This was literal in his case. In his case, it was his heart. It didn’t work. It continually sabotaged the rest of his body. It killed him more than once.
At the hospital during his first heart attack, the doctor used defibrillators for the first time. The paddles had arrived in the mail that day. The doctor took them out, read the instructions, turned them on, marveled at the electric whir in his hands and let ‘em rip.
The paddles left burn marks on Mr. Lewis’s chest.
Two nurses, despite the hopelessness of the situation, performed CPR on him for twelve hours. Twelve. Hours. I sometimes wonder what they were thinking. Not so much why they did it–they obviously committed themselves to it–I wonder more about the thoughts that went through their minds during those long hours.
Did they think about husbands and boyfriends? Their kids at their mother’s house? Was this job a way out of their mother’s grip? Did this dying man remind them of someone famous? Someone they wish they knew? Someone they knew and wished that they didn’t? Did they think about food? Johnny Carson? Their sister’s hot tub in Phoenix?
Did the nurses team up together for this, or did they tag team? Did one of them get jealous when the other was performing CPR? Did they even like each other or was this just a job? Was this one of those shared moments in life that forced them together? Forced them to bond, to make make a sinewy connection that neither of them would be able to break for the rest of their lives?
Were they guilty/happy/sad most of the time?
Whoever they were, whatever they thought, they saved his life.
After dying the first time, Mr. Lewis was honest about his heart condition. He knew what was up. He had a broken heart and a lot of people, including himself, wanted to fix it. Thing is, you don’t really fix a broken heart–not this kind anyway.
I like to think that it was his intimate knowledge of physical imperfection, of being broken, that made him gracious. When he looked at you, he looked at you with this knowledge: he knew that there was something about you that you knew was broken. Not only did he look at you and talk to you and listen to you like it’s okay to be messed up, he understood that it’s supposed to be like that.
No judgment. No I’m-the-wise-man-listen-to-me routine. Together, you were just two broken people laughing and loving and supporting each other.
People were drawn to him for this reason. They somehow knew this about him. It wasn’t confession. It wasn’t patriarchal like that. It was relief. This feeling you got when you were around him made you feel worth it.
And that’s what I learned: figure out a way to be the type of person that makes other people feel worth it.
Worth love. Worth affection. Worth others and work and laughing and yelling and crying. Worth the air and music and pancakes and pie. Worth mountain tops and open lakes and packed theaters. Worth the critics and the admirers. Worth the talent. Worth the shortcomings. Worth twelve hours of CPR with nurses we’ll never know.
Lesson no. 1 from Mr. Lewis, my grandfather: you’re worth it.
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