Who Holds Your Heart?

Grief and the Body

May 30, 2026

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Who Holds My Heart? Olivia Janna Genereaux, 2015

I sat in the waiting room of an orthopedic doctor. He was number four.

In the evenings they did the procedures. Mine was PRP — an injection of myself into myself. My own platelet-rich plasma was hoped would act as some sort of Hail Mary pass for my left foot.

This doctor, though, had openly admitted to me in my initial consult that he had ‘no idea’ what had happened to my poor appendage. I’ve only seen this in someone whose foot was crushed by a truck, he remarked as it rested, alien and pitiable, in his hands.

That night, as he took my blood for the injection, he began prattling on endlessly about Mao.

That’s right, Mao Zedong, the communist leader who founded the People’s Republic of China. (And who’s usually lumped in with Stalin and Hitler as the 20^th Century’s worst actors). Turns out my doctor was some sort of devotee.

He wanted me to know that he’d traveled to Mao’s childhood home in the Hunan Province and went on endlessly about the Shaoshan house and village.

I was desperate to tune him out, but he was two feet away from me and right then, in charge of the thing I use to walk.

It was at times like this, in utter disconsolation, that I would resort to talking to my dead sister in my head: I can’t believe this is my life. Can you see this guy, Lis? Did you hear what he just said? About Mao?! This is insane. Do something! This is such a nightmare…

After he left the room, I sat there watching the centrifuge spin. Thinking about my plasma. Wondering if it could cure me. Wondering if anything could cure me.

That night the communist fixed it. Within a few weeks my foot was finally, finally better. After two plus years of limping and months spent in and out of that boot, several turns with three of the city’s most prominent specialists who’d swung and missed, I could walk.

Only later did I begin to wonder if my foot had been trying to tell me something for which my grief had not yet found words.

When a Broken Heart Breaks

How each of our bodies responds under the considerable stress of grief is unique. I seemed to have an endocrine meltdown in wake of loss, and it affected my bones. A few months after that injection, they found the underlying issue and a simple medication addressed it.

But there are far more dangerous medical outcomes that can happen in the aftermath of loss. (Quick warning—this is about the dangers of cardiac events.)

Harvard and Beth Israel Medical Centers in Boston published a study in 2012, with some alarming findings:

On the day a loved one dies, you are twenty-one times more likely to have a heart attack than on any other single day of your life. That’s a two thousand percent increase.
Over a three-month period after the death of a spouse or partner, a man is twice as likely to die of a fatal heart attack and a woman nearly that much, 1.8 times as likely.

A headstone in a graveyard near my home. Elroy Smith died in the morning. His wife, Elizabeth, breathed her last that evening.

We know now too that the body reacts to deep stress over time. In 1998, Kaiser Permanente and the CDC published a study showing that trauma in childhood (ACEs—adverse childhood experiences) raises the risk of heart disease in adulthood. In fact, children with significant trauma die earlier from everything—heart disease, cancer, addiction, complications of obesity, mental health disorders, and suicide.

Today we take it as fact: the body holds it all.

No Panacea

This research provides further confirmation that our losses and pain need processing. Thank you, God, for neuroplasticity.

But mysteries remain and we cannot out-heal all our suffering here.

I sometimes wonder to myself, if the body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk offered in his groundbreaking work, is it okay if I don’t want a constant update on the tally?

It’s like those Oura rings that give you a sleep number in the morning. I’d rather just know I have great coffee awaiting me, regardless of what transpired (or didn’t) in the watches of the night.

My point is that these are helpful insights but they’re no panacea. It reminds me of a great metaphor used by Dr. Rudy Tanzi, a leading Harvard neuroscientist and Alzheimer’s researcher. He was speaking of a new approach for treatment of the disease about which he was wary:

It might help us find the casings on the field at Gettysburg, he said, but it will not help us stop the war.

My concern is this: when we start believing we can somehow master our pain—we can end up becoming harder, not softer, adding another layer of hurt to what we already suffer.

If I’d mentioned this research to my sister when she was dying of cancer, she’d have pulled her cute Mini Cooper over and told me to get out. Indeed, if you’d suggested I consider that my body was the whisperer on all my parents’ misdeeds and failings as well as all my own losses and terrifying sins, while I was writhing in pain a few weeks ago from a herniated disc, I don’t know what I would have done. But I would not have said, “Thank you so much. That’s really helpful.”

Healing is possible. Yes. But we are also being beset. We suffer. Period.

Thank you, beautiful Kate Bowler:

Everything does not happen for a reason and there’s no cure for being human.

*Maggie*, Chuck Close, 1996. (The artist’s daughter.)

Virginia Woolf wrote in a short, devastating little essay called, On Being Ill:

To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer.

Perhaps.

But here’s a hope hack. And this is for some people some of the time. (Not those in extraordinary pain, not tragic diagnoses, and do consider adding your own no-goes to this list and popping them in the comments.)

This came to me courtesy of a counselor many years ago. She said that when something rose up in her—pain, unease, restlessness, angst, fear—whatever it was, she would:

*find a quiet place

*settle herself down

*and say (in her thoughts or softly aloud):

Show me the wound.

And then she’d wait. Listening, giving the ache some space, letting it speak. And she would wait for Him too (wait on Him as the Bible might say), to see if God wanted to show her something — about herself or her pain or her scars. I think this kind of quiet witness works no matter your faith tradition.

I still do this. And it sometimes works. (In that I gain insight.) But it always works. In that I’ve settled myself down and my nervous system too, which we now know helps to actually heal us.

As we attempt to address our losses and pain and try to metabolize them, and in some way build up the patience it requires to suffer them well, that is with hope, it’s true, we’ll need what Woolf called the courage of a lion tamer.

Or, as my counselor wisely suggested, we need the lion Himself.

*Blue Period Portraits

David Bisgrove

"As we attempt to address our losses and pain and try to metabolize them, and in some way build up the patience it requires to suffer them well, that is with hope, it’s true, we’ll need what Woolf called the courage of a lion tamer.

Or, as my counselor wisely suggested, we need the lion Himself." Amen - thank you for this Kara.

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