Hot Topic Thursday: Broken Heart Syndrome

 
It’s time for Hot Topic Thursday and this week I thought I would talk about Broken Heart Syndrome. You would have to be living under a rock to have not heard about since Debbie Reynolds passed away one day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher. It is something that many people hadn’t heard of until then. For me it is not something that is new, in fact I was afraid my mother would succumb to it after my father passed away. 

It was very difficult for her, all she wanted to do everyday was sit in his chair wearing one of shirts. It took us months to get her to move around more and start wearing her own clothes again. I had to get rid of all of my father’s clothes to make that happen. She never recovered and is more a shell of her former shelf. She wasn’t the most outgoing person but getting her to even go out of the house is much more difficult than it was was he was alive. She lived for him and was heart broken when he passed away after almost 26 years together. While my mother survived we do have first hand experience with Broken Heart Syndrome.

If you have followed me for a while then you are aware that in the midst of Snowmageddon Atlanta in 2014 we were busy having the final funeral of three for my family. Many relatives didn’t even go to the graveside because they wanted to get out on the road as quickly as possible. The funeral that day was for my grandfather who had been sick for a couple of weeks and we were honestly waiting for his death. Several days prior to the funerals, when I called my cousin in the middle of the night the first thing she said was “He’s gone?” Only I wasn’t calling to tell her about Grandpa’s death I was calling to tell her that our uncle, his son, had gone home from visiting the hospital that day and had a massive heart attack. Now he had been ill for a very long time having survived cancer years before but the stress of Grandpa’s illness was just too much. They had lost my grandmother a few years prior and my dad before that as well as two other brothers.

The very next day I made the same phone call to the same cousin and told her about our aunt, our uncle’s wife, had died in her sleep the night before. On the third day with the third phone call her humor finally got the best of her. She told me if I was calling to say anyone else had died she didn’t want to talk to me ever again. This notification was about Grandpa. At one of the funerals she made a comment about a pact we had made as young children to died together on the same day after we grew old and became crazy cat ladies living together. You husband said “In this family that is probably what will happen.” 

Now that was said in good humor and while three funerals were hard on us (we’re Catholic and one day I will tell you Reese’s response to all of that) it was our humor that got us through. In fact after Grandpa’s wake we went to Krystal and sat there for hours together remembering various moments from our childhood and laughing. In the end for some memories just aren’t enough.

Share Your Thoughts

What are your thoughts on Broken Heart Syndrome?