Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Dave (the ancient mariner)
Date: 11 Feb 06 - 01:55 PM

True story from my part of the world....

Story of long-dead Lunenburg girl makes new book 'Curious Canadians'

It's a story that's touched a lot of lives, not the least of which were those of Toronto-based authors Nancy and Ted Liss.

Several years ago, the couple traveled to Lunenburg to research the story of Sophia McLaughlin, the 14-year-old dressmaker's apprentice who died in 1879 from what a coroner's inquest, and her headstone in the Hillcrest Cemetery, declare was a broken heart. It happened after she was wrongly accused of stealing $10 from her employer, a Mrs. Trask. After Sophia's death, Mrs. Trask's son admitted to the theft.

Taken as much by the town's ongoing tribute to the girl – her grave is marked with both a new granite stone and a decorative wrought iron fence, featuring the likeness of a broken heart – as they were with her story, the authors have included Sophia among the 34 real-life tales recounted in their new book Curious Canadians.

For seven years, the couple criss-crossed the country seeking out these stories.

"It was hard…(but) a labour of love," says Mrs. Liss, particularly, as it gave the couple the opportunity to meet so many fellow Canadians. "Wherever we went, people were so enthusiastic and encouraging," she says.

The book, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, is now available from a number of Canadian bookstores and there are hopes of also offering it in the United States.

In the meantime, the couple are working on another book along the same lines as Curious Canadians but looking at Americans. To this point, it remains untitled. And Mrs. Liss has also written a full-length novel based on the life of Sophia McLaughlin.

"I don't have a publisher for it yet, but hope lives eternal," says the author, adding she's "determined that Sophia's story be known."

- feature article appeared in The Bulletin and The Progress Enterprise in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Windsinger
Date: 13 Feb 06 - 07:36 AM

Hmph! 14...well, that's sure too young for a "true" coronary.

I'd still be interested in reading further details about the inquest, though. Seems odd for a licensed doctor, even in the 19th centruy, to actually put that on the death certificate...

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: beardedbruce
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 06:11 PM

can't resist bringing this to the top...


8-{E

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Ebbie
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 06:40 PM

I have several stories of cause/effect. One is of my brother in law after my sister's death. Six weeks after she died, his heart 'broke', almost literally. Their daughter, living at home, is an RN and her quick action plus the fact that an EMT lived on the same block and came running was the only thing that saved him. Almost 10 years later, he is still living but his heart is more than 30% gone. Doctors talked about cutting it away but decided against it.

Leenia: "I agree that old couples may well die within a short time, but you can also kill an old person by taking them out of her home. At least, that's what a friend of mine who is a social worker for the aged tells me. So it's not love, it's the shock to a frail system of losing the familiar."

When I was a girl I worked in a nursing home that was church-owned. An elderly couple had willed their home to the church and when they became increasingly at risk whle living on their own, the church started pressuring them to move into the nursing home. They resisted for more than six months but one day the word came that they had capitulated.

The nursing home, all excited, revamped one of the rooms, putting in a double bed and making the room 'homey'.

The couple came. That night the man died in his sleep alongside his sleeping wife. A week or so later she fell and broke her hip. She died.

Within three weeks the whole thing was over.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: GUEST,meself
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 07:14 PM

Death by broken heart - of the young, at least - seems strange to us moderns only because of the effects of evolution, or natural selection: most of those humans of the strain predisposed to die of broken heart had done so by the end of the 19th Century, most having failed to reproduce themselves (and those who did reproduce usually ended up drowning their offspring, or, less often, dispatching them with a penknife, shortly before dying of a broken heart, as so many ballads attest). As a consequence, we have seldom seen this phenomenon in our own lives, and so tend to regard with some skepticism the historical accounts of such. Clearly, though, there was a time when it was an every day occurrence, as was, for instance, death by bubonic plague. And the quasi-legal hanging of wooers of their daughters by jealous fathers.

I hope this explains satisfactorily a previously-puzzling medical phenomenon.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 07:29 PM

I believe firmly that a great loss, by death or misunderstanding of a genuinely intimate connection, can drop the trapdoor right out from under one. It can also happen when one loses something long familiar. But the deaths of true-lovers-by-heartbreak is, I think only slightly exagerrated for romantic effect. The steep emotional shock just takes 'em right down, like being tackled by a linebacker, as it were.

One man's opinion.

A

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: GUEST,JTT
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 07:39 PM

It doesn't have to be humans. Neighbours of mine had a beloved cat. Then they had a baby, and they simply stopped loving the cat. She'd be outside, staring in and calling pitifully.

They asked me to take her, but I thought this was pointless, as I lived so near them that she'd make her way home. Now I wish I had.

They went out one snowy morning and found her dead. When the vet did a post mortem he said it was acute cardiomyopathy, but I always thought it was a broken heart.

Another friend had a dog; when my friend died, the dog kept watching for him until the day, a year or so later, when the people who'd been with him when he died brought home his bag and his clothes to his widow.

The dog ran over and sniffed frantically, then he put his nose to the sky and howled. And then he basically howled and howled for a couple of months until he died.

(On a lighter note, I'm sure we all know the ballad of anarcho-syndicalist gordon.)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Susan of DT
Date: 16 Jan 07 - 08:33 PM

I have a spreadsheet where I have all the Child ballads and who kills whom and why.

Child ballads where someone dies for love:
   #64 Fair Janet
   #74 Lady Margaret & King William
   #75 Lord Lovel
   #84 Barbara Allen
   #85 George Collins
#229 Earl Crawford
#235 Earl of Aboyne
#239 Annachie Gordon
#256 Allison & Willie
#262 Lord Livingston
#295 Rich Irish Lady
Also #238 Jeanne of Bethelnie was saved from dying for love when the man relented and decided to marry her.


Funny, most of these are not popular today. I don't even remember the story on several of these without looking them up.

By my calculations, a bit over half of the Child ballads involve death in some form. (Part of why this is so "low" is that the Robin Hood ballads rarely involve death and there are 40 or more of them in the 305.)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 30 Oct 15 - 10:56 AM

I can believe that if two people are together a long time and one dies, that the other might die too as a result. But I have little patience with ballads where some person, usually male, falls instantly in love with a another, and dies when he can't have her.

As in 'Barbara Allen.'

In a long-term relationship, years of smell, touch, food, decor, comfort and familiarity are woven into the survivor's personality. In a case like Barbara Allen, the man's "heartbreak" is mere egoism.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 30 Oct 15 - 01:06 PM

Even then, I think your first postulation is a bit dubious, leeneia. As it says in As You Like It, "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them. But not for love." Oh, old Will knew wotz-wot right enuf.

Take me, if that is not too egocentric -- just happens to be what I know most about, & I think I can be a fair exemplar. My first, greatly loved wife, died 8 years ago after 48 years' marriage. Of course I mourned; I still sometimes find myself having a little cry for her in the night. But one moves on. I married my dear present wife 5 years ago. "Valerie was the love of your life, wasn't she?" she said to me a bit anxiously early in our marriage. "While she was there, of course," I said; "but one must move on if one is to survive. There is room for more than one 'love of one's life', with reason and goodwill."

We are still happy together...

≈M≈

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 30 Oct 15 - 02:26 PM

The trauma would surely affect different personalities in different ways. I don't believe in any supernatural nonsense but I do believe that the mind can be distracted sometimes to extreme degrees and this affects the physical body.

Shakespeare did not always put the truth into the mouths of his characters, as with all fiction writers.

An old couple lived in the middle of our estate for over 40 years in the same house and a feral family moved in next door that allowed the children of other feral families onto the property, stealing property, lighting fires, throwing large lumps of concrete into their garden, pulling down fences. After weeks of this stress the old couple moved into a home for the elderly. They both lasted less than a month.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: Janie
Date: 30 Oct 15 - 04:07 PM

A good friend with no heart disease had a heart attack when notified her youngest son was killed in a car wreck.

The mind, i.e. the brain, is part of the body. The body is a system. Anything that impacts one part of the body impacts the entire system to one degree or another.

Or what Amos said.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 31 Oct 15 - 11:37 AM

Michael, please note that I wrote "...the other MIGHT die".

I'm happy for you because you have had two fine marriages.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Dying of a 'Broken Heart'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 31 Oct 15 - 12:46 PM

That is indeed so. Thank you for your kind words, leeneia. Marriage seems to be something I am quite good at - not parentage, I have grown-up step-children now, but Valerie & I had none of our own.

I am reminded of one of my favourite epigrams, by Elizabethan/Jacobean wit Sir Henry Wotton*

He first deceased,
She for a little tried
To live without him,
Liked it not, and died

≈M≈

*author also of the wonderful pun about an ambassador being a man 'sent to lie abroad on behalf of his country' ['lie' in the old sense of 'reside', as well as the obvious other one]