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THE GOOD HEART

The analogy for one “good heart” having an influence for good upon countless individuals lives is the moral and premise for the story. In telling the story, The Good Heart, it is necessary to allow the reader to decide the plausibility of personality traits and “memories” of the deceased heart donor being transferred to a grateful recipient.

Pastor Caine, a heart transplant patient from the 1970’s, received a good heart of a man whose death he unintentionally helped cause during his rebellious youth of the civil rights 1960’s. “The heart is for giving and the brain is for getting,” he tells his congregation in his final address before retirement in the present day.  His powerful Senator-brother is in the audience and both share the dark secrets of a blended past. A double meaning to the statement regarding heart vs. head is of course intended from Pastor Caine to brother Senator Caine in hopes the secrets they share can now become history and forgiveness reign as the motivating force for the remainder of their lives.

But, the heart has its power and memories as well and how far that will go in revealing truth up to the end of their mortal journey is part of the stories outcome and moral. 

Few readers of this novel or scientific non-fiction have a problem agreeing with the power the heart muscle has over emotions, compassion, love, and kind generous responses to others. The brain is highly analytical, less emotional, and capable of compartmentalizing in such a way as to literally “forget” the needs, cares, and emotions of others. Much has been written in the sciences of heart-mind connection in the past thirty years – that the heart never lies and ultimately will convict or convert the owner to its logic and way of thinking while the brain seeks to control at all times.

The most influential source material for my story concept came from my reading of Dr. Paul Pearsall’s groundbreaking book title The Heart’s Code in which he explores the cellular memory capacity of the heart organ.  His basic premise is that the heart is more than a mere mechanical pump but also a receiver and transmitter of messages and another thinking and feeling “brain” designed by nature to be used in all aspects of life.

For example, Pearsall postulates that hearts in “synchronization” can beat on opposite sides of the planet and yet transmit loving or hateful thoughts to each other, and the sensitivity of such messages can cause euphoria and “loving” emotions or depressing and hateful emotions to the receiving heart.  Such emotions may bolster or weigh down upon the bodies immune system, and ultimately the health for good or bad of those who harmonize with other hearts. Dr. Pearsall further postulates that these ethereal messages of one heart to another affect the health, outlook, and actions of the individual receiving a transplanted heart. 

“He has a cold heart” is much more likely to be heard than, “He has a cold brain.”  “The love in that woman’s heart was felt by everyone she ever knew,” one eulogized of a relative. It is hard to imagine someone eulogizing with this statement: “She loved everyone with all her brain.” 

Those who live solely by the brain as their decision making center fail to love “with all their hearts” and by nature lose the wonder and splendor that a heart centered person experiences. It may be no accident, postulates Pearsall and others in the scientific community, that the heart is literally seated at the center of the human being’s soul for a divinely appointed purpose. New discoveries in connection to neuron cells found in the stomach and heart creates a bold new possibility; that “gut instinct” may be more than a metaphor for using intuition as a valid process for decision making.

INFLUENCES ON THE CREATION OF

THE GOOD HEART

How the idea originated:

Three compelling personal events caused the story to finally come into a life of its own. 

1. A life and death struggle I experienced.
2. My father’s life and death struggle.
3. And my novel writing ultimately leading to my interest in the intricacies of the heart as the ruling organ in our lives.

I write love stories. I write them because I perceive love is the center of gravity to human involvements—the cause of family and society being created, and the fundamental answer to the world’s problems.  After four war/love/triumph-over-tragedy novels, I started giving thought to the medical and scientific nature of the human heart.

I had been interested in matters of the heart and the connection that all the worlds great spiritual and religious belief systems carry about the “heart” being where faith, healing, and feeling originate.  The dichotomy and warfare that the human brain seems to have over the heart as an entity of decision making had never been explained by any scientific approach until four non-fiction works came to my attention. In the last five years. All written by reputable MD’s and or medical researchers the books spoke to me.  They involved cell level communication from the nervous system via the brain and the natural blood and lymphatic system that sustains cells.  Those books were:

Dr. Candance Pert Ph.D. --  Molecules of Emotion

Dr. Paul Pearsall, Ph.D.  -- The Heart’s Code

Dr. Bruno Cortis, MD  -- Heart and Soul

Dr. Dean Ornish, MD – Love and Survival

In The Heart’s Code by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D a story is told of a 10 year old heart recipient who accurately described for law enforcement the killer of her donor.  This was compelling enough for me to put together all of my feelings and ideas for “cellular memory” based upon other readings and establish a premise for the fictional story, THE GOOD HEART.

As I read I realized that the body could live while many of its functions shut down. The reason? The human heart is the final organ to cease thus causing the actual “death” of the body.  This was made even more apparent and clear by three personal experiences.
 

Story #1:

I had two life saving blood transfusions in two years; 1995 and then again 1997.  Both times my stomach lining had hemorrhaged due to excessive over-the-counter pain relief medicines taken since the age of 18 to control head and neck pain brought about by sports and later by the medicines themselves.  Aspirin (Aspirin is one of several over-the-counter pain formulas also known as NSAIDS) may gradually, and almost without notice, eat away at the stomach.  In my case it caused over 6 pints of blood to seep from my body on both occasions leading to hospitalization, surgery, and life saving blood transfusions.

The gift of life and blood, not once but twice in as many years from anonymous donors, affected me deeply.  In fact my first novel – THE LAST VALENTINE – was sold by my agent to a New York publisher as I literally drifted between life and death.  I got the call while in recovery. Tubes were running out of every part of openings in my body and new ones made by surgeons.  I had no health insurance, no money to pay for this death defying drama, and little hope when I received my New York Times Bestseller offer.

So what I have learned since, about the heart’s amazing ability to not only pump blood to every organ and thus sustain life, but also to send to every cell messages of healing, faith, transforming thoughts, and to be the center of communication with the brain – (the reasoning and logic center) has indeed impacted what and how I choose to write.

Story #2: 

My father, Grant L. Pratt (subject of DAD—The Man Who Lied To Save The Planet) had always been a humble and spiritual man and my greatest hero.  But when he died, April 2, 1994, he was released from final weeks filled with merciless pain, agony, and difficult breathing as one organ after another shut down. 

My sister Karen (who lived next door) begged me to come, because I had asked my father the day before (through Karen) to not die until I could see him, kiss him, and say goodbye.

I finally arrived to their small Idaho farm home knowing he would see me and then keeping his promise “pass on.”  He was at his home in a bed with a hospice nurse nearby.  His struggles where beyond my comprehension as he literally gasped for air until I got to his home, and then he visibly relaxed knowing he had kept one final promise to his son.  As I multi-tasked – reading his Eulogy and seeking his approval, and watching my deaf mother tearfully bid him farewell with gentle strokes of his hair. She gave her last kisses to his forehead and he groaned trying to form words to me.  He could not.  His eyes formed a desperate plea for me to understand something he was feeling. He had not been able to speak, die, or do anything but what his beating heart would allow him to do for weeks.

The thought, “God!  Let him speak…let Dad at least say what he is trying to say to me as he gasps for air these few minutes before death.”  It hit me that there was one organ in control.  Not the brain, not the liver, not the kidneys, not the lungs.  It was his heart!  Until it quit, until its clock ran down he was a prisoner to his body.  Then a miracle happened which caused the birth of a writer.  He yielded to his heart, closed his eyes and I thought he was dead. Tears creased his cheeks, and then I realized he was silently praying. He suddenly opened his eyes and turned his head almost effortlessly to me and said:

“I Love You!”  Then he closed his eyes at peace and his heart allowed his spirit to go home.

The heart was the last organ to go but it also summoned from the innermost part of him the words to express the only emotion that mattered at that moment – love.  It was then the writer, poet, and philosopher son truly had a birth into the realm of written communications. Now I live to tell his story, and to bring to those with sensitive hearts messages filled with hope, faith, and love such as I saw in my simple parent’s lives.

Story #3

My love story writing has affected at least hundreds of thousands who seem to yearn for more. Thousands of fan letters, emails attest to this hunger for more in the writing genre of moral fiction and non-fiction.  The readers I attract are “heart sensitive” as I call them.  Realizing this over the course of years as each novel was given a birth and did its own “magic” upon readers nationally and internationally, I felt an interest to seek scientific answers to the riddle of how the heart can affect so much if the brain is really in control.  I realized that the heart can be equal in decision making capacity and surpass the brain in all aspects with regard to wisdom and love.