Heart Failure

Heart Failure   
copyright@Will Maguire

At 39, in his artistic prime, the composer Frederick Chopin began to feel a nagging and then constant ache in his chest.

That year he had been in a tempestuous and ultimately ruinous affair with a woman, but only later did it become clear that the pain was a medical issue. She loved him, but Chopin lived the financially insecure life often demanded of an artist. 

So she gave herself to a man who could better provide for her and they both went on ruined in the way that love can ruin two souls simply by the knowledge of each other’s existence.

She became someone else’s wife and then a mother and lived with a tepid affection for her innocent husband, haunted by that rare Supposed to Be passion that she had given up.

Chopin for his part took what was given, which is to say what was taken, and used the longing to forge a new kind of music. 

It was the sound of a heart fractured by its own feeling. 

Later that year, over the course of a few months the pain in his chest worsened and his health began to deteriorate dramatically. Both heartbroken, and by then heart sick, he developed a rare psychological disorder called taphephobia. An overwhelming fear of being buried alive. 

So each night Chopin, desperately ill, became afraid to sleep for fear of being buried alive beneath the dreams of the woman he had lost.

As his health failed his music deepened, as though the loss somehow made it greater. Old women would gather beneath the dying composer’s window at dusk just to hear the sound of that voice. 

The voice of a forgiving and unfulfillable longing. 

Chopin had been raised in a devout family and had come to believe that his own heart, the actual organ, and his immortal soul were inextricably bound. And realizing that he was dying, he began to worry that if his heart was buried post mortem, his soul would be forever trapped as well.

So in his last month he pleaded with his doctor, a friend and admirer, to save it.  He pleaded with him again and again to remove his heart so that his soul would be saved.

“Mercy mon ami. Mercy I beg of you,” he whispered to his friend. “Mercy.”

And when Death was near, his friend the doctor finally relented and reluctantly agreed.

Soon after Chopin, one night wide awake and once more afraid of being buried in his dreams, quietly died.

After his death, the doctor, true to his word, removed Chopin’s heart.

It was terribly enlarged. The medical term is pericarditis. A heart becomes enlarged when it is deprived of what it needs. 

It was far too large to have ever survived. And the doctor remarked that to live with a heart that large must have been unbearable. 

Soon after, the body without its heart was buried in an unmarked grave in Paris.

The doctor took Chopin’s heart, and presumably his soul, and embalmed it, preserving it according to the practice of the day in a bottle of liquor. Cognac.

The bottle and its contents were secreted back into Chopin’s birthplace of Poland, then passed back and forth over several generations before being stolen by a German admirer of his music, a Nazi SS officer. He kept it on a shelf above his desk. 

The enlarged heart of a man that felt too much looking down each day at the small thin heart of a man that felt too little.

But a soul is immortal and, along with the unburied heart, outlasted the war.  The bottle was eventually returned to Poland and placed in the altar of the Cathedral of the Holy Name in Warsaw.

And there each night the Cathedral is filled with Chopin's music. 

The nocturne of an enlarged heart and an unburied soul fills the air. Each note as full of the majesty of love and the terror of its loss as when it first fell from his fingers.

And though Chopin’s heart no longer beats, it still listens. A silent witness to all it once felt.  

Each night, through the music, his soul is resurrected. 

It sings for all, we the living, are forced to endure.

You may think this an extraordinary story. The story of a man that died because his heart had grown too large for this small thin world. 

Or you may think it remarkable that a man could plead each night to have his own heart cut from him.

But this is a not an uncommon story.

 

The streets are filled with enlarged hearts. They, like Chopin’s, have grown too large for this world. From longing. 

They have become greater the only way a heart can, by what is taken away.

You can walk into any late night bar on Broadway, and if you know how to listen, you will hear that same quiet nocturne, that same voice of an unfulfillable longing. 

It sings for many slowly embalming their own hearts. In bottles.

It is better to have an enlarged heart, for all the pain of it, than to have a small thin heart, starved for feeling.

That is the only true kind of heart failure.

WLM