Tending to My Broken Beautiful Heart

An elder heart and its many cracks

My heart is aching these days, for many reasons. 

I think that as an elder, there are more cracks and broken places in my heart than there are untouched places. That’s a gift. It means that I have been putting this heart to good use, been loving with it, been risking getting it broken, been getting it broken, been open to the pain around me and in the world, been healing it to start all over again. 

Except these days, my heart is asking me to try and be a bit more discerning about the breaks. One too many might cause it to explode, it tells me. And maybe that’s ok, too, if it is exploding for loving in the right way at the right time. 

Different kinds of love experienced by this heart of mine

I love the earth and its trees. I cannot gaze into the eyes of an animal for very long without both smiling and shedding a tear. I relate and connect in a way where words do not get in the way. 

I love the children at the zoo where I volunteer and their sweet innocence and awe. 

I love my friends who reach out to me and aren’t afraid to see the broken places in me. In fact, they touch me from their own broken places, and we are both healed for a moment.

I love the random connection with a stranger as we exchange hello’s and know that we are really exchanging love, simply because. 

And oh, the romantic loves that I have had. I cherish each of them. They helped me become who I am today. Like the Japanese vision of a broken pot with its cracks being repaired by being filled in with gold and becoming even more beautiful, so it is with broken hearts. I have a lot of cracks these days. So, I must be filled with that wondrous gold shining through indeed. 

Online romance, or scam…?

And here I am (trigger alert for elders’ vulnerability to the seduction of romance), feeling broken hearted and sad, yet also grateful. I have had contact with a man online, I hardly ever respond to these online requests, but something about this one felt different.

He had responded to my posts and read some of my writing online. His words were the kind that touch my heart, about my openness and vulnerability in my writing, about feeling the ache beneath some of the words, about seeing and hearing me. I felt moved. This is exactly the kind of approach that can get to me, can draw me in, can make my heart beat a bit faster. 

I responded, thanking him for his lovely feedback. We wrote back and forth. He asked questions, as did I. I wondered where this was going and knew that I needed to be careful about online situations with someone who I never met, especially someone from another country. And then I found out he was so much younger than I. I am embarrassed to even admit this here, but he is 34 years younger than I am. I felt like the typical older woman who is in danger of being scammed and used. Shame and embarrassment began to come up inside me. 

I must be honest that, even though I had not been looking for romance this way, my heart began to open to some of his words, which felt like poetry to me. I realized how much I sometimes miss this romance, how much those wants and desires can still live inside me, how I have set them aside for a while now.

 I could hear the romantic direction that he began to go in his writing. And it was in a way that was seductive for me, not with crassness or physical innuendos, but with tenderness and wishes for closeness and connection, with reflecting back what he heard and felt in my writing, with sharing some of his own pain and history and vulnerability. 

I knew that I had to address this, to let him know that I questioned if he was real, and that even if by chance he was, there was no way that this would go further with this huge age gap, that it could not happen. I wrote more saying that if this was a scam, then not going further was taking good care of myself. And if it wasn’t a scam, then I still had to take care of myself in something that could not work, would not work. 

His response was lovely. He wrote that he understood, told me that he was real, realized that he might have moved too quickly, but felt drawn to me and what I wrote and who I seemed to be. And he went on to say that he would still be there if I wanted to reconnect, waiting patiently, and that he would always be grateful for what we had shared, even if for a brief moment in time. 

Is it a scam? It might very well be, but I don’t know for sure. It certainly awakened parts of me that caught me off guard. 

The surprising gifts

What I know is that this experience has been a gift, because it opened a place inside me that has been shut down for a long time. It awakened my heart to what it can still long for. It made me feel the ache inside my chest, the tears buried deep inside me, the ache in my throat, the longing for tender kisses and words that help me feel seen, heard, and cherished. There is a gift that comes with the pain of not having what I crave, yet knowing that I am still alive enough to crave it, the gift of having found all of that still inside me. How wondrous and bittersweet that is. 

I still desire, whether that is acknowledged by others. I need to acknowledge that within and about myself. Can I get scammed? Definitely. That is why I need to own that loneliness within so that I am aware of it, am aware of not being pulled into something that may be the final straw for my tender heart. I am vulnerable to the right words, the tender acknowledgments, to feeling seen and heard. I need to remember this about myself, own it and protect that vulnerability in me from any who might abuse and hurt me. 

The final message is for my own heart

And so, I say to my heart, I hear you. I will take care of you. I am so proud of you and your ability to still love so passionately, to still crave, to still desire, to still feel the longing. How wondrous and amazing you are. 

I am here. I see you and all your vulnerability. I will do my very best to take good care of you. If and when we explode, it will be a glorious explosion, drenched in tears… tears of joy, tears of love that cannot be contained, whether seen by anyone else or not. And most of all, I will do my best to give you that love that you crave. I see you, hear you, feel you, and cherish you. I am here, whether someone else ever will be or not. I am here.