The week opened with beautiful weather. The snow is melting and the sun is shining.We all know that. We also know it could change in a heartbeat.
A heartbeat.
I believe each heartbeat is a treasure. Having experienced heart failure twice and being put back together by skilled surgeons, it’s easy for me to say.
When the heart stops, families gather together and lay their loved ones to rest or deal with the ashes left by cremation. It’s final.
To people left behind by a criminal death, the finality may be elusive.
Asking why something happened, the daughter of a murder victim said she would live the rest of her life asking that question.
Her elderly aunt had the same question and said she had been able to forgive the killer because God told her to.
Her religion said so. Yet there is a longing within her that seeks a final answer.
When I was young, I asked the priest about the soul of a young man who had been killed in a car crash.
The boy was known to be a bit wild and I asked the priest how that would factor in.
“It’s a mystery, my child, God will reveal it when you reach Heaven,” he said.
I wasn’t dying to know.
Many things questions arise without accompanying answers.
How did the heart get mixed up with Feb, 14, Valentine’s Day?
“It didn’t mean love before the 13th and 14th centuries,” says Eric Jager, author of The Book of the Heart and medieval literature professor at UCLA. As the idea of romantic love began to take shape during that medieval period, so did the symbolism.
“[People at the time] thought of our hearts as books of memory, a place where God’s commands are written, and [believed] feelings for the beloved were somehow written on your heart,” says Jager.
A heartbeat.
I had a discussion with a young woman recently about the death of an elderly man in Romeo and realized that one’s last heartbeat can be either a blessing or a tragedy of untold proportions.
My young friend said the killer should be executed as a deterrent message to others planning such a heinous crime.
Maybe.
My life has led me to the realization that persons bent on crime don’t remember what they learned in civics class in school, read in a paper or heard from dad’s old cop buddy.
I told her the killer would spend life in prison without possibility of parole.
 “What’s life?” she asked.
“Until death,” I replied. “It could be one year or 100.”
How many heartbeats?
I hear the old priest’s voice.
"It’s a mystery."