As I am approaching my 10th cardiaversary on June 12th, I had a bizarre thought. I had just read a friend’s post that said when he was young, his beloved grandmother died at 55 of a sudden heart attack. That’s how old I was when I had the cardiac event from a fully occluded LAD (left anterior descending artery). Heart attacks that result are often called The Widowmaker since many don’t live through it. I didn’t lose consciousness, and didn’t stop breathing. I actually drove myself to the ER. So, the thought…what if I really didn’t survive the heart attack and everything that followed in the aftermath that I am experiencing now is a dream, an alternate existence? All of the things I have done since 6/12/2014- Forming Hugmobsters Armed With Love, by which I have hugged thousands of people, my current job as a therapist, the articles I have written, the TEDx talk I offered called Overcoming the Taboo of Touch. the new people I have met, the trip to Ireland in 2018, the classes/workshops I have taught, making it through the years of COVID with only a minor case in 2022, living in an absurd political time where everything I know and love hangs in the balance, being with my son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren and other beloved family and friends would be part of that existence.
Before anyone worries about me or thinks that this career therapist is experiencing depersonalization or derealization, I am simply musing.
When I posted this mental meandering on Facebook, several friends responded that they too had held the same thoughts. A few had survived serious accidents and wondered if they, like me, were living an alternate reality in which they hadn’t made it through. One suggested that I read the book written Matt Haig called The Midnight Library. A blurb to describe it: “Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?” It is now on my to-read list.
At this moment, I am sitting in the living room of the house I have lived since 1993. It is where my son was raised. It was where my husband took his final unassisted breath before falling into a coma and was ferried to the ER and he died 5 1/2 weeks later. It is where I was able to work and hustle to keep a roof over our heads for my son and me. It is where I ‘self solituded’ during the pandemic and it became my haven. It is where I now live on my own and invite family and friends to visit. It is where I am appreciating the ceiling fan and rotating standing fan that is keeping me relatively cool since my air conditioning conked out and will be replaced on Wednesday…whew! I am particularly grateful since there are too many people who don’t have this luxury.
It is where I am listening to my favorite radio station, WXPN with Linda Ronstadt’s beautiful voice wafting through the air. It is where I am now recovering from an exacerbation of asthma and COPD, using inhalers, a nebulizer and rinsing my clogged sinuses with a Neti pot. (hopefully not TMI).
As I sit, ensconced in the recliner chair that a friend had given me six years ago when I had pneumonia, I find myself wishing I could enjoy the first weekend of unofficial summer outdoors with family and friends. I did some of that yesterday, sitting on an Adirondack chair watching my grandchildren splash and play with their across the street neighbor kids. It was challenging to breathe in the heat, so I went back into the house for a bit to cool off. After they left to visit their other grandparents, I hung out and watched three re-run episodes of Northern Exposure, immersing myself in daily life in Cicely, Alaska. The quirky characters who populate the town are written so as to embody ‘magical realism’ which blurs the line between reality and fantasy. I have likely seen every episode several times over the years and have been giving it another go-around as I experience that sense in my day to day life post heart attack nearly a decade ago.
Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don’t know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It’s just accepting that we don’t know everything and everything is possible.- Isabel Allende
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
