Heartsounds: The Story of a Love and Loss

I am writing a dual review about a book I read at least 20 years ago, Martha Weinman Lear's "Heart Sounds". And I am writing it because I read Joan Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking." I read the book, "Heart Sounds" as a relatively new, young nurse and I was really shocked to hear someone so clearly describe what it is like to be a patient in a hospital or their family member. I would like to believe that this book helped me to be a better nurse. Both Lear and Didion write about the experience of being with husbands who have heart disease and die, though Lear's husband's day to day disability is much more profound in the last two or so years of his life. In both books, you learn about the American citizen's expectation of what I have come to think of as "the routine medical miracle". But for all of us there comes a time when there are no more miracles. Didion's book suffers from the fact that she was not afforded the luxury of mourning her husband, getting almost immediately swept up in her daughter's very serious illness (and, as another review alludes to, eventual death). Lear is much more articulate about her feelings about her husband's disability and death, having more aptly processed it. Both of these books have much to say about health care, mortality, death and mourning. Didion's description of how modern society doesn't allow mourning is very articulate, bittersweet and moving. But all in all, Didion's book reflects scattered thoughts on a tumultous year; it is perhaps a book better written in a year or two. I believe it is her incomplete processing that leaves the book feeling a little flat, a little one dimensional. If you want a book that exposes the raw heart of mourning a partner from a loving and imperfect relationship, go to your library or find a used copy of "Heart Sounds".

Heartsounds is, quite simply, the best nonfiction book I have read in my life. Not a phoney word, each thought a moving testimonial to the human spirit. At the same time, highly realistic.

The sensations described are so lucid and palpable that it is like experiencing them for yourself. This book taught me a lot about what it must be like to become suddenly ill. I use it in my teaching to medical students.