Every year about this time, we have, most of us, taken a look over our calendar shoulders and noted what we did or didn’t do last year. We’ve seen our accomplishments, our failures and habits we comfortably wore as we settled into the daily routines we established for ourselves. Then there are those special events which merit a second appraisal and some of which were indeed life altering. There were two such events which occurred in my life last year which will affect me for the rest of my life. Totally unrelated, although they both affect my heart, each gave me reason to pause and look at my life’s past and to gaze into the future as far as imagination would allow.

It was one of these singular events which altered my life in several different ways and with a constant reminder in and of itself. This would be the pace maker implanted in my chest to keep my heart beating at an even tempo. More or less. From going to not knowing I needed one to waking up in the hospital and finding I had one was quite an ordeal from the mental standpoint. It punctuated the idea or fact that I was getting older and was no longer the same robust person I had always thought of myself.  It also reinforced the fact that life is short and getting shorter and that age can be quite a variable thing in life.  Getting the pacemaker didn’t change either of those things; it did bring them to the forefront of my thinking a bit more often, as in daily or even more often than that for a period, which gradually tapered off into just at least daily. Once I got over the shock of it, my thinking returned to a somewhat normal state. But each time I reach up and feel that bit of hard plastic nestled under the skin just below my left collarbone, two things come to mind: I’m not invincible or immortal, yet I feel like I have postponed the inevitable outcome to this life for a little longer than it may have been. I won’t get into the the debate that sentence could easily invoke. Not today.

As for the other event that involved my heart, let me just state that finding a piece of my heart that was lost for 40 years can certainly have an effect on my pulse rate, pace maker or no pace maker. I think it most definitely affected my heart and my life. And like the pace maker in my chest, it will always be close to my heart.