HEART OF MY HEART

HEART OF MY HEART
LKW

I was five the first time a boy stomped on my heart.
He divorced me two weeks after our recess wedding on the playground and I thought I’d never get over it. When I told my mother, she didn’t say a word. She just picked up the phonebook and called his mother. I giggled on her lap. Already, the pain was fading.

***

The next time my heart broke I was 14. I don’t remember how it happened; I just remember how awful it felt, the days fading into one long grey streak. Self-doubt consumed me as I tried desperately to figure out what I had done wrong. One afternoon, my mother joined me on the couch. She cradled me like a baby, rocked me back and forth, and stroked my hair. I cried awful, hiccupping sobs. I cried so hard I could barely breathe, so hard it sounded like I was dying, gasping for breath.
As she wiped the streaks of mascara from my cheeks, I was surprised to see sadness in her face. "What's wrong Mama?" I asked.
"Heart of my heart," she said softly, "Don't you understand? When you hurt, I hurt. Your pain is no different from my own."

***

Ten years later, I held her hand carefully, trying not to interfere with any of the IV tubes. Around me things beeped, gurgled and swished, an onomatopoetic paradise. It was 9 a.m. on Valentine's Day, 2010, and I had left the apartment so fast that I had forgotten socks. Her brain had started bleeding, and no one knew why. They were able to fix it, but no one knew the extent of the damage. I couldn't think about it, it was too painful. An hour earlier, when the surgeon had come to talk to my father, I had fainted in the middle of the hallway. No one had noticed.

When she woke up it was worse. Seeing her helpless was nothing that could adequately be described in words. The helplessness I felt was worse. I saw her in there, trapped behind swollen eyelids and a bruised mind. She writhed in the cheap hospital sheets, trying to hurl herself off the bed. My mother, who couldn’t sit through a half-hour sitcom in our den without getting up at least five times to do various things, was confined to a bed. There was a falseness to the situation, a bad aftertaste like cheap soda leaves on your tongue.

She couldn’t talk for days. When she could talk, it was in bits and pieces. My mother, the woman who instilled a love of words in me, could only say about ten of them. It nearly killed me, seeing her like that. “I…” she would trail off. “I just can’t… I don’t… I…” I didn’t know if she wanted me to stay or leave. I didn’t know if I should make flashcards and have her point. I didn’t know how to help. I’ve never felt so powerless in my entire life. I felt like my soul was going to faint, and leave my body standing there, staring, vacant, not knowing what to do.

As time passed, she spoke more fluently, but there was still a halting quality to her sentences, as if she needed an extra second here and there to find the words. Every time she stopped, every idea she couldn't say, tore away at me in little pieces. Every time her eyes sparked with an idea and then welled up with tears when she couldn't express it, pain consumed me somewhere between my chest and shoulders.

A week later, she was doing what the doctors called “waxing and waning.” Some days she could talk almost normally, and some days she could barely get a sentence out. On one of her good days, she told me it was like being imprisoned in her own mind, and we cried. She said, over and over, “There’s no way you could ever know how awful it was,” and she was right: I’d never had brain surgery; technically, I didn’t know what it was like.

What I couldn’t figure out how to tell her was that I did know. The way it felt, watching her, helpless, was a kind of torture I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It felt like being ripped in half. I thought of all the times she told me she felt my pain, all the times she cried when I was the one breaking, and right then I realized what she had meant. Never before had I wanted, so much, to take someone else’s pain. I wanted to lie down in the bed next to her and have her pain transferred to me, injected into me in huge doses, pushed into my body by IV, to get it out of hers. When I was 14 she told me she could feel my pain, and it took me until 24 to realize that link went both ways. Heart of my heart. I finally understood.
I don’t know if I’ll become a parent anytime soon. I don’t think I’m strong enough to take on a lifetime of feeling my child’s pain, a lifetime of wishing that pain was inflicted on me instead. If I can, one day, I will.

***

Wouldn’t it be the greatest gift of all, to truly take on someone else’s pain?
If only we could.