Waiting for a Breath

Tom died nine years ago after a massive stroke.  His life had not been easy and so those of us who knew him looked upon his death as a release from the many torments he endured for almost seventy years. Tom was my older brother. We were never close to each other as children and I hadn’t seen much of him as an adult.  But when I heard the news of his stroke, my husband and I took the train to Philadelphia to be with him for his last days.  The stroke had destroyed his brain to the point where all that was keeping his body alive were the machines blinking and beeping by his bedside. Because we believed Tom would not have wanted to live like this, we knew it was time to follow his living will directive and unhook the machines to let him go.  But the end did not come easily nor did it come swiftly.  Although he never regained consciousness, he continued to breathe on his own.

For three days we took turns sitting in his room, watching him, or, more accurately, listening to him breathe.  I was knitting at the time, a prayer shawl that would be given to someone in need, someone, perhaps, like my brother.   

 After a while I realized that I was marking the pause between breaths with my stitches.  The rhythm of knitting matched the rhythm of my brother’s breathing. For some time the intervals between breaths seemed constant; seven or eight seconds.  Then they began to be a bit longer. This vigil reminded me of something, but it wasn’t until days later that I remembered what it was.

Five years earlier, I had been in the delivery room with my daughter as she labored with her first child.   Again, I was knitting, this time a baby blanket that I was hurrying to finish before the baby appeared.  I was counting then too, counting the minutes between contractions, counting, knitting and stopping with each contraction in order to pay close attention to my watch.  Over time, as of course it would, the space between contractions grew shorter and shorter, until, at last, the small, wet head appeared and a life began.

The two events were so alike, and yet so different. For, at my daughter’s bedside, I witnessed a birth and a first breath.  At my brother’s, the end of a life, and the last breath.  Each time, I was counting, watching, waiting.  With my brother, the moments between the breaths lengthened, until there were no more.  With my daughter, the intervals shortened until the final contraction was followed by the first breath; that ordinary, astonishing, everyday miracle.  

Breath.  Most of the time we take it for granted.  Only when there is difficulty breathing, whether from a cold, smog or while suffering a more serious condition, are we really paying attention to our breath. Breath, though, is synonymous with life.  It is our first and greatest gift; it is the last sign of life in the body.  And that, I think, is what I learned as witness to these two separate events, one being the inverse of the other.  Not a grand “Aha”, not the answer to the big question of life after death, although I could have wished it so, but something much simpler.  I saw symmetry in the design of life.  As every birth is a new beginning, with the promise of a life never before known or seen, so then isn’t it possible that every death could begin a new life, one of a different sort, one not yet known or seen?  Parents who wait for their baby often say, “We are expecting.”  At the moment of death, I hope that I will also be expecting.