I have been thinking a lot lately about the things that break our hearts. I think every adult has experienced some form of sadness that continues to hurt them – loss, loneliness, infertility, marriage issues, sickness or sadness. For some, they are afflicted with more than one of these feelings – for others, one hurt has caused another, ending with something they hold close falling apart like a house of cards.
I have clear and distinct memories of the moments when I actually felt my heart break. I wonder if writing about them will dull the ragged edges. Time has softened, but sadly not removed, what has been lost.
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I was 24 and I was moving house. Packing up the rental I had shared with my sister and a friend for 12 months. Sarah had already gathered her things and hauled ass to a better, more exciting life in Brisbane. My sister had joined the ranks of the blissfully happy – having been married only the weekend before.
I had called my 50 year old father during the week and sweet talked him in to coming over and helping tame our out of control garden. The super-cute three bedroom cottage that I had fallen in love with had been hard to pass by – but three girls forgot to consider how much work is involved in outdoor maintenance (I still remember that cottage and wish I had never left it behind).
Mum and dad arrived bright and early - lugging a cache of gardening paraphernalia. I bounded outside, keen to get the dirty work over and done with. Maybe I could talk mum in to helping me pack up the kitchen while she was in a helping mood.
My memory starts to get a bit cloudy here. I remember us all heading into the sunny kitchen for a cup of tea. The three of us sitting down, I was making jokes about something as I often did – probably about the lack of food in house, or somehow blaming the other two girls for the deplorable state of the garden. Dad started the conversation, we knew he had been having some pain in his shoulder and had gone to the hospital to get it checked out. The news was back – it was advanced cancer, and it was not looking good. I can’t remember what else said, except that I distinctly remember my dad looking at me and saying “Linda - I’m dying”. Words a child, no matter what age, should never hear.
I don’t think I have ever cried like I did that day, and I pray that I never do again. When I heard the ‘c’ word my brain just shut down, trying to block the entrances to my psyche so the truth couldn’t worm its toxic way in there. My mum says it was almost biblical, the way I reacted. She likened it to how women in foreign countries would keen and wail for their dead. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t process. All I could do was look at a man who I had loved every day for 24 years, and try to imagine a world without him in it.
I guess I eventually calmed down a little. I asked Dad who would walk me down the aisle on my wedding day – a somewhat selfish question in retrospect (was this a precursor of how I would be for the coming years? Self-preservation is second nature for me now). I wanted to know what came next – treatment? prayer? desperate pleading with God for leniency? all of the above?
My brother and sister-in-law, Lara, arrived from Brisbane. They had been told the previous weekend. They were there so we could be sad and optimistic together. I hoped that fighting overwhelming grief could be strengthened with numbers. As Dad was already in pain, and my brother had a broken collarbone from a biking accident at the buck’s party weeks before, Lara, mum and I did the gardening while the men supervised.
It certainly wasn’t the way I thought the day would end when I woke that morning, I had been anticipating another unremarkable Saturday in a life that, up to then, had been tragedy free – unremarkable.
I think that was the day that my heart broke for the first time.
Sure I had experienced my share of teenage heart-break – the type that comes from the then ‘world-shattering’ pain at the end of a relationship that you had high hopes for, when your pet dies, or your best friend leaves you behind and moves on.
Nothing can compare to just how badly a grown-up heart can break. When this occurs nothing is ever the same. It’s like you join an exclusive club that no-one wants to be a part of – because life was so much simpler before ‘that day’.
I think every adult has their own version of ‘that day’. I think that in time we all recover sufficiently to limp on, but we leave a little of ourselves (our hearts) where they first broke.
