Sandeep Jahar

That event was profoundly tragic in our family.

And I sort of grew up with this fear that something would happen to my own father.

And that...

fear translated into sort of an obsession.

I remember I would lie in bed and sort of monitor the thudding of my heart in my chest.

I would look up at the ceiling fan that was rotating and try to synchronize the rotations of the blades with my heartbeat.

And I sort of became obsessed with

this sort of dichotomous nature of the heart that it was constantly moving and yet so vulnerable and in the process made us vulnerable.

In other words, there was such a thing as sudden death.

And the fact is that sudden death almost always occurs because of the cessation of the heartbeat.

Heart syndromes, including sudden death, have long been reported in individuals experiencing intense emotional disturbance or turmoil in their metaphorical hearts.

In 1942, the Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon published a paper called Voodoo Death, in which he described cases of death from fright in people who believed they had been cursed, such as by a witch doctor or as a consequence of eating taboo fruit.

In many cases, the victim, all hope lost, dropped dead on the spot.

What these cases had in common was the victim's absolute belief that there was an external force that could cause their demise and against which they were powerless to fight.

This perceived lack of control, Cannon postulated, resulted in an unmitigated physiological response in which blood vessels constricted to such a degree

that blood volume acutely dropped, blood pressure plummeted, the heart acutely weakened, and massive organ damage resulted from a lack of transported oxygen.

Today, death by grief has been seen in spouses and in siblings.

Broken hearts are literally and figuratively deadly.

Yeah.

You know, the American Heart Association for the longest time did not list psychosocial stress as a key modifiable risk factor.