Nothing Places

I recently read the book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Up Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer.  In it is a married couple with some serious love/communication issues which results in the creation of what they dub "nothing" or "something" places.  They invent these places where they can just disappear from the other person's presence.  It's an interesting thought to me, these nothing places.

With four kids and a husband in this moderately crowded sized house I can't fathom any place being a nothing place unless they were all out from under its roof.  But it would be nice sometimes to find one of those places.  A place where just for a few minutes I could be nothing, feel nothing and do nothing.  Nothingness.

I imagine that those few minutes would lead to a few minutes more and then eventually I would never leave my nothing place and that scares me.  Because nothing is really nothing.  We are meant to feel, the good and the bad, and to live, the easy and the difficult and through those things we learn and adapt and want more.  I want to be in a something place and mean something to at least someone until the day that I turn into nothing on this earth.

I Heart my Heart

Wikipedia defines the heart as "a hollow muscle that pumps blood throughout the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions.  Gray's anatomy goes on to say "the rhythmical action of the heart is muscular in origin." But most of us probably don't think of the heart in this way.  If we even think of it at all.  That's because the heart goes on beating around 70 beats every minute of every day without any effort from us.  Yet for something so unnoticed, it's role in our lives could not be any more important.

Yet it's still a muscle, one that can be weakened by a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy habits and strengthened through exercise and healthy living.  A healthy heart is a happy heart.  Except that the heart is more than just a blood pumper.  It is a vital organ of emotional health too.  One that just like the beating drum in our chests needs exercise and healthy habits to function optimally.  After Wyatt and Eli's deaths my heart needed a break and so I tucked it away somewhere safe for a while.  I needed to protect it and keep it from any more hurt because I just didn't know how much it could take. 

I learned this last week that the human heart can take an awful lot.  It can be poked and prodded, shocked and even endure having tiny pieces of it literally killed off and still keep beating.  So too can the metaphorical heart.  I have endured hearing that two of my children, while each in utero, would most certainly die before, during or shortly after their births.  I have carried those little boys to term and watched each one die in my arms within hours of their birth.  I have stood at a tiny bare grave site to bury my first child and then eight years later at my oldest son's grave site by my very own headstone to bury my second son at his feet.  

I have also learned of the heart's incredible capacity for healing.  Both physically and emotionally.  At the age of 25, approximately one percent of the heart's muscle cells are replaced yearly, falling to one half of a percent by age 75 according to Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  What I can take away from this is that the heart really heals, inside and out.  The heart that I had ten years ago is not the heart that I have today, neither one of them.

Love

Love is defined as "a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection" at dictionary.com.  While this is listed as definition number two, it is the meaning I want.  Love is a feeling.  A feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection.  A simple yet eloquent description.  There is no additional specificity, no rules, no strings attached.

Love is not defined by any person, in fact it doesn't mention anyone at all.  It is a feeling experienced by one person.  It is not measured  in telephone calls or visits, there is no amount of minutes or hours which can solidly constitute "deep affection" or "warm personal attachment".  The absence of counting or tallying up those minutes or hours probably signifies a deeper personal attachment or affection. There is no list of people whom we must love or should love or even cannot love.  Only we can make those choices.  Because we feel them.

The warm personal attachment or deep affection lives within me, it is mine.  Because of this, it is so easy and so hard to love.  I love Wyatt and Eli every time my heart beats, even when I thought it was irreparably broken.  I've loved Wyatt every single day of the 3,161 days I have lived without him and will continue to do so until I don't have to live without him and Eli any longer.  This is perhaps the purest sense of love because they are not here.  Their deaths have wounded me so deeply and their absence stings so strongly.  There is no earthly word or action that can affect the love I have for my sons.  That is the bitter and the sweet.

A heart in the big blue sky above, sent from heaven by two little boys I love.