FOR TWENTY YEARS, my husband and I contentedly raised our family of three children on a ten-acre farm. Activity and warmth abounded within our extended home circle, which also included my parents who lived in a nearby town. Then within a six-month period, significant changes began to occur.
In January of one year, both my parents passed on within just a few days of each other. Later that spring, two of our children left home to pursue their own lives with their new spouses. During this same period, my husband began negotiating the sale of our hydroponic greenhouse business, which we conducted at the farm, and shortly thereafter, we decided to sell the farm and move into my parents' home. Both the business and the farm were quickly sold, for which we were very grateful. In June, we completed the move to my parents' home.
I hadn't been fully aware of just how stressful those months had been, but I soon began experiencing an irregular heartbeat, which left me very weak. All the circumstances and deep feelings of the previous six months fit exactly Mary Baker Eddy's spiritual description of heart in the Glossary of Science and Health: "Mortal feelings, motives, affections, joys, and sorrows" (p. 587).
