayed accordingly
I went on my way, forgetting to ask if the pain was gone. But it doesn’t really matter at this point. I know it is. He might still have his injury, I didn’t pray for God to take that away because God didn’t tell me to pray for that. He said to pray for relief, so that’s what got asked. God said to pray for better sleep, so that’s what got asked.
You guys, that wasn’t a coincidence. Did you know the word coincidence doesn’t even exist in the Hebrew? The concept just isn’t there.
And it’s not there for me either.
It is not a coincidence that we are on this planet. We are put here for a reason, together, and I will have no more of mandated isolation. It is not my intention to flaunt my government, but neither will I be party to such techniques of isolation. I am here for such a time as this, and I intend to love and care for the people around me.
My uncle did not die in vain.
Jesus especially did not die in vain.
There’s some stuff that needs to go to hell where it belongs.
Begone, isolation.
Now, remember, it is I who sends you out, even though you feel vulnerable as lambs going into a pack of wolves. So be as shrewd as snakes yet as harmless as doves.” Matt 10:16
Love,
L. Raine
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