Light Through the Crack

Chapter One CHANGE OF HEART AUTHOR'S PREAMBLE Hurt by my friend Bruno, I was pained and furious. From my grief, I thought, "How did we get to this place in our relationship? After all we've shared, can't you see how badly you are hurting me? I can't take it! You're so insensitive. I wonder if I can ever trust you again. I'm dying." Living in the same community with Bruno made it impossible to withdraw physically, so I pulled back emotionally, closing myself off not only from him but also from his friends and others around me. Blame dominated my inner stream of consciousness. "You've hijacked our mutual project, cutting me out of it. You're plotting to hold on to control. You're turning others against me, and I know you hate me but I don't know why." I felt the problem physically. High stress precipitated the need for almost constant deep breathing. It was hard to focus, and work became a real task. I watched mindless TV, and I overate so that my full body lost its dynamism. As time went on and the rift between Bruno and me widened, I noticed the negative feelings seeping into other relationships. I had a short fuse at the dinner table, in bank lines, with other drivers, and with innocent children playing in front of my home. I experienced what some might call low-grade depression. While all this was unfolding, another of my friends, Claire, faced a critical choice. She had to decide to accept a heart transplant and live, or to refuse it and surely die. Knowing that either decision demanded a terrible letting go of her life as she had always known it, I witnessed how she unhesitatingly refused the transplant, satisfied that her life had been full and good. Later, realizing her deep love for so many people who wanted her to live, she calmly reversed her decision. Her remarkable freedom around her very life astounded me! From Claire's encounter with modern medicine, I began to gather diamonds of wisdom for my own life and relationships, particularly my excruciating experience with Bruno. Claire's physical journey through her transplant pointed a direction for me through my own emotional "heart losses" into another kind of heart transplant. Claire, threatened with imminent death, mirrored for me the demise of my inner heart and passion to love and be loved. Emotionally and psychologically, I was dying too, and I had choices to make. If I refused to accept my need for a "change of heart," I was heading for disaster in all my relationships, but if I chose to discard my heart of stone for a real, human heart of flesh, there was hope for my inner revitalization. I intentionally chose Claire's heart transplant journey as the lead story for this book because all the stories deal with heartbreak and inner transformation. Claire is a powerful witness because in the time of her greatest weakness, she musters the love and the courage to refuse death and passionately choose a new, wonderful, painful, and limited life. Her very physical heart journey parallels my heartbreak and inspires me, despite my attraction to refuse, to discard my heart of stone and welcome a new, though still limited, heart of flesh and love. CLAIRE TELLS HER STORY When I was small my father, a nuclear physicist, and my mother, a chemist, both worked at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. My father taught me to read the binary tapes from the computers and to answer many scientific questions, and this precocious learning served me well later on. My parents had high expectations of their children but not too much awareness of weakness. We moved to California, and when I was fourteen it happened. I was on the local swim team, and we were doing a typical vigorous workout of laps. Suddenly I had to stop and cling to the side of the pool. I was gasping for breath, feeling terribly fatigued. MMosteller, Sue is the author of 'Light Through the Crack ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780385516679 and ISBN 0385516673.