c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ In his novel,”More Die of Heartbreak,”Saul Bellow proposes a Pain Schedule modeled on our Tax Schedule. At a certain point in the year, we fill it out and calculate our annual total.

The Nobel laureate in literature makes the case for ordinary men and women and their efforts to find and honor love in their lives. Nevertheless, stacked against heart disease, automobile accidents or assorted plagues, more people die of heartbreak than of anything else.

And there is no search for a cure.

Pope John XXIII, having viewed the landscape of suffering in assignments around the world, became pope and convened Vatican Council II. His answer, when startled aides asked why, was, in his own voice, deeply theological:”To make the human sojourn on earth less sad.” Bellow and the late pope were on the track of the same fugitive mystery. Now, of course, marvelous new techniques and drugs ease physical pain and treat depression. This is the Prozac nation, we are told.

But, if the drug exiles the illness, where is its Elba? We are aware that the ashes of heartbreak can be stirred by the slightest breeze to roaring life. Where is the energy of pain banked in the meanwhile?

Heartbreak is of its nature a lonely affliction. We are left, most of the time, to deal with it on our own. There is bittersweet irony, at best, in finding that we must suffer alone what comes out of living with each other.

We are often told that we must live with it. Where, then, in our being does it live with us? What can we do with this elusive tenant who may be quiet but won’t move out? One of the fiercest trials of suffering flows from our not knowing what to do with it.

You may think it has subsided. Lie down and find that it rises, a vampire needing the dark to sink its teeth into us and to hold us sleepless until first light.

Sometimes we put our sadness away as we do photographs into a desk drawer. Open it and sorrow seeps out like the smell of cedar. It was waiting in the pictures, as events do in dreams, where the dead live again and we are all young once more. We sit clutching the pictures that we will never seal into albums and put them away. But the genii-like sorrow stays with us.

Thinking that people will notice that we are unhappy sometimes confirms our isolation. People of good will make us feel worse by telling us, when we are feeling particularly bad, how good we look. They admire the cool marble mantle and miss the crackling fireplace below.

This forces a commonplace truth on us. Many people, preoccupied with their own sadness, don’t look carefully at us and don’t notice our faces at all.

Read the headlines about betrayal and distress, of murder and corruption, of famine and massacre. The smoke from heartbreak’s pyre does not ascend as a sweet odor to the heavens. Is it our sadness rather than pollution that clogs the stratosphere and eats away at the ozone layer?

The answer to our quest is found, of all places, in the White House. On a lower level there is a large finely appointed parlor, an oasis of calm and quiet off a bustling corridor of power. In the oil paintings that line the walls you discover where all the sadness of that house goes.

The first ladies of most of this century look down timelessly. All the sadness of their lives, and perhaps part of our own, is in their eyes. These presidents’ wives are mothers of sorrow, too, and the pain of everything they have known and looked upon is both at rest and restless in their eyes. How much they know of which they have never spoken, from Lady Bird Johnson to Patricia Nixon and Jacqueline Kennedy and from Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This array of portraits is overwhelming in its impact. Nobody needs earphones and a taped guide to this small exhibition of the clear, still depths into which the rivers of every sadness empty themselves. Observe here sadness itself observed.

Our sorrow, like theirs, may be found in our eyes, too. Perhaps that explains sunglasses, plastic surgery, and the poet who described the eyes as the”lamps of the soul.”It may also make more understandable our seldom looking carefully at each other. We avert our own eyes so as not to see the sorrow that we know is there in the eyes all around us.

The cure for heartbreak, then, lies not in nonsense about men being from Mars and women from Venus, but in our willingness to look truly into each other’s eyes, deeper than the diving bell can go, to find the truths that make us kin and make us free as well.

DEA END KENNEDY