Heart Failure...A Love Story
"Let's get on with it..." - Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Windows open into the past, and I’m rolling down the hallway. The steel doors shine brightly, reflecting the intense lights of the hospital corridor. I’m three years old, and this is now my reality.
Frigid air finds its way underneath the white blankets. I register the cold, but I don’t know enough to be scared. In my life, I never learned to be scared, starting now: as the doctors leaned over me in preparation for the anesthetic.
After the operation and for the rest of my life, memories arrive in blocks of ice, frozen in images that tinkle in my head like ice cubes in a glass in the moment before the pouring of a drink.
My memories are sharp and jagged, randomly colliding with every movement of my head or body, shaking the glass, forging new, mini-memories that become larger blocks of ice.
When the liquid hits, it’s polar. And giant, multiplying icebergs bob on turbulent waters: memories of St. Paul, Elvis’ death, Golden Books, Noah, the International House of Pancakes as seen through a frosted window, radiators, Minnesota Vikings football helmets, chemotherapy, my Nana holding my legs and reading to me, hospital stays, radiation treatment, being trapped in an elevator with my mother, lying on the couch, my sister’s birth, goat’s milk, John Denver, my bald head, the Children’s Hospital, feeling thin and exposed at school, fearing recess, Batman’s protective talismanic powers, knowing how to read before everyone else…
…And holding on to stories that were me and not me: The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars, the life and death of Jesus, great athletes, and, later, artists. These stories solaced me with their terror, and precisely because of that terror, taught me that uncertainty was the norm, that the line between life and death was tenebrous and flimsy at best, that I was a Polar explorer destined to go mad through my passionate desire to bridge the icebergs and create the coherent narrative that I found in the stories.
The problem was that I was simultaneously the icebergs and the explorer, the written and the writer, the myth and the forger. The problem was madness.
But, as my words reach you with subjective sincerity, I know of the existence of a third term…of an ocean or a sea or a Great Lake (the metaphor doesn’t matter) in which the icebergs and the explorer positively gleam, along with all the other icebergs and explorer.
And some icebergs and explorers have surrendered their sharpness and will, melting into the water that is the third term, endlessly hardening and liquefying into water. As a part of the process, they let go – the explorer, as well as the ice chunks of memories that have immobilized a human being against the dread of all vicissitudes – and away go the stitches, the knife, the chemotherapy and radiation treatment, the scar, the bald head, the abuse, the misunderstandings, the organ failure...