Hot. That’s kind of all I could think.
My daughter and I were recently in Florida with the Juneau Jumpers at the national competition. I hadn’t been out of Juneau in seven months. It’s good to get out every now and then for a reality check on America. There are a lot of Applebee’s and Golden Corrals outside Alaska.
I brought some reading material with me since I knew there would be quite a bit of down time. For the pool and short waits I had a mindless mystery I could pick up and put down without much effort. I also brought Herzschmerzen.
I want to immerse myself in German again before we travel there in August so I grabbed one of the books that’s been sitting on my shelf for a while. It was given to me by someone who thought it would be an easy read for my level of German.
What I love about the German language is how it captures an experience in a word — often a very long word. This isn’t quite true for schmetterling, which means butterfly without any of the grace and beauty.
It is true for herzschmerzen. Herz is heart. Schmerzen is pain, hurt, ache or broken. We know the term broken heart; it’s just that herzschmerzen sounds like what I feel when my heart hurts.
The book is easy reading, but not light reading. I am able to understand most of the German; it is a book about interviews with children who escaped the war in Yugoslavia. The interviews are full of heartbreak. Many of the interviews flood into my brain as impersonal TV news images. These images didn’t seem believable in the 1990s coming out of Europe, so we often ignored them.
I find myself thinking of Syria and all the other places I’m too ignorant or “busy” to think of the families fleeing. All those refugees who still know the heartbreak of war.
But there I was at a jump rope competition where there were plenty of tears and herzschmerzen. These kids, the hundreds who competed, trained for countless hours, and in a minute all dreams could be crushed with a miss or nerves. I don’t want to discount that sorrow in any way. What is weird is how I want to respond. I want to fix, buffer, or even consider bailing on such risks because watching your flesh and blood cry hurts more than anything I know.
Then I remember how important it is to experience heartbreak. Obviously not the heartbreak of war and having your dad’s leg blown off when he goes back to save your teddy bear (that interview was horrible). However, digging through pain, guilt and disappointment gives us the empathy to take the sorrow of the world seriously.
Sometimes you have to just sit with heartbreak and let it wash over you until you can catch your breath. Sometimes it makes you push harder. Sometimes it keeps life in perspective.
I’m not sure folks always learn a lesson or come out better, but often we come out more human and hopefully a little more aware of how painful life can be. Coming out of heartbreak helps us to realize people do come out on the other side of pain. The heart is never the same after herzschmerzen, but there is another German word that might be helpful: Versöhnen. It means to reconcile, make friends again.
I don’t think you ever get over or move on from heartbreak, but you figure out how to reconcile to a new way of being in this world. You make friends again with your own being, with a changed reality, with a world where there is plenty of pain, guilt and disappointment.
I often think of the magnet I have in my office. Life is short, so tell people you love them; but it is also scary, so shout it in German.
“Living & Growing” is a recurring Neighbors column, written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders. Tari Stage-Harvey is the pastor of Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church.
