Last Thursday saw the death of Mary Hayley Bell, 94-year-old actor, writer and widow of Sir John Mills. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's, but the cause of her death has not yet been given. Many might speculate, however, that her death owed less to her physical frailty than to the fact that Sir John, to whom she had been married for over 60 years, died in April.
The phenomenon of devoted couples dying within a short time of one another is well known. The pioneering psychiatrist George L Engel listed dozens of cases in a 1971 article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. More famously, James Callaghan died 11 days after his wife Audrey; Catherine Cookson's husband Tom died three weeks after his wife; Dennis Potter died a week after his wife Margaret; and Johnny Cash died less than four months after his wife June. The New Yorker editor William Maxwell died within a week of his wife, shortly after announcing to a former colleague: "I've decided there's not much reason to stick around, now that Emmy's gone, and I'm doing my best never to take another bite of food."
The idea of dying of a broken heart is of course the bread-and-butter of sonnets and pop songs. But is it really anything more than a romantic notion?
Earlier this year, researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore claimed to have proven that one could indeed die of a broken heart. The frequency of such cases is unknown, but the study suggested it to be more common than most doctors realise - particularly in the case of older women - and usually mistaken for a traditional heart attack.
The researchers compared patients, none of whom had any history of heart problems, who had nevertheless had heart attacks after experiencing sudden emotional stress. When the researchers compared these patients with people who had suffered traditional heart attacks, they discovered that although they all had healthy, unclogged arteries, the levels of stress hormones, such as adrenaline, in their blood were two to three times higher than the "conventional" heart-attack victims, and seven to 34 times higher than normal.
They concluded by blaming stress-spasms, which unleash a flood of stress hormones capable of stunning the heart, causing sudden, life-threatening heart spasms in people who are otherwise healthy; and in those who are less than healthy, the effect can prove fatal. So yes, one can indeed die of a broken heart. Or rather "heart-spasms". Alas, heart-spasm does not sit so elegantly in a sonnet.
