On Human Hearts

The heart doesn’t really love, not literally, but it can break.

The pulsating center of the human circulatory system is a fist of muscle squeezed so tight, so dense, that in some men it weighs as much as a soccer ball. Athletes who run long distances every week tend to have unusually large hearts. Nearly two hundred times a minute during a match, an electrical impulse will shoot through a soccer player’s heart from top to bottom, causing the muscles to contract and pump blood into a cavernous left ventricle, perhaps one and a half times the size and aerobic capacity of a normal person’s, which will rush oxygen to every part of the body. But even a super heart can hide a flaw. Sometimes the heartbeat’s spark fails without warning, and when it does the body fails, too, and pitches over wide-eyed in the bright wet grass, and everything stops.

Prompt CPR can save a life. When Denmark’s Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field just before halftime of the third game of the Euros, help came first from his teammate Simon Kjær, who compressed his chest until the medics got there. Within minutes professionals were defibrillating him on the field. Suffering a cardiac arrest during one of the planet’s biggest sporting events is horrific, but it may have made all the difference; it’s hard to imagine anyone finding better or faster care. “He got life-saving cardiac massage,” Denmark’s team doctor said later. “We quickly got help from the stadium doctor and we got Christian back.”

Watching it live, though, it felt like forever. The TV feed lingered awkwardly in the stadium, unsure where to look. It showed fans in various stages of shock. The commentators kept talking out of some numb instinct, saying nothing, telling us that they had nothing to say. When the TV showed players crying and praying, it was time to turn it off; but we couldn’t, or at least I couldn’t, out of hope that we might see Eriksen giving us a thumbs up on his ride to safety, that we might see him moving at all. Instead we saw his girlfriend on the field, desperate to reach him, and being cared for, again, by Simon Kjær.

I don’t know about you, but that’s when my heart broke.

The link between our hearts and feelings is an ancient one. The Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of the soul and left it in the body even after other organs were removed, to be weighed against a feather in the afterlife. The Greeks studied anatomy and argued over the primacy of the heart or the brain, both of which appeared connected to every part of us. For Aristotle, whose ideas shaped Western science for over a thousand years, the heart won out because of its heat and “honorable position” near the center of the body; since it seemed to power life itself, it stood to reason that the heart must also be responsible for the emotions that make living hearts leap. “For man is practically the only animal whose heart presents this phenomenon of jumping,” Aristotle wrote, “inasmuch as he alone is influenced by hope and anticipation of the future.”

Yesterday afternoon, frozen by hope, we felt sad or angry or anything that could help us cope with the burning worry in our chests. Finally UEFA announced that Eriksen was stable. A little while later, inexplicably, it announced that the game would go on. Did anyone watch it? I couldn’t. Kjær didn’t return to the field; his coach said that he was “too upset.”

The cliché we tell ourselves at times like this is that it’s only a game, but I think that misses the point. There’s nothing that makes games less important than the other ways we spend our days. We play and watch them for their power to make us feel things, and to feel them together; I’m not sure there’s much in life that matters more than that. But there are good feelings and bad ones, and good and bad kinds of togetherness, and games can stir up the worst in us as often as the best. Waiting to hear if Eriksen would be okay, I was exhausted by everything that wasn’t that. It’s impossible to imagine how his teammates must have felt.

I don’t know if I’ll watch soccer today. I’ll get caught up soon, because games are my job, but if they don’t make us feel the way they’re supposed to then what’s the point? Better to be with the people we love. Games always last for ninety minutes, even when they probably shouldn’t, but with hearts you never know. Use them well, friends. ❧

Image: Egyptian New Kingdom, Ramesside, Heart Amulet