Heartbreak

I don’t like that word.

Your heart does not get broken, per se, when a loved one passes into the next sphere of existence.

Broken implies something that needs to be repaired, but your heart will carry the deep hurt of loss until you pass.

You can’t fix it.

Before I get going, check out theses pics from the golf course:

Granted, there are different levels of heartbreak: watching the results of animal cruelty (and knowing damn well I’ll be in the confessional for my thoughts), watching children being hurt or neglected (same), and of course, losing our own.

My heart did not break when my Godmother died, the very first death I ever remember seeing at age four. I did not know her all that well, and what I do remember was the beautiful smell of fresh flowers and the eerie music playing.

My Grandfather’s funeral was next, and what stood out to me was not the ceremony, but the big party afterwards at my Grandma’s house where my Grandfather would hold court with members of his family who drove in from wherever at some point during every Sunday.

Never failed.

We use the word “heartbreak” very flippantly.

Did my heart break when my first girlfriend broke up with me?

No, but I cried like a little pussy all night before leaving her forever in the misty morning.

My heart didn’t break when my beloved Fighting Irish were blown out by the Alabama team in their only College Football Playoff appearance.

It might have been more of a hit if the game was actually close.

It was over by the end of the first quarter.

After my Mom’s death in 1982, I don’t go to funerals. I wrote a blog about missing my Dad’s funeral in “Promises.”

I will go to the funerals for my big brother Ed, or my in-laws, Karen’s family, but one thing I will never do again is look at the corpse.

I want to remember the person as I remember them, young, kicking ass, and raising hell. Not hollowed out and filled with chemicals, while the face is the makeup artist’s.

No thank you, very much.

My big brother Ed will forever be the Rock to me. His nickname “Rocky” came from our Grandfather, with whom Ed was very close. After my Mom divorced and our family was severed, I was in Japan before you could shake your head. Ed was my protector from anyone bigger, and I was pretty much a little runt, always sickly from the bad water I was exposed to from the Japanese well water.

I had strep throat 23 times in a nine-week span, so that pretty much ended our time in the tiny Japanese village we loved, and we were forced to move onto the American Air Force Base Tachikawa, which I thought was huge.

But there were the girls…

In a very peripatetic existence, I would end up saying final goodbyes to six girlfriends from six different countries.

I was madly in love with each one of them, but you know what?

Not one heart break.

Stay well.