There should be a recognizable sound when it happens. When a dish drops, its pieces scattering helter-skelter across the floor, there is a familiar sound that accompanies it. It is a crash so crisp and clear that you reflexively look down to make sure you aren’t about to step on a jagged edge. When the limb of a tree breaks off, it makes a sound like a rifle firing– loud and sharp. A few years ago we had a terrible ice storm in our city. The night it came in, I opened my back door to watch as the landscape was being transformed. In the still, frozen, black air I listened to the ice shots ringing through the neighborhood as the tree limbs fell like the wounded in battle. It was unforgettable.
But a broken heart, which should have its own recognizable sound so that both you and others know to watch out for its flying shards or avoid its falling limbs, makes no noise at all. At least it makes none that we can distinguish. Only the broken-hearted can hear it and for a long time after the break, they hear little else.
Modern medicine has confirmed that hearts do indeed break, even without an accompanying noise for confirmation. “Broken-heart syndrome,” previously known in medical circles as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, has symptoms similar to those of a regular heart attack. The big difference is that it isn’t caused by blocked arteries or bad cholesterol or heredity. This heart attack occurs when intense emotion overwhelms someone to the point that their body sends out an overload of adrenaline that temporarily freezes the heart muscle. The left ventricle of the heart actually changes shape—it “breaks.” The whole process is kind of like being hit with an emotional stun gun.
While “broken-heart syndrome” is relatively rare, and mostly occurs in post-menopausal women, what if it is significant for all of us? Maybe broken heart syndrome has little to do with the changes occurring in women’s bodies during a particular time of life. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that by the time a woman is losing hormones, she has developed the ability to truly love. While love may begin with a look or a kiss, maybe only those who keep their hearts open and forgiving for years develop the capacity to love deeply.
I’m simply saying that the more you practice loving others, the bigger your capacity to love becomes. If the price of loving that much and that long is that our hearts can be stunned temporarily, well, that’s probably not much of a cost considering all we get from loving. It’s probably not much of a surprise either. Maybe the intense loving is worth the deep breaking—and the only way to know for sure how much love you have is to lose some of it from time to time.
So, if you are grieving, if you have felt the sting of adrenaline and the temporary numbness of heart that goes with it, don’t despair. According to doctors, clogged artery heart attacks may cause permanent damage but broken heart syndrome rarely leaves irreversible harm. It is closing our hearts that causes lasting harm. Keeping your heart open may mean it can be broken, but it also means it may have a much better chance of beating strong again in the future.