How to Die of a Broken Heart. Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?
by Kristopher Jansma
Your grandfather dies when you are seven, bald from chemo most of the time you knew him.
Before this, your father donates bone marrow for transplants for years, off and on. It is incredibly painful, he tells you, but if he hadn't done it then his father would have died when you were only a baby and you'd never have met him.
For some kind of school project, you ask your father about your grandfather's side of the family and he tells you about your great grandfather, back in Holland, who died two weeks after your grandfather, from a broken heart.
It isn't until you're much older that you think to question this. Can that happen? Cartoon hearts on television might break in half, but aren't real ones made of tissue and blood? They can't shatter, or crack, or break.
Yes, you learn, they can. In medical school you find out about “acute stress cardiomyopathy” where in times of intense grief and extreme stress, the left ventricle of a person's heart can enlarge, causing severe chest pains and can't pump blood the way it’s supposed to. The left side of the heart literally slumps over and can collapse entirely. Obviously then, you die from it.
The condition is sometimes called “takotsubo cardiomyopathy.” A takotsubo, your Japanese friend tells you, is a traditional kind of octopus trap used by fishermen in that country. You find a picture online and, sure enough, the old clay octopus trap looks just like a broken heart in the medical textbook. Swollen on one side, leaning at an odd angle. That's where the octopus goes in and gets stuck.
So, it's not just a cliché. Or, like most clichés, it was, at some point, an original observation. You can love someone so much that when they die, it kills you.
You lead a charmed life in most senses. You never break a bone. Your appendix, your tonsils, never need to come out. One time you had a kidney stone, but it passed after an hour and you went home. You've only ever spent the night in a hospital when your children were born.
Actually, that's not true. You've spent a lot of nights in the hospital. You work in the ER, and at least for the first few years you pulled a lot of nights.
And when your sister gets cancer, you stay with her in the hospital for hours and hours, but never overnight, not even at the very end. You always leave to go home, or to crash at a friend's. You always walk away at some point.
In high school, at a blood drive, you lied about being over a hundred pounds so that you could donate. As they slid the needle into your veins you remembered your father coming home from the clinics, pale and weak and pained. You passed out on the cafeteria floor and woke up to the fingers of your math teacher in your mouth, crumbling up cookies and trying to get you to eat them while she attempted to open a stubborn carton of orange juice.
Your sister has about a day to live, they say, maybe less. You go to see her in the hospital and while they take her off the morphine she has one last good hour, somewhere in there, and she remembers how when you were kids how you used to go camping with your parents all the time in these rental motor homes.
You remember your father, studying the giant unfolded AAA maps by the side of the road. Whenever anyone asked your father if you were lost, he'd always say, “We're not lost. I know exactly where we are. We're right here!”
You think this must have been when your father was grieving the loss of his father, though you weren't really aware of it at the time.
To not die of a broken heart, you must keep moving. You must find an open road, a national park. Drive at night when it's quiet, your family sleeping in the beds behind you—there's one up above you, even, as you drive. You are a frontiersman. What’s happened has happened. The unknown lies ahead.
After your sister dies, you and your mother leave the hospital to go home. On the way out one of the nurses at the front desk asks what happened, and your mom says, “She's gone,” and the nurse says, “Oh I'm sorry,” and your mom says, “Thank you, it's just been a very a hard day” and the nurse looks very sad and says, “I know how you feel,” and your mom snaps at her, “I’m sorry but you really don't.”
But she doesn't know that. You never know what people are going through, what they've been through. If their left ventricle is enlarged and collapsing. Or if it ever almost did. People with broken hearts look just like people with unbroken ones, as you're about to learn.
Your father doesn't speak for a year. He was quiet before and there's a lot going on, so you basically don't even notice. He seems fine, he smiles, he does his thing. Keeps moving. You didn't realize how long it had really been until, one night at dinner, he abruptly says to you, “I'm sorry if I've been a little out of it. It's been a year now, I didn't know if you noticed, but I haven't said anything.”
And you realize it has been, and you really hadn't noticed.
He's not much different after that, only now you see how sad he is, plus he talks sometimes. The following Christmas you and your mother decide that the best way to get him to snap out of it is to find him a project. She finds a thing online from a company in Australia that sells kits to build catamarans. Before you know it, two shipping containers are being delivered to a builder's lot near the water in West Florida. Your father is so happy. They move into an apartment across the street and he spends every day for the next year at the lot, working with the builders, cutting fiberglass and running wires and bolting things and slowly but surely there is a boat where there wasn't one before.
And then one day they get on the boat and sail away.
Now you have a little app on your phone that tells you where they are. En route to Panama, presently.
Elephants grieve. Monkeys, apparently. And giraffes? Dogs, of course. Killer whales, bison, turtles…there's nothing about grief that seems to require higher order thinking. Even a bird brain can do it, literally. Their songs change, after the loss of a mate or a chick. Their posture droops, they can begin to overpluck their feathers. In the wild they've been even seen holding “funerals”…a “large cacophonous aggregation” of rock jays will form around the body of a fallen flockmate, calling out what are known as “zeep-scold” songs that encourage their younger generation to come attend to the corpse. Is it meant to protect the body from predators, or to alert others to danger?
Octopuses are solitary creatures, but all evidence suggests that they can feel not just physical pain but emotional pain as well. They change color, become withdrawn. In times of extreme stress they've been observed to eat their own tentacles in a bizarre auto-cannibalistic self-mutilation. It’s one of the many reasons you’re not supposed to have one as a pet.
You ate an octopus once. It's high up on your list of lifelong regrets. But you were young, at a celebration dinner for something, at a very authentic Korean restaurant in Flushing. On the menu was “live baby octopus” and your group ordered it, being daring. You thought of it as a kind of cross-cultural adventure. The servers brought out a huge hot tray full of food and set it over some kind of burner. As you chatted, they stirred and prepared the fragrant dish, and then, without fanfare, pulled a little octopus from a nearby tank and plopped it into the center of the scalding plate. You watched in awe, horror, amazement, as the little creature stretched its tentacles out quickly, pulling itself around, and at one point making it to the edge of the dish. The server whacked it back into the middle. It didn't take very long, maybe ten seconds, cooked right there in front of us. And what could we do? We'd killed the thing already. You dug in with your chopsticks, pulled the newly pink thing apart right there on the table. It was delicious, no lie. Even as it all happened, you felt it was wrong, that a line had been crossed somehow, that in all your adventures in eating fisheyes and cow brains and snails and pig snout…that this had been somehow different. Not really like boiling a lobster or a crab on a summer day. Not even like hunting, which you've never done anyway. It was watching the thing move, that unnerved you so badly. Seeing it strategizing, trying multiple purchases at once, attempting to escape. It was intelligent in a way you’d not anticipated. Calculating. Grieving its own coming death, right in front of you.
You read that the evolutionary basis for grief has something to do with our shared DNA. Our biological imperative is to preserve and pass along our genetic material, therefore losing a child is the worst. Losing a sibling is, theoretically, slightly less distressing because while you and they have come from the same DNA, it all exists in them in a variation of your own.
Losing a parent, then, is hard but not quite as hard, because you already exist—the code has been replicated successfully. You guess.
But then you read somewhere else that you share 99% of your DNA with every other human being on the planet. The minuscule sliver of ribosomes that make you unique are less than 1% of the whole. The part that is significant to your family is even smaller than that.
96% of your DNA with a chimpanzee. You and pretty much any other mammal are going to be at least at 93%.
But octopuses?
That’s where it gets weird. Scientists have compiled data on their genome in recent years, only to find it is stunningly complex, composed of an unprecedented 33,000 protein-coding genes, about 10,000 more than a human being. There are, even, questions as to how this makes sense within current conceptions of Darwinism.
On the Internet, of course, you'll find articles claiming that Octopuses are, in fact, aliens. Or that they have some DNA that isn't totally earthly.
Your parents send you a photograph they took on a dive trip with some other boating people. Your father stands triumphantly in waist-high water, a glass mask still pressed over his eyes, but the snorkel loose so you can see his huge smile. He holds one arm up in triumph and shows the camera (held by your mother surely) the red-and-white-spotted Atlantic octopus that he has found there in the shallows. The creature’s eye is wide and blue and staring out at the above-water world it has just been thrust into, another plane of existence it was not particularly eager to arrive in. The tentacles wrap around your father’s arm, the soft white suckers look like Lifesaver candies.
Lately, you’ve been waking up early to sit on the couch in the dark before anyone is up, even the sun. You’ve come to like this first hour of the day more than sleep. When nothing has gone right or wrong yet. You’re not on the open road, exactly, but your family sleeps peacefully up above you. Outside the sun rises and the birds come to the feeder and everything is getting greener every day. It used to be that you thought Heaven was not real, or at least that there was no way to conceive of real peace here on Earth, but now you think you're getting a sense of it. You cannot be lost. You know where you are, you're right here.
