27,000 Breaths

by Trevor Corkum

DHARMA

The first adult movie I watched with my father was The World According to Garp. In the film, Robin Williams plays a sensitive young man who grows up without a dad, and whose mom becomes a feminist icon.

We watched the film side by side in a small hospital lounge. A handful of men in pale green scrubs sat in plastic chairs around the TV, IV drips taped to their arms. I ate butterscotch pudding from a plastic cup. My dad, shorn of his heavy curls, the result of a complex surgery that had tried, unsuccessfully, to remove a tumour from his brain, was too weak to stand or walk. Instead a jokey orderly wheeled his hospital bed like a throne into the room. I remember how the bright winter light filtered into the space, illuminating the linoleum floor, with its deep reek of ammonia, and the anticipation on the faces of the other men who, like my father, would be dead from their various illnesses within a few years.

I knew Robin Williams from Mork and Mindy, a TV show about an alien who finds himself on Earth and is perplexed by the weird ways of humankind. I was too young to understand the sexual undercurrents of Garp — why the men laughed so rudely or slapped their thighs at certain segments of dialogue — but I liked watching Robin Williams, who was full of wit and warm energy, courage and charisma.

He always seemed to be smiling.

CELLS

Some say we store pain and trauma deep within our tissue, a poorly understood body memory that contains the seeds of our emotional histories in a way the brain is unable to process.

At a microscopic level — at the level of the individual cell — physical or emotional pain can be reproduced and carried forward from month to dizzy month, year to unbearable year, stretching on through the long decades of our lives.

If this is true, I wonder: how do we release that trapped emotion?

How should we decode the body’s strange hieroglyphics of grief?

REVERENCE

For Buddhists, suffering comes from the ways in which we attach ourselves to the world — how we attempt to dodge the bullet of our own mortality, how we hold onto fleeting forms of pleasure, as if we could insulate our lives from loss.

Reverence, it is said, is to live a life of poignancy without despair. Reverence can take hold before moments of impossible beauty — a gorgeous sunset beach, the tender eyes of the beloved, the indelible face of a newborn child — but also in instances of hardship and despair. To be reverent in the face of pain; to honour the slow-motion unraveling of the body, the drawn-out ravaging of the body’s form.

To be reverent in our lives is to accept with equanimity all that has yet to come.

Easier said than done.

BREATH

Every day of our lives, according to the books, we take an average of 27,000 breaths.

Our lungs are insatiable, working humbly behind the scenes.

Unlike eating, sex, or running away from the world, breathing is an involuntary action. It’s the wise knowledge of the body preserving itself. Typically when we breathe, we do so unconsciously, unaware of the steady whisper of oxygen transforming into fuel inside us.

While our minds are occupied with the sushi we had for lunch, and the drama unfolding on Twitter, our lungs remain steadfast and loyal.

Every night we close our eyes and ease ourselves into sleep. The breath continues its thankless work while we float away to dreamland. Our cells reproduce and carry on with their small repairs, healing the havoc wrought by time and lonely days, passing on, through the years, and in spite of our human failings, a love that the body remembers.

But even the lungs have a certain threshold.

Eventually, they rest.

My father took his final breath at a quarter to six on a snowy New Year’s morning. He was alone in the room when he died. His lungs, taking orders from his brain, began to soften, and then relax, until everything became quiet.

GRIEF

How do we hold grief inside the body?

Grief is a frantic soldier. Grief wants all the action. The clenching knot at the throat. Anxiety storming the gut. A debilitating fatigue that stripmines the body’s resources, leaving us weak and depleted, lonely on our midnight couches.

Grief likes to hide. To disguise and go out in camouflage.

It’s the strange face that stares back at us from the bathroom mirror, the face that we no longer recognize or know how to love.

Tenderness

Late at night I’m sitting cross-legged on a cushion, staring into a candle, paying attention to my breathing. There are no other sounds besides the rumble of distant subway cars, the hissing of the fridge.

I’m trying without agenda to cultivate Bodhichitta — tenderness of the heart — when I notice a carpenter ant circling around the candle. My first unholy instinct is to stomp the ant with my foot. Ants in the house are a nuisance. But tonight I just observe. The ant appears dazzled by all the brightness, veering left then right. At times he crawls toward the candle, tentatively mounting the pale white cone, as if he longs to get close to the fire — some born-again, earthbound Icarus.

I break from meditation and scoot down onto my stomach so I can watch the ant at eye level. Sensing my giant body, he freezes. I know he can feel my breath against his delicate carapace as something of a gentle wind. He remains there in a defensive position — the instinctive place where ants rest patiently to await whatever comes next.

Then, eventually, as if he can sense that I am no threat, he continues his curious pilgrimage around the flame.

SURRENDER

How do we learn to let go?

How do we learn to part — with a moment, a person, a love?

Do we ever let go of love?

Post-Equinox, the days begin to shrink. The world grows cold. Long evenings of sunshine are replaced by turning inward, the closing of heavy curtains against the dark.

Instances of surrender are manifold: we surrender to our enemies, we surrender to the unknown, we surrender to life, we surrender to ourselves.

We surrender, eventually, to death.

Suffering comes from aligning ourselves with tired emotional patterns — seeking familiar grooves that govern how we experience and see the world. When we hold on to love too tightly, it loses some of its oxygen, diminishes because of our clinging.

An exercise: sit with something awhile and see how it dissolves.

A mote of dust helicoptering through the early light.

The shape of your naked toe against the floor.

The face of a dead relative, someone you love and long for, gazing back at you through time, or from a photo with soulful eyes.

Take that object, that person, and breathe it in completely.

Peer into its mysterious heart.

Then see how it fades away, how begins to lose its shape, returns to nothing more than a current of restless energy, the same formless energy to which we all return.

WARRIOR

The last time I held my father’s hand, I wanted so much to be strong. I wanted, as a boy, to be the perfect warrior, to have power over heaven and earth. I wanted, listening to his painful breathing, to stop the tide of his death, as if I could make him immortal — but also to acknowledge the swirling energy inside him.

I had no words as a child for what that might even mean — his life force, his invisible himness, his elemental chi, which I could not touch or hold onto but which I had already begun to grieve. I wanted him to know that it had left its mark on me.

I wanted to know his secrets. Stories he could no longer share.

To meet the boy he had been in backwoods Nova Scotia, chasing butterflies across the farm while his mother, apron ironed primly, watched with a cold glass of lemonade from the long back porch.

I wanted to sit with him at a bar the night he fell in love with my mother. To ask over gin what it felt like to be in love, how he imagined the unfolding future, whether he was fearful, what it was about her that made him take the leap.

I wanted to stand beside him at the birth of my older brother and know the wonder he must have felt, the ricochet of terror and holiness, of life begetting life.

But these are merely desires. And I am no conjurer of the past.

I am just a man, one of my father’s sons, learning how to breathe.

About the author

Trevor Corkum’s fiction and non-fiction have been published widely across Canada. His work has been nominated or longlisted for a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, the CBC Short Story Prize, and the CBC Creative Non-Fiction Prize. He lives in Toronto, where he runs a popular author interview series called The Chat at 49thShelf.com. His novel The Electric Boy is forthcoming with Doubleday Canada.

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Credits

BT #017 © 2016 Trevor Corkum. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2015. Edited by Amanda Leduc.

Cover image uses artwork created by Clockwise, from thenounproject.com

Originally published at littlefiction.com.