Four Years Ago

The humid days are the worst.

This is what all the therapists at my Pulmonary Rehab Class are telling us. There’s more moisture in the air and that makes it heavier, harder to breathe in, harder to push out. The class, made up of roughly a dozen people, are struggling. People sit slumped, breathing hard. Scratchy, hospital towels around our necks, dixie cups full of water in our hands.

The instructor continues to lead us through our paces, but gently. Beside me a woman in a wheelchair has fallen asleep. The intimacy of that. To look over and see the flaked, yellowed skin exposed above her black socks. Her face relaxed to the point of formlessness. Her glasses smudged, fallen. What dreams now forming and dispersing within. And across the room a very elderly man, so old and thin he looks like a fledgling, has fallen asleep, too. Almost fetal in his wheelchair. And the instructor says something with her eyes, perhaps, and we all begin to exercise so gently. Nobody speaks. Everything softer, everything hushed. And as we pretend to jog in our seated places, we’ve become as silent as ninjas. As cats hunting. As clouds touching in the skies above.

Our quiet, a blanket we put around the shoulders of those sleeping within this wounded circle.

Three Years Ago

Everybody’s eyes were trained on the TV in the upper corner of the hospital waiting room.

Dr. Oz was on.

Somebody talking about nuts

Which ones were good for you, which ones were bad.

We were a rapt audience in the waiting room, each one of us happy for the bland distraction, but also sincerely curious. Something had happened in our lives that had changed us. We’d all crossed a line, moving from our natural selves to the types of people who now hoped if only they ate the right kind of nuts then everything would be okay. A woman leaving the clinic stopped and looked at me. Having noticed the oxygen concentrator on my back she abruptly said, “I HOPE YOU DON’T SMOKE!” I assured her that I didn’t, that I had quit, and as I was saying this the person who had accompanied her said– in a voice meant to convey to us that we should think of this woman as a child–“It would be great if you could quit, too, Beverly! Maybe this man can tell you how to do it?” And we all stopped watching Dr. Oz. We all stepped from our anxieties. No longer thinking of ourselves as people who needed to be helped, we thought of ourselves as people who needed to help. And in this, we were released. The grief that had hung in the room dispersed, and as if by saintly intent, we were left there, still and light for a moment, the tv flickering irrelevantly in the corner.

Two Years Ago

It is snowing and the world is different upon us.

“It doesn’t make any sound,” Jones says to me, “not like rain.”

How strange the world and its revelations. I think about trying to tell him water is many things. How depending on what it is responding to, it can be rain, snow, steam or ice, but settle for, “Each one of us is many things, Jones, and change lives in our very core. Everything you see is always becoming something else.”

And so what is truth, Jones might ask.

But he does not.

He is smiling, trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue. The walk back takes longer today. He finds a mound of snow and must stand upon it, throwing chunks of it to the ground like King Kong. He walks along each fence he comes to as if a cliff edge. Hand over hand, meticulously grabbing hold of each bar as it presents itself. He circles trees, makes snow angels, rolls around, leaving his scent on this new world.

A neighbour just before our home has a front garden. Short cedar bushes and trees, all of them capped with the most perfect snow. Jones cuts through this pristine forest, a part of it rather than intrusion upon it. Tangled with trees and ice and leaves and snow, his neurons, everything within him firing at full and awesome capacity. He is happy and alive, moving forward into this world as intimately and immediately as possible. His skin as fair and virginal as this newly falling snow.

I hear a tapping at a window and look to our apartment and there’s Rachelle watching. I point this out to Jones, who pops out of his forest. He sees Rachelle smiling so brightly and is transformed. Our dawdling is over. He drops everything and runs as fast as he can to her, to this point of light that simultaneously exists inside and outside of him–the glowing permanence that will centre the rest of his days.