Breathing and Listening

Monday, May 3rd, 1965. I’m seven years old, running home from school with my chums. I can’t see their faces anymore—they appear shrouded as if in mist—but I know they are there. We’re all wearing our Catholic school uniforms. Each of us carries a leather bookbag and a metal lunchbox. Other details from the suburban scene that day: green-gold leaves on relict oaks, mid-afternoon warmth of spring sun, fragrance of lilacs, the utility pole on the side of our family’s still new-looking split-level home. And there is my mother, standing next to the Japanese red maple my father recently planted. She has been waiting for me. She has something to say. “I have bad news. Your grandfather has died.”

That memory remains unchanged, even more than half a century later. It does not age, unlike the yellowing snapshot I have of my father and his father taken in 1932. The paper on which this image is fixed suffers from the slow combustion of time. It’s crumbling into dust. But what about the image itself? It is slowly loosening itself from the grip of the paper. When free finally of its bonds—both chemical and emotional—this image, like all images, will return to that place that is no place, where all images go when not being images.

During those long weeks in the spring of 1965, my father—when he wasn’t at the office—was at his dying father’s bedside in the V.A. Hospital. At a certain point, my father’s father became unresponsive and spoke no more, but my father continued to sit there every evening, listening to the old man’s breathing. This went on for days, until the end finally arrived. Whatever communication or transmission or exchange occurred between father and son during that time happened in that place where words go when no longer being words. Some call it the heart.

I learned this lesson myself one spring, as I sat at the bedside of my dying father. He had been admitted to the hospital twelve days earlier with what appeared to be a minor ailment but proved otherwise. As the days went by, he became unresponsive. The end drew near. A priest was called, who administered the last rites and hurried off, leaving my father and me alone together. After that, it was just the breathing and the listening and my father dying and the breathing and the listening that continues to this day.

©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on April 30, 2021