America’s Broken Heart Syndrome
2 min readAug 8, 2020
I came across Broken Heart Syndrome watching a French TV series, Balthazar, (about a dashing Sherlockian coroner ). I remembered almost instantly a letter my mother wrote after the death of my brother Luke from AIDS in 1991, in which she described the sensation of her heart actually breaking, and I immediately understood that her pain was not just figurative, but physiologically literal.