Case File of Patient X

Sobering news from one of the most eminent thinkers in Neuroscience, Neurology, and Psychology, Antonio Damasio: "One can die of a broken heart."

I came across this in my research for a project based partially in the best neuroscience I could find, from one of the greatest writers in the field.

Damasio is credited with finally persuading scientists that the historical presumption of duality between thinking and emotions is not supported by the evidence; in fact, the two are inextricably intertwined in our brain matter.

Both are equally necessary for our survival.

There are many problems a person has to overcome when dealing with profound losses such as the death of a loved one or an emotional breakup for which (s)he was not prepared. These problems are magnified when the dying (or leaving) person does not or cannot help prepare the one left behind for the difficult transition ahead.

I leafed through a novel by a Chinese woman the other day who described the "final gift" from her mother as demonstrating the "way to die."

In today's world of social media, those breaking up need to be cognizant of how much damage they may do to the one left behind. One way is simply by openly expressing their new happiness, which only deepens the pain they inflict on someone still in love with them.

Of course, anyone with a big heart wants their ex- to be happy ultimately. But when you are still in so much pain that you catch your chest and have trouble breathing, to be assaulted by the new lightness and sweetness of freedom, new love, and happiness that you don't have -- but she does, purportedly -- when she is the proximate cause of your not having them, is actually more than any normally sane and emotionally balanced person can handle.

It actually is.

This is how one becomes ill, often gravely ill, and in the worst case, dies.

Damasio does a brilliant job of eliminating our misconceptions about the interplay between what we often separate out as the "heart" from the "brain." Being very, very smart is no insulation whatsoever from the "heart" pain you feel during grief. In fact, it makes things much worse, because your perception, newly poisoned with the sensitivity of bruised emotions, goes haywire.

You are prone to do things you never would have done -- mainly self-destructive things. You will push away friends and family, mess up any semblance of an organized life, and spin out of control.

All of this is written in our brain tissue, fired by our synapses, finally anchored, dangerously, in our hearts. This is how one dies, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, bit by bit.

Can fate be avoided? Of course, normally we forge our own path to recovery. All of us works hard at this, no rational being wants to wallow in pain. There is no time for it in this brief existence. So we try to "process," we try to promote the "grieving process."

But this does not lessen the harm in every case. That depends on the circumstances.

What makes this worse for artists is what happens to your creativity. There are survivable traumas, and unsurvivable ones, just as in automobile accidents -- or perhaps a better analogy in this case would be plane crashes.

In the best case scenario, the writer or artist survives the shock and acquires new power from the loss that they can use to strengthen their work, and make it more universally relevant. No artist wants to be seen as self-absorbed; that is almost the worst insult one can hurl in times of pain -- even when the person uttering it is, in actuality, revealing and voicing a projection from her own guilty conscience.

Because there is, in fact, a worst case scenario, and that is the one Damasio documented.

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