Broken hearts everywhere you turn
I got an e-mail from my cousin the other day. Her father-in-law was in critical condition for complications after scheduled heart surgery. Last I heard, he was improving, but not out of the woods yet. He’s already had a stroke in recent years. Turns out, he has some kind of congenital heart defect that complicates matters further, so all the kids in his family have also been tested as the result of his turn for the worse.
My cousin’s husband does not have the congenital defect; however, they discovered plaque in his arteries.
He’s 35 years old.
My mother tells me that (in her work) she generally sees this in men in their 50s, not men in their thirties. My cousin-in-law is ridiculously in shape, as is his wife. They eat right. They take all these vitamins and supplements. I’m not entirely sure they could scrape up an ounce of fat between them. So clearly, the heart disease is genetic in this family. And now my cousin-in-law will no doubt be adding other medicines to his daily batch of vitamins to try to keep him from ending up in an ICU just like his father. And my cousin will have to worry about him, and their child.
It was their wedding I went to, and cried through, a month after A died. When they started their vows and talked about forever, I bit my lip and stared off into Lake Superior to my left as the tears rolled down my face, and prayed they would both be 99 years old before they learned that "forever" is sometimes much shorter time than you ever imagined.
And now I learn that he is stalked by the same genetic time bomb that took my A, and A’s father, and A’s father’s father. After A died, his siblings were tested, and despite both of them being hard-core runners and fitness buffs, they, too, have problems developing along the same lines. But at least they know; at least they have been warned, and can try to do something about it. I hate it, for A, for his family, for my cousins. And I know that there’s very little to be done about it. It’s like a thief in your house that you can see through the windows, but you can’t stop him as he takes what is most valuable from you. The best you can do is slow him down.
At some point the whole idea that death stalks us becomes just another fact that you incorporate as a reminder to appreciate now and live now. Which I guess we should have been doing all along, eh?