Deep in the Sweet Melancholy

In the movie Elizabethtown, the character Drew Baylor stands in his aunt's kitchen with a group of new-to-him relatives following his father's viewing. While visiting estranged family in Kentucky, Drew's father had passed away from a heart attack and Drew was sent by his mother and sister from Oregon to take care of the funeral and bring his father's remains home. Chaos ensues. In this particular scene, the night is warm, the light is low, they're obviously tired both physically and emotionally, yet they're smiling as they revel in a sweet melancholy that often follows traumatic life events. 

I love this scene. It calls to mind a difficult-to-describe sentimentality that you have to experience to understand. It is this almost peaceful longing, a reverent recall of difficult times. As if the slow let down  that happens following the adrenaline rush and fear, provides its own serotonin release, cementing a beautiful nostalgia all its own.

This is what my family experienced in the month following my heart transplant.

As you recall, my miracle phone call happened on December 14th 2023, with surgery taking place in the wee hours of the morning of December 15th--just in time for the holidays. I had a record recovery and left the hospital eight days after surgery--it would have been seven but I begged for one more day to learn how to manage my medications and get a hold on my blood sugars. Nevertheless, I was released from the hospital on December 23rd--just in time to celebrate Christmas with my family.

Coming home from the hospital felt a lot like bringing home a newborn infant. For me it meant a whole new way of life. While I had gone through a lot of training on medications and things to watch for, I felt unprepared and scared. My body did not feel like my own. I was weak and sore and dependent on everyone around me--something I wasn't used to. Even showering was a new experience with procedures and regimens that needed following and for which I needed assistance. It was bewildering. 

As I was so fresh from transplant, I basically had no immune system. My transplant team asked us to keep visitors to a minimum. We decided to basically act like it was the 2020 pandemic again and go on lockdown. Our married daughter came back home with her husband, our college-age sons moved back in (it was winter break anyway), and we hunkered down. Even though surgery had gone well and my recovery was, for all intents and purposes, on track, we were still taking things day by day. 

We fell into a rhythm of sorts: wake up, take medicine, check all my vital signs, make our way to the family room, take medicine, eat cheese (seriously, we ate six pounds of cheese), take medicine, assemble legos, take medicine, share a meal, take medicine, make the strenuous journey up the stairs to my room and take all of my vitals again, take medicine, make our way to bed for a restless night of worry and night sweats (oh, the joyous transplant medication side effects).

There were the inevitable excursions out to the lab, the pharmacy, or to the hospital for right heart caths and biopsies. I hated those times. Those days were long for me. I could barely walk across a room, let alone last an entire day navigating the halls of the University of Utah hospital. I was expected to arrive, fasting, at the hospital usually before 7:45 a.m. for my then weekly biopsies to check the progress of my heart's healing and monitor any signs of rejection, and we wouldn't arrive back home before 5:00 p.m. Thankfully, neighbors and friends often provided dinner for our little tribe on those harrowing days. 

For me, just the like the early weeks of motherhood, the days were simple but hard.

The holidays came and went and we existed in our own little bubble. 

No Christmas Eve parties. No family Christmas dinners. No Sunday services. No New Year's Eve party. Just the seven of us gathered around the six-pound block of Muenster and the Titanic lego set.

The thing is, however, when we each think back on that Christmas and holiday season we each remember it with this deep, sweet nostalgia for the melancholy of that time. And though this is just my retelling of that season, we talk about it in a similar way. While we're all grateful to have moved on and healed from that winter of 2023-24 we all express a longing, if you will, for those simple-but-hard days.

There can be a pulling together, a unifying in times like these. Where difficult events often force change--change in our lives and changes in ourselves--nostalgia pulls us back together. Whether it arises through grief brought on by loss or through the emotional release that takes place following periods of great stress, this sense of exhausted tranquility helps us process intense feelings into something--well, transcendent.

Call it a coping mechanism, call it delusion--call it what you will--but I call this experience a blessing for enduring well the hardships life throws our way.

I can recall one other time when I felt deep in this sweet melancholy before. It was after the passing of my brother. At the end of a long, emotional day of funeral planning we had gathered in the office of his home to go through some papers and photos. It was a warm summer night, not unlike that scene from Elizabethtown. We ended up crying and laughing, laughing and crying into the night, remembering better, easier, more innocent times. Recalling times when laughter came without tears, when memories were either good or bad, when we were uninformed on the nuances and complexities of adult relationships, and we simply would not have been able to fathom a world where joy and sorrow could exist side by side, and the understanding that we are all better for it. 

A world before we knew the longing for simple-but-hard times--and the joy of a six-pound block of cheese.