Heartbeats and Sneezes

Over the holidays, the farmer and I watched a movie called, Something the Lord Made. The film is based on a true story about white surgeon Alfred Blalock and his black assistant, Vivien Thomas who teamed in the 1940s to develop a procedure to save blue babies, children suffering from a heart defect. Since the farmer recently went through heart surgery, this movie was quite fascinating!

Frustrating too as the interplay between Blalock and Thomas due to Thomas’ status as a second class citizen and the social realities of the time complicated their friendship and their medical goals.  Blalock soaked up the heroism of being the first surgeon to do open-heart surgery; Thomas – who perfected the surgery on lab dogs and thus taught Blalock - got no credit or recognition for his brilliance. Another point of interest is the medical and theological controversy in those days of cutting into a human heart.   

Those who know me well can imagine my personal conflict with the kennel of beautiful dogs outside the surgery. I hope the movie portrayal of Thomas treating the surgical canines with kindness was accurate. The phrase man’s best friend kept ironically popping up but I’m making no political or moral statement here – just observing. Medical advances are complicated too. 

I watched all the surgical open heart scenes with awe and dread, and sometimes with partially closed eyes. Not because the beating heart inside a chest cavity made me squeamish, but because I couldn’t stop thinking of my dear farmer being on the table with heart exposed.

The scenes where the surgeons closed THEIR  eyes with their fingers lingering inside the chest cavity to listen-sense-feel when the patient’s blood was pulsing correctly through reunited vessels before closing everything up – wow - my own heart thudded! A few times I looked away completely, while my scaredy-cat inner voice yelled, “open your eyes. Look at what you’re doing! Someone could die on your watch!”  Odd response from me, a contemplative, feeling-sensory-slightly dominant right-brain kind of person, who was also absolutely fascinated, elated, to be witnessing this if only in film.  Perhaps my left brain took over briefly, or my right amygdala argued with my left. In any case, I completely felt the agony of the parents waiting outside the operating theater of the first blue baby treated with open-heart surgery. Not a ground breaking statistic, but their precious child on the table!

 In this new year, already seeped in political and racial divisiveness, with so many personal and collective questions of what shall I(we) be and do, when there is so much that could be said, and as I discern what I want to say as a writer, I’m most keenly aware of presence and gratitude. I’m grateful for my husband’s life, while sorrowing for the families of others who ceased living on this earth. The randomness of why one lives and another dies is beyond us. So we appreciate, love, mourn and simply hold the question. But, presence, real Presence is another experience altogether, eternally possible and hopeful.  

The hardest thing for Thomas to teach Blalock was pausing his left brain long enough to be able to sense with his right- the epic eye closing scene- the feeling with the fingers rather than seeing with the eyes. Despite being a superb surgeon, Blalock had much to learn from Thomas in trusting the art of surgery as well as the science. The scene caught my breath, sang my soul.

Those ‘aha,’ moments of Blalock were seconds of being, of being in Presence. Complete absorption in right now with all senses, with brain and body and soul all existing in Presence – presence to God, Insight, flowing with a Source much larger than one human, or even one united humanity – it was pure potential, raw possibility, creator and created, teacher and student, art-science-faith, flowing together in the NOW, with all the knowledge and sensing and soul work of those humans and energies that have gone before the moment. It was clarity and awareness and skill, and trust, blended.

Opening to Presence is practicable. Whether ordinary or groundbreaking, all moments of Presence are full of wonder, focus, excitement, peace, awareness, clarity…of aligning oneself with More, with All, with the Divine. You and I hold a lot in our souls, all the decisions, questions, learnings, how to live and be in the future, all the joys and sorrows of our pasts, of history. Yet as the Divine gifts us with a moment of sheer presence (yes, gifts us as all we can do is keep opening more and more), we can relax and lean in.  

After the movie, I laid my head on the farmer’s chest and heard the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. I marveled, dwelling in Presence, in this beating, beautiful moment. I thought of the surgeon with his fingers around my beloved’s heart, and I hope he closed his eyes.

Close your eyes, too, my friends, and lean into Presence.  Open, awaken, love, learn and lean in.

I’ll end with a somewhat poignant, but fun poem I wrote during the farmer’s recovery:

Sneeze!

Air forced through lung and

nostril. Fast. Powerful.

Cleansing.  Yet, it’s said one

is never closer to death while

living than during a good sneeze.
More true, perhaps, if you’ve just had
heart surgery. Cracked breast bone, and
a sneeze. Makes your head explode in

brilliant stars, your chest in glass

shards. And for a millisecond you wish

for death, for a laugh long and

loud, or both!