Dying of a Broken Heart

[ed. Wonderful serialized blog/book, with successive chapters posted on the right side of the page. This is Chapter One. Be sure to read the Prologue, too.]

It happened just over a week ago. I was lying on my med-bed on the third floor of the local Nashville nuthouse, waiting for the Ambien to amplify all of the other shit coursing across the blood-brain barrier: Zoloft…150 mg, a zonester of there ever was one…Ativan, a 10 mg mini-pill, clicking along the mellow mental interstate like an unloaded 18-wheeler dead-heading home…and my personal favorite, Risperdal, its 1 mg packing a punch like a lead-weighted glove aimed straight at the deepest wrinkles in the old medulla oblongata. Suddenly I saw them, in Technicolor on the insides of my eyelids, these words: I am dying of a broken heart.

Don’t get me wrong. It had nothing to do with the drugs, and certainly nothing to do with checking myself into the nut for a much-needed life-recalculation and some chemical cell-tuning. No, it had been coming for a long, long time, and the only thing that had saved me until then was that tried and true foxhole fixation, Denial. I’ve been real, real good at it, Denial. After all, I’m a Truscott.

My grandfather, General Lucian King Truscott Jr., died of a broken heart. So did my father, Colonel Lucian King Truscott III. And so did my brother Francis Meriwether Truscott, who took his life with a Tokarev pistol taken from an NVA Major in Vietnam. The war finally got him, his wife Debbie told me on the phone the morning his body was found on the back steps of his local funeral home. Broken hearts in the Truscott family follow broken bodies and lost lives right to the bloody fucking end.

I’ve had friends, too, who died of broken hearts. Hunter Thompson, who shot himself in his kitchen when he finally realized that what he loved as much as life itself — the fun — was over. Gore Vidal, who died in his bed never having been able to bring himself out of the Final Closet: he was for the entirety of his life a terminal romantic who lost his first love and could never allow himself to love again. And Bill Cardoso, who died with a tall Dewars and soda in hand and his loving companion Mary Miles Ryan at his side, still raging against a world in which he had no place left to write, no place that would publish his marvelous wit which he wielded with a rapier, nearly intolerable ego.

The weird thing about lying in the dark full of drugs in a nuthouse realizing that you’re dying of a broken heart is how good it feels. It’s soft and psychically comfy to finally realize that where you are and what you are feeling has roots in family tradition, and looked at in that way, there’s really nothing wrong with you. You’re a Truscott. Of course your heart is broken. Of course you’re going to die. The two go together like gin and tonic. (...)

Life is full of love affairs and relationships and sadness and regrets and mistakes and joy and fights and reconciliations and you remember most of them fondly and without rancor, some painfully, and nearly all with love in your heart.

by by Lucian K. Truscott IV | Read more:
Image:Truscott family photo