I’ve been thinking about breaking hearts today. Partly because of yesterday’s song – a tale of rejection and unrequited love that resonates so strongly with me and partly because of the book I’ve just read. The title of this photo came to me when I realised I’d shot thirteen photos to get it how I wanted it!
I’ll come back to the book in a mo but for now a quick recap on my own broken heart tally. Four times is the number for me but only one is because of a lover. The remaining three have been for other reasons – two were related to the death of beings (both animals) close to me – big Bun and Tobes. More than five years since his loss, I still would give almost anything to stroke his head or to get home and have him leap in the air, licking my face like he always did. Big Bun’s loss was so painful simply because I’d never experienced loss or grieving before.
The third occasion was when I had to tell my folks that despite sticking my fingers in the ever increasing number of holes in the rapidly emptying bucket that was my marriage that I had failed where they had kept on working at it for forty odd years and never given up. How I beat myself up over that. Now of course, I realise that their circumstances were just so different. They always knew they loved each other, no matter how bad times were. I always knew my ex didn’t love me and so I eventually woke up to the miserable realisation that if I did nothing I would spend the rest of my life unhappy.
The first and only broken heart I have received as a lover came from having to force myself to walk away from someone whose love for me had evaporated. I could see it in his eyes when we were together, I knew what had triggered it dissolution and no matter how much I begged, cried and offered anything to be with him, I knew his love had gone so I realised I had to go to bring back my dignity and self-respect. I know now that I would NEVER do that to myself again – public self-flagellation and humiliation are not good for the soul – yesterday’s ‘do you remember the way you cried…..I’m your toy, I’m your old boy and I don’t want no-one but you to love me’ is what makes me cry.
But broken hearts mend. They’re made from muscle and it’s stretchy so sooner or later they heal. Mine have all healed but I doubt that I have seen the last time that I will have my heart broken. No-one is immune.
Other people get their hearts broken through the death of loved ones – again something I have seen at close hand this year very clearly indeed. Losing your child in this way for most of us is thankfully only an imaginary experience of the depths of anguish and suffering that bereaved parents experience.
The thing that’s prompted this photo though is a book I’ve just finished. I always carry a book in my handbag, along with my camera, so in a quiet moment I can pull it out and read. On the train a couple of weeks ago I pulled out my new book ‘Unless’ by Carol Shields, a Canadian author whose work I admire enormously. She writes with such sensitivity that her books are always a huge pleasure.
I got stuck into it and suddenly realised that I couldn’t read this one on the train – you know, those awful moments when you have to weep and you are doing it in front of fifty other passengers who look on in disbelief. The narrator, who is the matriarch of a family whose lives have been devastated because their nineteen year old daughter has dropped out of university, left her boyfriend and sits begging on a street corner in Toronto with a sign around her neck saying ‘goodness’. The girl blanks her family and their painful quest to understand why their bubbly, fun loving teenager has turned into this stranger is the meat of the book. The scene to which I refer is where the matriarch goes out to a bar and discovers blackboards in the toilets for graffiti – she chalks onto the board ‘My heart is broken’. Oh boy, did I weep at that one.
I’ve come across this before, within my family and close circle. The bewilderment of loving parents whose children reject them and shun normal life is so painful to watch. I don’t think the parents in one of the two cases I know of have ever got over the shock and misery of the experience and even now, some fifteen years or so after the events that triggered the withdrawal of their beautiful, intelligent daughter from the world, I still see the hurt in their eyes when they talk of her.
To lose your child is simply the worst thing a human being has to deal with but it adds an additional layer of misery when that person is alive and shuns you. I have never experienced such pain because I am not a mother but I have to assume it’s like the love of your life walking away. They eat, breathe, sleep and experience stuff that you can no longer be a part of because they won’t let you. For me, I liken it to that lick I was referring to earlier. I have to accept that won’t happen because I know for a fact that he’s gone – I was there and I scattered his ashes myself. But what if that lick was being given to someone else? Would I cope? I’m not sure I would.
