COMMENTARY: Doctors Can Now List Heartbreak Right Before Heartburn

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Science now confirms what you learned the hard way: that there is such a thing as heartbreak. Plain and homely heartbreak, however, is abstracted into “myocardial stunning” marked by elevated “stress hormone levels,” according to the doctors’ Web site http://www.Medscape.com. Also termed the “broken heart syndrome,” and accompanied by […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Science now confirms what you learned the hard way: that there is such a thing as heartbreak.

Plain and homely heartbreak, however, is abstracted into “myocardial stunning” marked by elevated “stress hormone levels,” according to the doctors’ Web site http://www.Medscape.com.


Also termed the “broken heart syndrome,” and accompanied by chest pain and shortness of breath, it was found _ surprise, surprise _ in a small sample of people who “had experienced emotional jolts” including one woman “who had watched her mother die at the hospital. Another had been in a car accident … unscathed. … One … was startled at a surprise birthday party,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

There was no mention of being disappointed or hurt by _ or disappointing or hurting _ somebody you love, something that happens more often than surprise parties but certainly feels like an accident. It, after all, is something you don’t want to happen, that you don’t see coming, and that mocks no-fault insurance and makes you wary of ever taking that risk again.

Ask Dolly Parton; she can sing all about it for you. Does Shakespeare’s Hamlet describe those who wound or are wounded by love when he says, because he doesn’t know whether to be or not to be, “I am sick at heart?” Does Goethe’s Faust speak on behalf of everybody who has bungled a bargain with life or love when he says, “My peace is gone. My heart is heavy”?

But unlike Hamlet, Faust and maybe you, too, the subjects in this new research “had not suffered heart attacks and would have no lasting damage.” What could be more pleasing to a culture whose slogan is “Get over it” than to be told that there is nothing to get over?

Other newspaper stories remind us that the great American oasis of closure, which rises out of the desert of our woe, is a mirage. If there are things too deep for tears, there are things like heartbreak that are too deep to get over as well.

Rachel weeps for her children everywhere as for the mothers caring for the HIV-infected babies born out of the rapes by marauding troops in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Sorrow comes up with the sun in Swaziland where the HIV infection rate of 39 percent is the highest in the world.


Rachel is uncomforted in the Mideast where the cries of the bereaved in the town squares below are keener than the summons to prayer from the muezzin on the minaret above.

Some observers equate heartbreak with such findings as stress hormone levels, as if the human person housed a laboratory filled with steaming test tubes. Every Valentine’s Day they reduce falling in love from something that happens between persons to random chemical reactions inside persons.

The findings suggest that plasma levels are not causes, but effects, of something that occurs only in a relationship between infinitely complex but whole people who love each other and thereby give and gain the power to break each other’s hearts.

You are not surprised that the researchers found no evidence of physical heart damage in their subjects; after all, that occurs in people with normal coronary arteries. Heartbreak is fundamentally a spiritual experience. Its invisible wounds heal slowly from inside but they throb, as broken bones do on rainy days, at even slight reminders that you have loved and been loved by somebody else.

Mel Gibson’s movie notwithstanding, Jesus didn’t become human to suffer and pay for our sins but to preach love and experience our heartbreak with us.

Heartbreak is a function of taking the risk of healthy intimacy, of loving enough to be our undefended selves with somebody else; heartbreak happens only at close range.


If you have never missed anyone, or wept at their loss, your stress hormone levels may be fine but you’ve missed the point of being human.

KRE/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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