The EKG

The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight. When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking though a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.

Ram Dass

Several years ago I was suffering from odd heart palpitations and some tightness and pain in my chest area. "This is definitely a heart attack," I convinced myself several times a month. Although I guess it was not enough of a heart attack to make me see a doctor. "It will either kill me or it won't and I can't take time off," my internal workaholic assured me. Finally after about six months of this, the symptoms started to include shortness of breath and dizziness. That's when I finally decided to see someone. I went to a fancy-pants Park Avenue cardiologist and had a bunch of tests. After all the diagnostics came back I was assured that my heart was fine but my mind was not. All of my "definitely a heart attack" symptoms turned out to be not much more than self-induced stress. My own personal myocardium (heart muscle) was A-OK. That was a relief…but I still felt a little shaky.

After consulting with the cardiologist I upped my yoga, my attendance at A.A. meetings, and my meditation and prayer practices. I reduced my caffeine and news intake as well as my travel schedule. That course of action worked quite well to soothe my racing, jumpy ticker. When I went back to see the cardiologist eight weeks after the first visit he hooked me up to an EKG which we looked at together while I marched purposefully on a treadmill he had in one of the consulation rooms.

“Look at that!” he said, pointing with one long thin finger to the screen on the machine. "That’s a good looking EKG." We both watched the up and down line monitoring my rapidly beating heart.

“Well, at least it's not flat," I laughed, but he looked aggrieved. I guess joking about flat-lining in a cardiologist's office no es bueno. 

This foray into the world of cardiology was the first time I had ever seen my own beating heart on paper. It was a powerful visual. "That's me," I thought as I watched the jumping line, the reassuring thrum, the peaks and valleys of my heart. A heart that beats to keep me alive. Seeing my heart on paper, thumping steadily away, I appreciated that organ for maybe the first time ever. I was filled with gratitude for this indomitable muscle. It beats so loyally and without complaint, and it has done so for all these years. On the whole, it takes care of itself, leaving me free to concentrate on other affairs.

Watching my heart do its job I was reminded of Ram Dass and one of his more famous lectures on spirituality. In it he likens our bodies to spacesuits. Spacesuits that are gifted to us when our soul decides to visit this place, planet Earth. We are only allowed a spacesuit when our soul is ready, strong enough in fact, for the (in equal measure) wonderful and terrifying vicissitudes of the human experience.

At first the spacesuit is unweidly and quite hard to operate. We can't even move it or clean it or fuel it on our own. We are completely dependent on others to take care of it and keep it running for us. The seeing capabilities are abysmal - blurry, out of focus and confusing. The hearing apparatus is overly sensitive and fragile, as is the outer membrane, also known as the epidermis. The steering mechanisms take forever to develop - years even - and we wobble around crashing into things and sometimes even damaging the exterior of this miraculous machine.

It is all so interesting. The skin and hair and hands and feet. The miraculous brain encased in what is called the head. Those small wet swiveling orbs (called eyes) which see and translate everything in front of them into a signal that the brain can understand. And how about the fleshy flappy things on the side of the head which bring in all the sound vibration - for better or for worse. I also appreciate the nose and the mouth - three small holes that allow us to smell but also let us communicate with other spacesuits. The nose and mouth together give us the ability to taste, which in turn can make the refueling of the spacesuit a wonderful event.

When I had Covid, I lost my sense of smell and taste for ten days and it was terrible. It was the first time in my life that I realized how grateful I am for those two delectable senses. My mother also lost her sense of smell and taste and the doctors say it is never coming back. She refuels daily but it is a joyless task. Without those two senses doing their job, refueling for her is nothing more than a daily chore, akin to shoveling coal into a furnace. It's heartbreaking to watch. She tells me that while she eats she tries to recall the taste of whatever it is that she is eating. She also tells me that this does not work and that everything she tries to swallow “tastes like cardboard.” The nurses who care for her now in her 90th year suggest that she drink Ensure to keep her spacesuit running, but she says that drinking Ensure is even more disgusting than swallowing cardboard - so she sticks with the tasteless food.

The exterior of the spacesuit is incredible enough to consider but it is the interior that really fascinates me. All those whirling cogs and wheels and cords and synapses. The springs and seals and shafts and axles connecting every single mircroscopic cell to the others. For the vast majority of humans it all works all the time. The brain and esophagus and the gallbladder and stomach and intestines and the rest of the machinery. For the most part they function smoothly all while hanging precariously from a fragile, quite prone to fracture, scaffolding known as the skeleton. This miraculous machine is held together by a membrane so thin and delicate that it can be sliced open with the sharp edge of a piece of paper. It's astonishing that any of us survive at all.

And the lungs! Don’t even get me started on the mystery and the majesty of those two spongy organs nesteled in our chests which resemble an upside down tree more than anything else. The lungs simply astonish me. And, just like with those other spacesuit filters, the kidneys, we are given two, so if one craps out, the other can pick up the slack. The lungs are probably the most important element in our spacesuits, although some might argue that the heart takes top spot. The internet tells me that neither is most important but that together they are a symbiotic and interconnected system, vital for our survival. The lungs take oxygen from the air which we then absorb into our bloodstream. They then remove all of our waste gas and pump it out in a life-giving act of gas exchange. They are our spacesuits’ air filters and if they stop working we die in a matter of minutes. And they don't even get a salary, or a year-end bonus, or a day off. Ever.

Do I spend much time each day in gratitude for this miraculous spacesuit that was given to me so many years ago? I do not…although when I was an active alcoholic and drug addict I was aware, toward the end of my debauchery, that I was destroying this gift. That I was poisoning my spacesuit with drugs and alcohol and smoke and starvation. I also had this nagging idea that I wanted to have children and I knew that I had made a mess of my spacesuit. It had become a foul and toxic ground in which I was sure no seed could survive.

So I cleaned up my act, which in itself I see now was a gift of supreme grace. Maybe the gift of recovery came from the same store as my spacesuit? And then I had a baby. This spacesuit of mine made a gosh darn honest-to-God human. It made another functional spacesuit for a new soul to occupy. In fact it made three. I had very little to do with it. It all happened inside of me for 40 weeks while I simply went about my business and took the absolute miracle of what was happening in my spaceship's middle section for granted.

My experience at the cardiologist’s all those years ago opened my eyes. I'm even grateful for that period of extreme anxiety, without which I never would have gone to see him in the first place. As I was leaving the cardiologist’s office for what I hoped was the very last time, the receptionist handed me a scroll of paper secured with a rubber band. "What's this?" I asked her.

"Oh, it's the printout from your EKG. Some people like to hold on to them. Do you want yours?"

"I'd love it," I told her. I pinned a small section of the EKG to the bulletin board at my house where it stays to this day. Its clean black lines are a harbinger of good health and, God willing, some continued longevity. It reminds me to be grateful for this heart that works so well, so faithfully, so diligently on my behalf.

As I settle down into middle age (how the hell did that happen?) and friends and family around me begin to have serious, sometime life-threatening, issues with their own spacesuits, I'm flooded with gratitude that mine has behaved so well. Even after I shamefully and thoughtlessly abused it for so many years, it never let me down.

I know quite well what the future holds for me and my spacesuit. I can already feel it slowing down a bit. The scaffolding is less flexible than it used to be, more prone to wreckage and decay. The seeing mechanisms, once so acute and laser sharp, now need glasses to fully operate. Even the strength in my hands is waning somewhat and I have a harder and harder time opening pickle jars. Frustrated, I hand the jars to my children who twist the lids off with a casual flick of the wrist. The whole thing is appalling. But then I remember that this is what happens with these human spacesuits. Like any machinery, even the most carefully crafted and maintained, my spacesuit will eventually fall apart. It will become decrepit. And then it will die. All of us, at some point, will have to let our spacesuits go. It's part of the deal. Hopefully this will occur later rather than sooner but who knows? I'll be sad to leave my spacesuit. Just as I am grief-stricken when people I love leave theirs. But there is light, even on that horizon. Because once my spacesuit has done its job and I have experienced this wonderful human experience, my soul will be released from its confines and will be free, once again, to fly.

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