Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for the Lesson

Mary had a heart attack yesterday.

She was walking her spotted dachshund along the Boston Common side of Beacon Street when the dread of what was to coming crept over her. A tightness of the chest? A tingling of the arms? I don't know. I couldn't see her face from my side of the street. The only reason I can be sure that she knew it was coming at all was because she was screaming at anybody nearby: "Will you take my dog?!"

Ahead of me, on my side of the street, a crowd of men I took for tourists started talking in French that was too fast for me to understand anything but the word "chien." Dog.

Mary, screamed again, more insistent this time, clearly distressed as she took another step into the street. One of the French men glanced at the stream of traffic zipping up the hill. The tension in the air was palpable. Dread mingled with an electric charge. She started sobbing as she inched toward the middle of the street. My stomach bottomed out. Alarmed, I called to her, meaning to ask if she was all right, but before my second word was out, Mary was down. A heavy woman, solid, and yet her strong legs swayed, then buckled as if they held all the strength of limp noodles. She folded first to her knees, then to her hands, and then she rolled over onto her back right there in the middle of Beacon Street. Someone yelled, call 9-1-1, so I did as I beelined for the center of the road.

One woman grabbed the dog's leash as I waited for the phone to connect. In the road, Mary lay on her back, her rouged cheeks puffed up on a face that was upside down to me, her hand over her chest. No shortage of people had rushed out, but everyone was hanging back; nobody was talking to her. So I told her my name was Cathy, asked her hers, the dog's. Her name was Mary, she told me. The dog was Happy. When I told her I was calling for an ambulance, she stretched her fingers toward me, her voice childlike:

"Will you hold my hand, please?"

The traffic veered around us. I dropped the pack I was carrying, laid my binder beside that. I put the GPS unit I was using to direct me to a client's house on the ground in front of me beside my purse. Then I took her very cold fingers in mine as I tried to relay information to the 9-1-1 operator. The traffic swerved behind us.

I looked over my shoulder to see how close those cars were. Too close. "Could someone wave the cars around so I don't get hit?" I asked. So I don't get hit. Not we.

Mary's fingers squirmed in my hand. I assured her that help was on the way, and asked her questions the 9-1-1 operator was asking of me. Did she have nitroglycerin? Not on her, she said in a child's cry. A history of heart disease then? A keening, then a drawn out yes. How old was she? Sixty.

A biker stopped, introduced himself as a physician, and went to work loosening the coat around Mary's chest. My hand still in Mary's, I noticed my GPS was gone, and I asked after it. The woman with the dog told me it was just here somewhere. It was mine, I told her. Beside Mary, the physician called out to passersby—did they have nitroglycerin? Aspirin? Someone came forward with a bottle of Bayer. Someone else a bottle of water. Mary choked it all down. The 9-1-1 operator assured me help was coming, then my phone buzzed and the connection was gone.

My GPS got pulled out of Mary's handbag. I took it from the woman. "That's mine," I told her again. Like it mattered. Like I thought she might think I was stealing.

Mary's fingers were still in mine when she started crying about her dog. Where was he? Where was he?

"Here," the woman holding the leash said.

The poor dog was shaking hard enough his collar tinkled, but when I reached my right hand toward him and called his name, he inched closer. I sat like that a few seconds, a minute maybe, my left hand in Mary's, my right hand stroking Happy.

The fire truck arrived first.

As the medics poured on the scene, I remembered I was late, pulled my hand from Mary's, collected my stuff, and slipped back into the crowd without sticking around to find out what happened to Happy, what became of Mary. The only sign that something out of the ordinary had happened was my hands. They shook as I climbed the stairs to my appointment a few minutes later.

I'm sure Mary's gonna be fine. The fact that she was lucid enough to answer questions seems like a sign of survival to me. But what shook me up was the three strikes I racked up quickly. When Mary needed someone to be present with her while her heart ripped her world open, I let myself be distracted with thoughts of preserving my safety, my electronics, my schedule.

What kind of person does that make me?

I don't like any of the answers I came up with yesterday. I like the answers I've come up with this morning even less. But deeper than that, I feel like the message that keeps surfacing from all this is "be present"—not that I have any idea what that might mean in terms of my day-to-day life. I guess today it's enough that I'm grateful for the invitation to the lesson. Maybe that's enough period.