In the Company of Broken Hearts
The older I get, the harder it can be not to be quietly undone—sometimes to tears—when I come into contact with a moment of tenderness: a film, a phone conversation with my son Jon, waving goodbye to my son Micah as his car disappears in the distance, or a beloved photograph of my brother Ed.
I’ve come to sense that these moments carry such weight because, over time, we begin to see more clearly the deep contrast that shapes a human life. We come to know its customary hardness—its disappointments, its quiet cruelties—and so when tenderness appears, even briefly, it meets us in a deeper place. Perhaps we are not only responding to the beauty before us, but also grieving, in some quiet way, the innocence the world does not always know how to protect.
The photograph I’ve chosen for this reflection is of my younger brother Ed. I assume my dad took the picture, though I have no memory of when or where it was taken. What I do know is how difficult it is to look for very long into the eyes of my baby brother. There he is—Edwin, as we called him then—wide-eyed, delighted, meeting the world with a kind of unguarded joy.
And I know what came later. He did not.
There is something almost unbearable in that difference. As he giggled and marveled at the life laid out before him, none of us could see what would eventually unfold—years later, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and then pancreatic cancer. A life that would ask so much of him. A life that would end too soon, leaving behind his wife Robin and his daughter Presley.
To look at this photograph is to hold two truths at once: the purity of that moment, and the weight of everything that followed. And sometimes, that is almost more than the heart can hold.
And yet…That small, radiant child is not only my brother. He is, in some way, all of us.
We, too, began this way—open, curious, unguarded. And over time, we have walked through more than we ever would have chosen. We have made our share of mistakes, missteps, and the small stumblings of an ordinary life. The world, sooner or later, finds its way into every heart—and breaks it.
And still, something tender remains.
Perhaps these moments are not asking us to explain anything, or to make sense of it all, but simply to soften. To meet ourselves—and one another—with a little more kindness. At the end of the day, these small acts of tenderness matter more than our politics, our religious affiliations, or how much money we have in the bank.
What we share in common is far more fundamental: our broken hearts—the Iranian mother grieving the death of her son, the parents of a U.S. Marine waving goodbye as their daughter is deployed to the Middle East, the husband who has just read the word “cancer” for the first time on MyChart.
And to remember, gently, that whatever we have carried, whatever we have endured, we are deserving of as much tenderness and compassion as this life can offer.
