My father died of emphysema twenty years ago. That was a lot of grandparenting that slipped through my fingers like smoke. I will never get it back. I remember the phone call I made to tell my mother. He lived in Arizona, and she lived in Pennsylvania. The separation helped in those last years of her mania, when he was too weak to
withstand the gales.
"Mom, Dad died this morning."
An audible gasp. "Are you sure?"
Even though her husband had been lugging an oxygen tank for years, those two words still came like an arctic blast.
Dad explained his disease to me. It wasn't that he could not inhale so much as he could not exhale. The elasticity of his air sacs had been sacrificed to nicotine. Thousands of
puffs over a lifetime, predating any warnings from the Surgeon General, made his lungs a tad stiffer and unable to welcome fresh air. He was completely surrounded by oxygen, but he could not take it in. Stale carbon dioxide had taken up residence and was not budging.
It turns out the new series I watched with my twins was too awful for us. The episode about serial rape left us scared, rather than entertained.
The few shows we saw have left us
with blackened images, trapped in our memories. Aurelle said she had nightmares. I will not be able to breath out the scene of the woman tied up and terrified. Why would I want more of those life sapping scenes clogging my dreams?
Filling our mind with pictures of adultery and violence deadens our ability to receive lovely ones. Thousands of them over time rob us of the strength to exhale.
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