When I lie still trembling sometimes, or listen to the crickets in the dark, I think back to the night before my surgery and the same question keeps going over and over in my mind. Why wasn’t I afraid? I’ve suffered from chronic and acute anxiety for much of my life. I underwent analysis, conventional talking therapy. I was a valium addict for 30 years and spent recent years seeking therapy and spiritual counseling, holistic and meditative healing.
How could it be that I was lying in that room in the Albany Medical Center hours before having my chest torn open, my heart stopped, and I slept as well as I ever have, I was at peace, accepting and secure? How can I make sense of that? I knew I could die, or suffer from various things associated with such surgery, I knew at best that I would be facing long and painful months of recovery. Why wasn’t I afraid?
I will say up front I don’t completely know, I’m not certain, it will take a long time and some perspective to see that night and those feelings clearly. There was a frightened man in my room, I couldn’t tell if he was older or younger than me, he wouldn’t get up and he refused to take off his street clothes and submit to the surgery. He demanded to go home.
His heart rate was down to 30, he could barely walk, he and his son spent the entire day demanding to leave the hospital, arguing and negotiating with the doctors. He said he didn’t want the surgery, didn’t need it, he had lived with a weak heart for years. After hours of fruitless negotiating, one of his doctors was near tears, she said she would accept whatever decision he made, but she pleaded with him “why won’t you let us help you, why won’t you let us take care of you?”
I listened to this all day, nothing separated us but a thin curtain, he and his family argued with the doctors for hours. I never saw him get out of bed and move, he seemed utterly depressed, as did many of the men around me.
At night, when it was dark and lonely, he whispered out my name to me and said he had a question. It seemed to him, he said, that I was unafraid. Was I? I said I was, almost unaccountably, not afraid. I have been so afraid of so many things in my life, I said, I think my wounded heart had finally brought me to a place of acceptance, even courage. He asked me if I thought he should have open heart surgery, and I said that was not for me to try and answer, it was not my place, I was not that wise.
I think the question you have to ask, I said, is this: are you refusing the surgery out of fear, or are there good and important reasons why you simply do not want to do it? That’s the key for you, I think. It’s your heart, no one can decide but you.
“Because it is not cowardly to be afraid,” I said, “it is very human.” I was gone in the morning, he waved good bye to me as they wheeled me to the operating suite. Two days later, as I made my first halting lap around the Intensive Care Unit, I walked past a man I did not recognize, tubes protruding from his face and chest, as they were from mine. “Jon,” he sad, “it’s me, it’s me.” It was him. He smiled and waved and whispered “thank you.” I did not see him again.
The word courage dates all the way back to the 1200’s, from the Middle English word corage which, loosely translated, meant heart. In so many ways, I live by the heart. My relationship with Maria is one of the heart. I write about the heart in my books about animals, about our feelings for them, and theirs for us. My photography is all about the heart, about light and color and meaning.
My faith, in part, is this. Words matter. Truth matters. The heart matters. From the first, I saw the surgery as an opportunity to right the great wrong I did my wonderful heart. When I smoked. When I worked 14 hours a day and wolfed down cheeseburgers and fries for lunch. When I refused to have my heart checked out for 30 years.
When I lived a life of panic and fear. I had the longest talk with my heart that night, I said hey, sorry about all of this, I have been given a chance to make things right, you have given me so much in life, and today, I can give something back to you. All the good things in my life have come from you, flow from you, and last week, when I could not walk up that little hill, I knew I had broken faith with you and the world was not punishing me, it was given me the most amazing thing: another chance. Think of all the things we can do together, I told my heart, all the ways we can love Maria, all the friends I can care for, all the words I can write that might touch someone else’s heart, all the photos I can take that might remind people of the light and color in the world.
I cried with my heart that night, we were both so excited to have another chance to right the wrong done to my heart, mostly by me. How could I live in fear of that?
Courage is a fuzzy thing, I think it is a quality of mind and spirit that enables us to face difficult and dangerous things – frightening things – without fear, but with hope and acceptance and gratitude. I had courage that night, and so, in his own way, did the man in the room.