Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren

dizziness, and weakness, along with the booming of my heart and the distinct sensation that if I did not simply lie there and wait—if, instead, I rose and tried to do anything—I would keel over and die, to a variety of possibilities: to the mixture of champagne, wine, and cognac; to being apprehensive about being on my own for the first time in many years; to a touch of the stomach flu; to in-flight turbulence while I was asleep; to a nightmare—night terrors?—I’d had but could recall only vaguely; to being in transition from the known (my life as single parent in Northampton) to the unknown (life as a single guy in a city and nation foreign to me), and to who-knew-what-else.
    So I lay there quietly, and after a while I sat up, put my head down between my legs, and waited. In about seven or eight minutes, the physical symptoms, and the fear, passed.
    Like Dr. Katz, Rich doesn’t see any connection between this experience and what I am experiencing now. But who knows? Rich says. Maybe the pain in my back two years before was a symptom of coronary disease, and maybe it wasn’t. And yes, he says, given the manner of your uncle’s death, your father’s heart attack at fifty-nine (which he survived), your symptoms, and your age (fifty-nine), thedoctor probably should have ordered a stress test for you back then. But hindsight is easy, and the main thing now is to pay attention to the symptoms, and for us to stay in close touch with each other.
    And this—staying in close touch with Rich about my symptoms—is exactly what, in my memory, I believed I had been doing all along.
    When, after surgery, I begin telling my story to others, I am certain I was talking with Rich nearly every day beginning with the day on which I first had an episode of shortness of breath. More than this: in my memory, not only had I called Rich as soon as I came home from the YMCA, but I had also immediately telephoned Arthur, Jerry, and Phil, and then had begun checking in with each of them regularly.
    When I go through my journal, however, I discover that it was not until I had seen Dr. Katz—four weeks after the shortness of breath first occurred—that I began talking with Rich and my friends about my symptoms and anxieties. I discover, too, that once Dr. Katz told me that what I was describing didn’t seem to indicate major heart problems, rather than being reassured, I became more convinced than ever that I had heart disease.
    What was happening, I now believe, is that I was trusting what I was feeling more than what my doctor was telling me. Was I, as we commonly say, “listening to what my body was telling me”? Perhaps. But what I was experiencing in my body was in no way separate from what I was, in my mind, thinking—and what I was thinking seemed in no way separate from what I was feeling. More exactly: I found myself believing that my fears, anxieties, and premonitions, along with my bodily symptoms, were not unrelated to what I knew to be true; and what I knew to be true came to me in words that seemed quite plain: physically and spiritually, I was suffering from a sickness unto death.
    On the day I first call Rich to talk with him about my concerns and about Dr. Katz’s diagnosis, I also talk with my father, who died at the age of seventy-two in 1976.
    Ever since his death, when I’m especially troubled or have had especially good news, and usually when driving, I will talk with him, and our conversations invariably help me through to seeing thingsas they are and to understanding and articulating what I’m feeling about them. Conjuring up his presence—“Hey, Dad, it’s me again,” I’ll begin, aloud—I will look upward through the windshield and usually find him floating in the sky, Chagall-like, just above the car. In our talks I’ll generally report, first, on what’s going on with my children (his grandchildren), with Robert,