The Heart That Keeps Time: Grief, Memory, and the Love That Remains
A man in the audience asked how to rebuild his confidence after a difficult few years. Then came the details. Two dead wives. A pacemaker. His second wife had died four weeks earlier. The pacemaker had gone in around the same time. His first wife had died five years before that. When the host found him in the crowd, the man admitted he wasn’t doing very well. Then he made a joke. At least he’d gotten a free ticket. There’s something almost unbearable about that. Not because the joke was inappropriate, but because it was so human. A man whose life has been cut open twice by death, whose own heart has recently required a machine to keep its rhythm, still finds enough of himself to make strangers laugh. Sometimes grief looks like that. We expect grief to arrive dressed properly. Tears. Silence. A darkened room. But grief will also complain about parking, laugh too loudly, forget why it walked into the kitchen, watch television, answer email, and make a joke about a free ticket four weeks ...