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Whenever I exercise, which is often, I wear a heart rate monitor. I am obsessed with knowing how hard I am working and how many calories I have burned. My husband, who occasionally wears a monitor, does not understand my obsessive need for the tiny machine. “Can’t you just exercise to your maximum level on your own?” He questioned me one day when I was despondent over a dead battery in the monitor. “HOW CAN I EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS?” I bellowed, “IF I don’t have the monitor to TELL ME when I am working hard?!” I rely upon the monitor to tell me when I am slacking off… when I am working beyond the level of comfort, and when my heart is truly on the edge of bursting. “181!” I will shriek to whoever is near. “I need to slow down!” But in my REAL life…. My day-to-day existence…. I don’t need a monitor to tell me the status of my heart. I only need to look at the upcoming holidays with such amazing sorrow as proof that a broken heart can never heal….. not if that heart has been broken by the loss of a child. I feel the breath actually freeze in my lungs in the middle of the night, waking me from a sound sleep as I remember that my son is gone. I try to remember the last time I slept through the night without waking bathed in sorrow, and realize that it has been over two years. Two years in which time has in some ways stood still, and in others warped forward in an astonishing blur. My youngest, who was 9 when his brother died, is 11 going on fifty. He is a child in many ways, but aged beyond his years by the realization that loving someone will not keep them close to you forever. My oldest has a year and a half of undergraduate school left, and has forged forth into a life of his own under the worst of circumstances. It’s not like he had a choice in the matter. It’s not like any of us had a choice in the matter. God had a plan and frankly, I think it stinks. That may be bad to say, but I am facing another holiday season without my son and God isn’t letting me in on why that is so. Even though I ask Him nightly. So far, He’s not talking. I continue my restless nights, tossing and turning and trying to forget all the pain and to piece together what is left of my heart. I don’t need to wear a monitor to tell me that all the exercise in the world is not going to bring back my Carrick. But it is the only thing I can do to take my mind off the dull ache that reminds me that nothing will ever be completely right or whole around here again. I look at a house that has remained unchanged in the two years since Carrick’s death, and wish I had the energy to care enough to rip down old wallpaper, to paint a wall. I do not. I don’t need a monitor to tell me that something that used to be important…. keeping the house nicely decorated and current is far down on my list of priorities. Far, far down. So I wear my heart rate monitor and carefully track my calories burned and my peak and average heart rate. I work hard at exercise because it takes me momentarily away from a broken heart, which has a pain that runs so deep that it cannot be monitored. I do not need a machine to tell me the status of my heart.
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