Today’s song is ’What Becomes of The Broken Hearted’. This was a hit single recorded by Jimmy Ruffin and was released on the ‘Motown Records’ Soul label in the summer of 1966. It is a ballad, with lead singer Jimmy Ruffin recalling the pain that befalls the brokenhearted, who had love that's now departed. The song essentially deals with the struggle to overcome sadness while seeking a new relationship after a breakup.
The tune was written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser and James Dean. ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ remains one of the most revived of Motown's hits. ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’ peaked at Number 7 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’, and at Number 6 on the ‘Billboard R&B Singles’ chart; as well as Number 8 on the ‘UK Singles Chart’. Eight years later, the song was reissued and surpassed its original chart position, reaching Number 4, and thus making it his highest-placed chart single in the UK.
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Look across any road or down any street; go inside any home in any place at any time, and there you will find the ‘broken-hearted’. Not all of us are broken-hearted, and thankfully, nor are most of us, but each of us will know of someone who is. It is the most debilitating, depressing and destructive of human conditions that can befall any person. It essentially stops the person living any meaningful or pleasurable life and places them into a world of suspended animation where continuous hurt and unsettled emotions reign supreme.
For over one twenty-six years I was a Probation Officer who also trained and worked in the additional roles of Marriage Guidance Counsellor: Anger Management Worker: Relaxation Trainer and Bereavement Counsellor over a twenty-six-year career in West Yorkshire. By the time I retired, I had seen too much hurt and heartbreak and had worked with enough depressive, desperate and dispirited souls to last a lifetime.
Over my career, I have worked with people who have killed and thereby created heartache for others, as well as working with parents who’d had a child or another family member murdered. I’ve worked with families who’d lost a loved one through some tragic accident, and I’ve comforted and cried with a mother, who after several years and a number of miscarriages, gave birth to a baby who lived three hours before dying in her arms. I have sat with parents whose house had been burgled, and among the things stolen was the personal effects they had of their deceased and only child. The robber had stolen the items and then decided to burn the photographs to destroy the evidence of his theft. I have worked with young people who have been burnt out of their homes along with arsonists who burn for sheer excitement, whatever the risk to human and animal life. I once worked with a man who contracted HIV and who knowingly went on to deliberately infect others. This was at the start on that particular medical plague. I have worked with men and women whose inhuman torture and killing of domestic pets have witnessed them receiving no more than a fine at Court. I have worked with people who had their childhoods stolen and their adulthood left forever unhappy through the sexual molestation, rape, incest and physical hurt inflicted on them by fathers and brothers and uncles who were m t to love and protect them. I have visited people in prison, who allegedly committed crimes for which they were convicted of and never confessed to ( crimes I believe they never did), and I have known people who have committed terrible crimes for which they were never caught, convicted or imprisoned.
The author, Stephen King once said, “Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.” I know of many people who would share his expressed sentiments even though I could not.
Hearts can be strong; they can be trusting and faithful, and hearts can burn with a passion that ignites the soul, yet sharp are their pieces if ever broken and deep is the pain when pierced through. Hearts are also the most fragile of human organs. Their condition is directly responsible for millions of premature deaths when we fail to listen to them. When broken by the loss of a loved one or the emotionally cruel actions of someone once loved (or even still loved), the heart can be a cold survivor of suffering for the once romantic, but now ice maiden. A broken heart can rip a human apart just as much as the broken wings of a butterfly kills a part of nature that can never be reborn.
Was I to try and identify, from the many examples of a broken heart I’ve seen in others, I would be unable to conclusively concur that it is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all! I know from my work with ‘broken-hearted clients’, that those hearts which took the longest to heal (from those hearts that did heal), belonged to all manner of people. They belonged to those people who had ‘loved and lost’ as well as those who never found the love they sought. I worked with so many good people who gave their heart (and body also), to another, only to have it broken through the unfaithfulness, dishonesty, rejection, desertion or ultimate betrayal of the other person in whom they’d placed their total trust.
There have been many men and women who essentially told me in their own words that they’d given their heart to another, only to have it returned to them in pieces. It may seem hard to believe that one person can love another so much, that if circumstances suddenly and inexplicably change and the other person deserts them, dumps them for another, stops loving them or perhaps says that they never did love them, all the ‘lost-out-lover’ can feel is an constant wanting to die.
Look on Facebook any day of the week and you can read the texts of the broken hearted in their hundreds. Their mouths may say “I’m okay”, their fingers may text, “I’m fine”, and their smiling photograph may suggest they are getting on with their lives, but behind their smile lies a broken heart that never mended, and behind that laugh of bravado, they are falling apart. Within their body ls a frightened soul fighting to get out and truthfully engage with life once more, but a lack of confidence in self and trust in others militates against them being prepared to invest their love again.
I don’t know if a heart was ever meant to be broken, or if indeed, it ever truly is. There is a divide between the fractured and the broken in which the degree of hurt cannot be measured; and just like an injured limb, a fracture can often prove more painful and complicated, and take much longer to heal than a clean break does!
A broken heart emotionally bleeds whenever the touch of another threatens to massage it and bring it back to life’. The thing never to forget, however, is this. If your heart beats, it is capable of loving, and if it continues to throb, life lives within it. The only long-term answer when you have been badly let down by another is to liberate the love of your heart and let it out once more. The more love you express, the more love will surely return. Allow your love to fly and land upon other hearts, and like a budding butterfly reborn inside the body of a caterpillar, you will fly to new experiences and know other worlds.
I once read that unless hearts were breakable, they would have no purpose. Perhaps hearts will never be made practical until they are made unbreakable? I would, however, like to believe that it is the heart’s capacity to give all when it is at its most vulnerable which designates it as the most important organ in our body, signifying its desire for life to go on.
Love and peace Bill xxx