Heartsong

Living with a Dying Heart: A Memoir

Anita Swanson Speake

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631524387
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Anita Swanson Speake’s story begins with a diagnosis: idiopathic cardiomyopathy. At sixty-five, she had just found out that her heart was dying. When she got the news, she was in her late sixties. Her girls were raised and gone. Her three decades of high-stress nursing was behind her. She was living with her hopefully last, and certainly best, husband in a big, contemporary house with lots of glass on a lake in rural Northern California. She loved her life. But she didn’t love her scary new medical condition—or the many awful side effects of the medications her doctor promised would serve as a crutch for her heart. As she struggled with all this, Speake began to see herself as a member of the dying rather than the living. And over time, she began to ponder a new question: “Do I really want to get well?” Heartsong takes readers on an often humorous, sometimes sad journey through the best of Western medicine, complemented by a sampling of alternative and Eastern support systems—and through Speake’s evolving relationship with God—as she navigates this transition. Ultimately, with the help of her doctors, a Reiki practitioner, a Mindfulness coach, and her deep, abiding faith, Speake found renewed purpose late in a changing life—and realized God was waiting there for her all along.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: You Want to Try That One More Time?
• Chapter 2: This is Good News?
• Chapter 3: Side Effects
• Chapter 4: Life in the Temporary Zone
• Chapter 5: Green Bananas
• Chapter 6: Well, That’s Just Plain Crazy
• Chapter 7: And We’re Walking
• Chapter 8: Just Ask Barbra Streisand
• Chapter 9: Heart Sick
• Chapter 10: Everybody Has a Mother
• Chapter 11: Stealth of a Serpent
• Chapter 12: Real Snappy Dresser
• Chapter 13: Starry, Starry Night
• Chapter 14: For the Love of Tropical Fish (A Brief Story from a Brief Marriage)
• Chapter 15: Surprised by Death (Another Marriage, Another Time)
• Chapter 16: And Then There Were Others
• Chapter 17: The Great Unraveling
• Chapter 18: The Tin Man
• Chapter 19: Angel’s Watching Over You
• Chapter 20: “Well, They Die.”
• Chapter 21: Lookin’ Good
• Chapter 22: Here We Go Again
• Chapter 23: I Sure Could Use a Massage
• Chapter 24: It’s All Woo-Woo to Me
• Chapter 25: Reiki Calling
• Chapter 26: It’s Reiki Time
• Chapter 27: Reiki Invades the Land of the Wellish
• Chapter 28: Is All This Deep Breathing Really Necessary?
• Chapter 29: Something Old. Something New. Something Borrowed.
• Chapter 30: And So It Goes . . . Or Not
• Chapter 31: Born Anxious
• Chapter 32: Leaving the Lake
• Chapter 33: On the Road Again
• Chapter 34: What Was That?
• Chapter 35: I Wish I’d Been in Nordstrom
• Chapter 36: The Gray Area
• Chapter 37: A Place for Us
• Chapter 38: Can You Hear Me Now?
• About the Author