How can we mend broken hearts?
Ibegan this morning as I always do “these days,” perusing my Twitter feed, filled with its usual admonitions, accusations, insults and general bad news. I found myself humming that famous 1970 Bee Gees tune, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”
After fumbling with the lyrics in my head, I resorted to Google, where I learned of the recent debut of the documentary of the same name that chronicles the brothers’ lengthy careers. I’m not clairvoyant or psychic, so I must have known somehow of its production; hence, the song’s surfacing in my head.
But, for now, let’s forget the group and the documentary. I awoke today, like yesterday, with a broken heart. Perhaps you did as well.
Like most everyone with a beating heart, my heart breaks for the more than 300,000 souls who have left this world due to COVID-19. It breaks for the health care workers — the doctors and nurses and orderlies and janitors and every other person in that lengthy chain.
My heart breaks for the grocery cashier whose tears dripped to the top of her mask one recent afternoon. “This is really hard,” she whispered quietly to me, although it was difficult to make out her words from behind the mask and
the plexiglass partition.
Worse, she may not have been able to see behind my mask that my heart was breaking for her. My heart breaks for all of this broken world’s families whose holidays will be oh so different this year.
For many of them, every Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa holiday season is forever altered, broken by a life’s passing that didn’t need to happen. For many others, fortunate but broken nevertheless, this holiday season is shaping up to be a lonely, sad time.
My son is isolated in his Los Angeles studio apartment; this is the first year we will not share the Christmas morning. While FaceTiming with him recently, I joked that isolating at home is making me a boring person. “Better boring than dead, Mom,” he snapped back. In the shared laugh, I detected the broken heart.
My husband’s daughter shares my son’s fate, isolated in her Denver apartment. Both want to be with us on Christmas, but we know that can’t happen this year. Broken hearts all around. My heart breaks for the many children whose parents cannot afford the Christmas they want to provide or even the meals they desperately need to survive.
Finally, my heart breaks for this broken country, currently in the hands of leaders who have failed to lead. I know that change is imminent — a vaccine that will slow and eventually stop this deadly pandemic, and the inauguration of a new president whose administration holds the promise of healing a broken system.
In the meantime, with our collective broken hearts held hostage, I’ll try to rely on those “misty memories of days gone by” and work on mending this broken heart.
Mary Brooks is a freelance book indexer and lives in Santa Fe.