A Heart Breaking

He is sitting on a bench oblivious to the light rain coming down, he has no umbrella, not even a jacket. The bench he is on faces a small neighbourhood playground but there are no children in sight, the little park is empty.  He is a young man and he is alone. Suddenly his shoulders hunch and he drops his face to his hands, his body heaves with sobs. From where I sit in a warm dry car, a half a block away, the scene plays out in silence. My husband has pulled the car over to fiddle with something on his GPS  and is oblivious to the drama I am watching. 

We are in a very upscale neighbourhood of Vancouver, big expensive homes and tall, stately trees abound. The park is a triangular patch of green and I have often seen young children with their parents or nannies playing here. It's usually a happy place. Today in the rain I am watching a man's heart breaking. Every thirty seconds or so he grabs his phone, punches in a number, listens, speak a few words, most likely "call me" and hangs up. Then sobs anew. The cause of this distress could be many things, I know, but from where I sit and what I see it looks just like a breaking heart. The end of a romance, a young woman who will no longer take his calls.

My heartbreaks are long behind me. Over three decades of marriage have been put between me and this young man's kind of agony. That's more years than he has been alive I'm guessing but it's not hard to tap right back into what he is feeling. Once after the collapse of a romance I cried so hard in an elevator leaving the scene of the crime  that the people who got on the elevator with me were concerned enough to try and convince me to go home with them or let them call someone for me. I refused their good intentions and staggered out of the elevator to sit in my car and weep. It was just a heart breaking after all, nothing that required a hospital visit or a policeman. I could manage it alone. Just like the young man in the park, heartbreak seems best managed alone. Others just try to cheer you up or distract you from it. Some disparage the heartbreaker so as to make it seem for the best, and that's a difficult road to manoeuvre, that one. The fictional Bridget Jones sits home alone in her movie with a bottle of wine, her diary and her tears. I can identify with that. I rarely watch movies a second or third time but I have done so with Bridget Jones's Diary. I was Bridget Jones at times in my life and though it's a silly movie it has real moments that mirrored mine. And a happy ending which also mirrored mine. Thankfully.
Merriman Websters defines heartbreak as crushing grief, anguish or distress. But think of the word itself. Heartbreak. It's more than distress, it feels like the very centre of you is cracking apart. I think its a word that perfectly suits the feeling or event that it is describing. The good news is that hearts heal. I believe everyone needs some heartbreak in their life, it makes you resilient and compassionate. Its only when a person allows themselves to get overwhelmed by their anguish that nothing is learnt. Fear creeps in and the  heart shuts down. We all know someone who has sworn never to love again after a wrenching heartbreak. No one escapes the devastation , why would you want to? Heartbreak only comes from feeling something deeply and feeling its loss deeply as well. All those rich emotions are what make up a life well lived. It's not about the sights you've seen or the languages you've learned it's about the people in life that you've touched or been touched by. All our intense relationships with people, with pets, even with nature give us great pleasure, they round out our lives. They are what we are here for, to connect.  To avoid all that is to stay safe and keep heartbreak at bay but is that what you really want? We break, we heal, we live to love again.

Bridget Jones recovering from her heartbreak

The tear-stained Bridget Jones inside me raises her bottle of wine in salute to that young man on the damp bench. Feel the pain, cry the tears and pick yourself up and carry on. You're human, enjoy it.