Nature in us is a “riddling distemper,” says John Donne. “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a canon batters all.” I read these words, from Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, while sitting in my younger brother’s book-lined home office near Atlanta, earlier this month. I had flown out from San Francisco on the emergent occasion of his heart attack at age thirty-eight.
All his life my brother excelled at everything he set himself to. It was no great surprise, perhaps, that he would take up the family curse with zeal. Grandpa had waited till fifty for his first heart attack. Dad had waited till forty-nine. My brother’s first was no minor attack…
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Viv Drewa - The Owl Lady 