Just breathe

I hinted in my next-to-last post about something that's weighed heavily on me in the last year or so.

It took a long time for me to begin to deal with this issue because I was so--let's say unfocused--as a child. Growing up without my father in my life was hard. Becoming an adult without him and facing the "real world" without him has been much harder. Well, maybe not harder, but certainly more complicated and draining. My Sophomore year of college was burdened with the knowledge that it was my tenth year (since his death). I was nine when he died, so when I turned eighteen, I'd live half of my life without my father. This is something so often reserved for those with good reason to hate their fathers. There aren't many visible people like me. So, the tenth year, the first full year of having been without him longer than I had been with him was remarkable to say the least. This December, it will be eighteen years. Two thirds.

With every year that passes, I lose more memories. With every year that passes, he gets further and further away. That tall man with enormous hands who always stole the tops off my soft-serve cones is never coming back. I can listen to stories, but I can never know him more. He will never be a person to me. I wonder, really, how much people remember of how they feel about their parents when they are young. It could be me and the broken way my brain works (and it is so very broken), but, when I was a child, I'm not sure my parents were people. They certainly weren't distant, but maybe I hadn't learned well enough to get past my own emotional distance to see them as more than Nanny's bestockinged legs. That's a profoundly unfair exaggeration, both to me and to them, but, from this vantage, sometimes it feels like all that is left.

My mother is a real person now, as am I. We have real, meaningful conversations--though she swears we always did. We have a real, meaningful relationship. She's one of my best friends, and I can count on her for anything and everything. She's a complicated and nuanced woman still as full of hopes and dreams and goals and fears at 59 as I am at 26--the age she was when she married a man she'd dated for six months and who fulfilled his vows to her after sixteen years. That man I'll never have an adult relationship with.

My grandfather died last February. He was my mother's best friend. She was one of the few people who were willing to work with him in his hearing loss and they carried on long conversations about whatever they liked, something I was unable to do. It was on very rare occasions that I was able to pitch my voice low enough for him to hear me at all. Still, he was the man who loved me when my father was gone.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about how he died. My grandfather broke his hip. He'd been using a walker more and it rolled out from under him. The surgery to replace it went well, but, as happens so normally with advanced age, recovery can be too big of a challenge. My grandfather had had emphysema for many years. It was as much related to his military service as it was to his smoking--which he quit when my mother demanded it upon my older brother's birth. The short term damage from smoking can heal within six months. But when you've been exposed to heavy smoke for 50 years, your lungs are often irreparably damaged.

Sleep is poison. I have heard of a man who accurately predicted his death by timing his sleep. He slept longer every night, and he calculated that there would be an occasion on which he would sleep the whole day away. He predicted he wouldn't wake again after this. I can only assume he was either a very healthy man who never had cause to sleep many hours before this day, or that he was incurably insane to time his sleep every day. But this much is true, sleep, or rather lying down, will kill you. Every night when you lie in your bed, you diminish your lung capacity. Most people are healthy, and their lungs recover. Some lungs are not healthy and they don't recover. My grandfather woke after his surgery. It was a few days later, when he'd lain in bed long enough for the hip to heal enough that he could start to sit up and maybe stand and walk when it was clear that it was too late. It was a horrible experience to sit and listen and discuss and argue with the family over whether and at what point we would allow his living will to be activated. How long would it be before he simply stopped breathing? Would it happen before or because his blood stopped receiving oxygen?

The weekend after he fell, I left work and went to him. I spent nearly the whole weekend at his side. I stayed up overnights. I had breakfast with my uncles. I slept. The Sunday I was to drive back home, I had to run some errands with my mother. I told him I would come back before I left town. But, I didn't. I have no idea if he heard me anyways, but I never spoke to him again. He died that week. I came back the following weekend and we did all those things you do when old sailors die.

They call them "committal shelters." Some are little more than steel pipes holding up a cover. The big one at the center of what is now a grouping of vault courts is more like a gathering tent. I don't recall what it's made of. I haven't spent a lot of time there looking up. I have spent a lot of time there listening to gunshots. Far too long there. Barrancas was filling up when my father was buried in section 38, but there were five more mostly-empty sections in the main cemetery. My grandparents (my grandmother led my grandfather by a little over a year) are in one of the six extension sections now waiting for the quick to fall. I've been once or twice since, and I've not bothered to take note which. It's hard to bear and the distance in my heart isn't ready for the number.

Since he died before the internet, my father's plot is easily found online. His name is there twice, since each plot has room for two in our traditionally monogamous pairing culture. Someday, there will be a different name on that second plot. And now we come to what this post is about. I read a post from a friend about how she counted her father's breaths as he lay dying. I'm sure there are billions of people who can't even fathom what it means. Sometimes I lie awake at night watching my husband's back and desperately counting his breaths. I'm not really paranoid, but I am nervous. I have no illusions about permanence. And the knowledge I have about the frailty and impermanence around me makes me jumpy when I can't sleep or I'm already anxious. I suppose I should add that my husband has chronic bronchitis. So does my mother. I hope to avoid counting any more breaths, but I can see a long road of breath counting ahead of me. People don't die of old age. They suffocate, gasping, when their lungs stop pushing oxygen into their blood. It is at once horrifying and hopeless and suffocating to watch. You find yourself holding your breath to match theirs. Every breath threatens to not be followed. I've never known anyone to breathe regularly in his sleep. You should definitely not try counting someone's breath when he's sleeping. It's quite traumatic because the dark dilates time until you're not sure how long it's been since the last breath. And sometimes he'll breathe softly and you'll miss it. Will it come again? Please, please breathe! I definitely recommend against it.

I didn't think this would come up so soon, but, recently my mother decided to delay a repair to her shoulder. This shouldn't be a problem for a 60-65 year old person; even a 70 year old person should have a good prognosis for recovery from a major surgery. She's fairly healthy, and she's committed to staying motile and even improving her physical prowess. She's quite a woman. But, that monster that steals breath is now fixed in my mind. I asked her just how long she intended to delay it. It was very difficult to tell her why I asked. She isn't going to delay it long, but the fear, the fear of the counting, is waiting for me. But, I will be by her side. Counting is the least, smallest ministration we owe those who have loved us, however illogically terrifying it may be.