How does someone die of a broken heart?

 

How does someone die of a broken heart?

I told this story to a good friend on the phone yesterday. He's a worldly man, highly intelligent, never married, never fathered a child. And after knowing him now coming up on 26 years, I realize we are alot alike.
We both understand loss, caring and quite a bit. He told me many years ago, when I complained my compassion was too much, so much it crushed my spirit quite often. I'd felt exhausted so often in my life.
I knew some of the exhaustion was from traumas most people don't reckon with in their lives. He agreed; then added, "Yeah, Jody-Lynn. But the world needs more people having your level of compassion.  And yes, it does ruin the things you are passionate about. I know it wipes you out. However, your compassion is a good thing and it's needed in the world."
And for some crazy reason that Thursday back in the autumn of 2008 I knew that was the answer. It held me bewildered. He has probably been one of the most intelligent beings I've known, and was not sugarcoating the situation of my having compassion.
So yesterday, I told him this story of one of my dad's relatives. Apparently, I was born the year she died. She was never married, never mothered a child, and was quite independent like my friend I'd had on the phone. He has a medical license, he is incredulously knowledgeable in great detail on A.I. that was part of our five hour discussion we had yesterday.
Here goes the story, one I've told a few times to sacred people.  By the way, 'sacred people', are people who either need to hear it to help them or I truly have immense trust with.
"...Well apparently, she died of a broken heart." I stated.
"How is that possible?" He queried.
"She'd felt she allowed herself to be in a position, where she was pushed to depend on anyone else but God."
"Huh? How so?"
"She told someone she was failing and they called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. Nuns who knew her, knew she was so crushed that she'd allowed herself to now have medical attention when she'd always depended on her faithful religious practices instead."
"Whoa."
"Yeah. You have a woman that healed people for real with her religious practices." I gave my friend a few examples.
"Wow!"
"So, here I was ..."
"How old were you?"
"I was eight, it was springtime. I arrived home for lunch not feeling well. Now mind you, no one in my family ever spoke of her until I did what I'd done that day. I had no clue I was practicing anything. I was just privately praying alot. We weren't really even that religious.  No one read the Bible; except me. The only book I could read, was in the children's version of course. We went to church by then about once a month, sometimes every two to three weeks. And we went to different denominations too. Whatever was convenient.  I knew which Christian religion I enjoyed more than my own. For it seemed less hypocritical."
"You picked that apart?"
"Oh yeah. By the time I was eleven,  I told my parents that most Christians were doing it all wrong."
"Oh."
"Yeah. I had to express it somehow."
"So what happened when you were eight?"
"I came home for lunch from school. Mom had made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and there was a glass of milk on the side of it on the kitchen table.
My brother was two years older than I. He had stayed to eat lunch with a friend at school that day. Normally we would walk back home for lunch together.
Here I was coming into the house into the kitchen, I looked at mom and said, "I don't feel good. My tummy is bothering me."  She responded, "I'll give you some pesto-bismol." I replied, "No. I'm going to go upstairs and talk to God. I'll be okay in twenty minutes. She said nothing. For she appeared absolutely dumbfounded. I left the kitchen and went to my room, pulled out my Bible and read two short healing stories and said to God, 'So, you're going to heal me like the Leper and Centurion's slave.' I prayed a little, felt better, went to the kitchen ate half the sandwich and drank half the glass of milk, said goodbye to my mom, and went back to school. I was totally fine. That night I overheard my parents talking about me, 'Noone does that. Where'd she get that from...?'  The next evening it was then revealed to me at the dinner table by my dad about his relative who was a Christian Science Practitioner. The only person they'd known of who practiced the way she had. My parents were perplexed. I was indeed a 'strange bag of lunch."
"That's amazing." My friend remarked.
"I believe that we all have this amazing healing inside of us, but we are just all too impatient. It's there for the taking, and the learning; no matter your religion or no religion it's available to all of us. It's been proven. We will always need the medical field to aid us. But sometimes we jump the gun on our own abilities, thinking we are always helpless within ourselves. And perhaps that is one of the ways we die of a broken heart."--- Jody-Lynn Reicher