Breathe

--> Michael and I are packing for our trip to Fiji (which still sounds exotic though it is the closest tropical island to NZ), nestling snorkels and fins next to shorts and tank tops as the July winter wind lashes sleet against the windows with stark staccato strikes. The last time we packed these things, it was my first trip out of chemo, the promised trip that got me through the long days and nights of cancer treatment. Now, a year later, I take an in breath and look out over my life again, above and under water.

We have been working on getting our PADI certification so that we can scuba dive, and Chris, our lovely instructor, keeps having to remind me to push my hair out of the mask; the last time I wore my mask, I didn’t have any hair to push away.  The PADI certification has been harder than we imagined it might be, and in many ways more wonderful. Chris at Dive Wellington greeted us on a cold Saturday morning—a motley circle of participants who were all looking to breathe deep underwater for one reason or another. There was the fellow who wanted to spear fish and collect kai (food in Maori), the lovely young couple who were wanting to swim in schools of fish on their next holiday, the two US Marines who do such things because they are there to be done.  Chris told us again and again that most of the trick to scuba diving was stress management and watching the breath, and during his patient teaching of the theory portion and in the pool afterwards, he showed us what he meant.

By Sunday afternoon there were nearly 20 of us in our wetsuits and scuba gear sitting at the bottom of the four metre pool in Kilbirnie.  We were clumped in little groups around our instructors, watching them signal to us, perform an underwater task with grace and ease, and then point to us to mimic it, anxiously and awkwardly. I was a raw beginner, misunderstanding some of the directions (and inhaling rather more pool water than I’d have liked as a consequence), awkwardly listing to one side with uneven weight belts, popping up too quickly or sinking like a stone as I tried and failed to make small adjustments to my buoyancy.  Chris watched the way I was likely to simply try a thing without centering and breathing into it first—getting ahead of myself in the desire to move through and on to the next task. (This is not a new pattern.) As he hovered in the water, telling me to breathe and watch and settle, I wondered where he had been all my life.

I wondered, too, about how useful this exercise would have been during chemo. The raw focus on the breath, on the present moment. It is always right now under water (how could that be not true on the land?). Never have I had a meditation so anchored in the breath as this is—every inhalation and exhalation is audible, marked, miraculous. Yet isn’t that always true? Aren’t all of our breaths a kind of miracle?

I shouldn’t be new to this idea, and yet it seems close in several ways this week. While I’ve been struggling to breathe underwater, I have loved ones struggling to breathe above it.  My great uncle Bill Gunther—my grandmother’s baby brother—is in the hospital with pneumonia. Although he has seemed old to me my entire life, it is hard to imagine him without a twinkling smile and a welcoming hug.  When I close my eyes, I can hear his gravelly voice in my ear: “I love you, girl.”   

And on the other side of the family and a generation younger, my uncle Tommy Fitzgerald—my mother’s little brother—has been admitted to hospice. Although he’s probably 20 years older than me, I remember Tommy as a new Air Force officer, as a young father holding his tiny baby. When Tommy was diagnosed with stage four cancer in late 2013, the doctors said he had only a handful of months to live. He and I were on the cancer train together in 2014, but as we know, the cancer train has many many different tracks, and his track looked heartbreakingly short while mine had (has) every indication of long. Chemo—a last ditch effort—worked wondrously for him. Tommy recovered enough to visit his daughter in China, enough to come to Aidan’s coming of age ceremony, enough to finally see his ancestral Ireland this year. In January Tommy and Aidan and I hung out with my mother and my aunt Betsy, and we talked about life and love and death and grace, and I learned more from him about the present moment than I had ever imagined there was to learn.  Every breath is a miracle.

Under the pool water I breathe in, bubble bubble out. I check my gauges. I hold my buddy’s hand. I look up at the slowly kicking feet of old women doing their daily exercise, the strong arms of middle aged men arcing through the water, the flailing legs of children racing for a ball.  Chris shows us how to breathe from my buddy’s tank, how to drop my weights and race to the surface in case of an emergency (humming all the while), what it feels like to try to breathe when my tank is empty.  There are no fish in the pool, just other strange beings in scuba gear down below, and the occasional glimpses of swimmers far at the top. We all breathe in, we all bubble out; each breath is a miracle.

I have been out of chemo for a year and three weeks now. My hair is a curly mop top, deeply in need of a cut. I have danced at Naomi’s school ball, celebrated Aidan’s 14^th birthday, and mourned my cousin James who would have turned 25. I have held my new book in my hands and watched sea turtles sleep on coral ledges 12 meters under water.  I have fallen back into a world where I am overscheduled, where I travel too much and work too hard (I am writing this on Aidan’s birthday, on a plane to Melbourne). I am learning and I am also not learning these lessons.

The things Chris teaches us about scuba are the same things I am also trying to learn about life. Breathe slowly and deeply. Never, ever hold your breath. Don’t go up or down too fast. Stay close to your buddy. Be aware in the present—of how deep you are and how much you have consumed. Every breath is a miracle.

I am a slow learner—above and below the water. Michael and I meditate on land in the morning, hold hands far under water in the afternoon. We laugh with Aidan at his birthday dinner until our stomachs hurt and tears pour down our faces. We walk from our new city house to paths through magical woods with vistas out to sea. While we make breakfast, we talk to Naomi to hear about her latest college visit on the other side of the world. In this last year I have learned how short life can be, how precious it is, how few guarantees we’ll ever get. In this last week, I learned that again and again. I reminds me of a Richard Wilbur poem I have always loved. It is always a matter of life and death, as I sometimes forget. This week I have learned what I have learned before, only harder.

The Writer

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy.

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.