1
Lights of Home
I shouldn’t be here ’cause I should be deadI can see the lights in front of meI believe my best days are aheadI can see the lights in front of me.I was born with an eccentric heart. In one of the chambers of my heart, where most people have three doors, I have two. Two swinging doors, which at Christmas 2016 were coming off their hinges. The aorta is your main artery, your lifeline, carrying the blood oxygenated by your lungs, and becoming your life. But we have discovered that my aorta has been stressed over time and developed a blister. A blister that’s about to burst, which would put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call. Faster than I can say goodbye to this life.
So, here I am. Mount Sinai Hospital. New York City.
Looking down on myself from above with the arc lights reflecting on the stainless steel. I’m thinking the light is harder than the steel counter I’m lying on. My body feels separate from me. It is soft flesh and hard bone.
It’s not a dream or vision, but it feels as if I’m being sawn in half by a magician. This eccentric heart has been frozen.
Some remodeling needs to take place apart from all this hot blood swirling around and making a mess, which blood tends to do when it’s not keeping you alive.
Blood and air.
Blood and guts.
Blood and brains are what’s required right now, if I’m to continue to sing my life and live it.
My blood.
The brains and the hands of the magician who is standing over me and can turn a really bad day into a really good one with the right strategy and execution.
Nerves of steel and blades of steel.
Now this man is climbing up and onto my chest, wielding his blade with the combined forces of science and butchery. The forces required to break and enter someone’s heart. The magic that is medicine.
I know it’s not going to feel like a good day when I wake up after these eight hours of surgery, but I also know that waking up is better than the alternative.
Even if I can’t breathe and feel as if I am suffocating. Even if I’m desperately drawing for air and can’t find any.
Even if I can’t breathe and feel as if I am suffocating. Even if I’m desperately drawing for air and can’t find any.
Even if I’m hallucinating, ’cause I’m seeing visions now and it’s all getting a little William Blake.
I’m so cold. I need to be beside you, I need your warmth, I need your loveliness. I’m dressed for winter. I have big boots on in bed, but I’m freezing to death.
I am dreaming.
I am in a scene from some movie where the life is draining out of the actor in the lead role. In the last moments of his life he is vexed and questioning his great love.
“Why are you going? Don’t leave me!”
“I’m right here,” his lover reminds him. “I haven’t moved.”
“What? It’s not you leaving? Am I the one walking away? Why am I walking away? I don’t want to leave you. Please, don’t let me leave.”
There are some dirty little secrets about success that I’m just waking up to. And from.
Success as an outworking of dysfunction, an excuse for obsessive compulsive tendencies.
Success as a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis.
Success should come with a health warning—for the workaholic and for those around them.
Success may be propelled by some unfair advantage or circumstance. If not privilege, then a gift, a talent, or some other form of inherited wealth.
But hard work also hides behind some of these doors.
I always thought mine was a gift for finding top-line melody not just in music but in politics, in commerce, and in the world of ideas in general.
Where others would hear harmony or counterpoint, I was better at finding the top line in the room, the hook, the clear thought. Probably because I had to sing it or sell it.
But now I see that my advantage was something more prosaic, more base. Mine was a genetic advantage, the gift of . . . air.
That’s right.
Air.
“Your man has a lot of firepower in that war chest of his.”
That’s the man who sawed through my breastbone speaking to my wife and next of kin, Ali, after the operation.
“We needed extra-strong wire to sew him up. He’s probably at about 130 percent of normal lung capacity for his age.”
He doesn’t use the word “freak,” but Ali tells me she has started thinking of me as the Man from Atlantis, from that 1970s sci-fi series about an amphibian detective.
David Adams, the man I will owe my life to, the surgeon-magician, speaks with a southern twang, and in my heightened Blakean state I begin to confuse him with the crazed villain of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I overhear him asking Ali about tenors, who are not known to run around a stage hitting high notes.
“Aren’t tenors supposed to stand with two legs apart, firmly rooted in the ground, before even considering a top C?”
“Yes,” I say, without opening my mouth and before the drugs wear off. “A tenor has to turn his head into a sound box and his body into a bellows to make those glasses smash.”
I, on the other hand, have been racing around arenas and sprinting through stadiums for thirty years singing “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the high A or B depending on the year.
In the 1980s the stylish English songster Robert Palmer stopped Adam Clayton to plead with him. “Will you ever get your singer to sing a few steps lower. He’ll make it easier on himself, and all of us who have to listen.”
Air is stamina.
Air is the confidence to take on big challenges or big opponents.
Air is not the will to conquer whatever Everest you will encounter in your life, but it is the ability to endure the climb.
Air is what you need on any north face.
Air is what gives a small kid on a playground the belief that he won’t be bullied, or if he is, that the bully will have the air knocked out of him.
And here I am now without it, for the first time.
In a hospital emergency room, without air.
Without breath.
The names we give God.
All breath.
Jehovaaaah.
Allaaaah.
Yeshuaaaah.
Without air . . . without an air . . . without an aria.
I am terrified because for the first time ever, I reach for my faith and I can’t find it.
Without air.
Without a prayer.
I am a tenor singing underwater. I can feel my lungs filling up. I am drowning.
I am hallucinating. I am seeing a vision of my father in a hospital bed and me sleeping beside him, on a mattress on the floor. Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, the summer of 2001. He is deep breathing, but it’s getting shallower and shallower like the grave in his chest. He shouts my name, confusing me with my brother or the other way around.
“Paul. Norman. Paul.”
“Da.”
I jump up and call a nurse.
“Are you okay, Bob?” she whispers in his ear.
We are in a world of percussive, animated whispers, a world of sibilance, his tenor now become short tiny breaths, an s after every exhalation.
“Yesssss sssss sss.”
His Parkinson’s disease has stolen the sonority.
“I want to go home sssssss I want to get out of here sssss.”
“Say it again, Da.”
Like the nurse, I am leaning over him, my ear close to his mouth.
Silence.
Followed by another silence.
Copyright © 2022 by Bono. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
