Brick by Breath by Word

The following story is about living and dying, about building and breathing. Nurturance and maintenance intersect through family and writing and integrate as fractal performativity of the spirit, a repetition of dying into life, the laboring process of breathing open the door that births us into the next world in a spiraling exiting entry of exhales. I am present during my Uncle’s last breaths.  His last words to me were one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me.

Brick by Breath by Word

            A gray tube snaked from the hole doctors drilled into his frontal lobe to drain fluid from his brain and relieve pressure created from an inoperable brain tumor. His skin stretched thin across a gray face that, until this moment, I had known only as hearty. Now everything about him had gray tones: his aura, his flesh and his strength matched the color of the liminal space into which he was suddenly slowly sinking.  

            From depths of morphine sleep, he raised open his eyes and gathered me into his focus. Amidst this grayness he had deep awareness of his need for economic dialogue. Distilling to the essence what he wanted to convey to me in his final words, he persuaded his dry mouth and fading voice to issue forth the question, “Are you still writing?”

            These were Uncle Don’s first words to me in his last days.  I cannot recall a time that we’ve ever shared a conversation about my writing.  Yet, now, in this suspended moment bridging life and death, at our first seeing of one another in over a year, he greeted me not with ‘hello’ but with the subject of my core. 

            “Yes,” I replied.

            With great effort he whispered, “Good” and closed his eyes.

            Here, in his final moments, he was gifting me with the reminder of life’s impermanency to reaffirm for me the importance of following one’s passion.

            An artist and a carpenter, Uncle Don spent his life following his own passion, creating homeplaces with his hands. It was his job, his life, his core.  He built physical homes for people to live in, and he painted homes on canvas, all of them brick by brick. When I was a young child Uncle Don taught me how to lay bricks.  I laid each brick carefully and pressed it into the densely moist cement. He showed me how to press just enough so the mortar oozed over but didn’t fall away.  The ooze was meant to stay there and dry that way. This was the particular aesthetic for some houses, including the one I was learning on. That was how I learned about multiple aesthetics.  For some brick houses, the aesthetic is to swipe clean and smooth the pressed out mortar, like the extra dough that remains around cookie cutters.  I remember appreciating the brick aesthetic that kept the ooze.  

            When I was eight years old, he taught me how to mix sand into paint to create texture.  This was before the days when you could go to a home improvement store and buy pre-manufactured paint textures. I watched him adding sand into the five-gallon bucket and stirring, adding sand and stirring, repeatedly until he reached the desired texture.  I was fascinated by how much sand the bucket could hold, and by how much sand the paint could absorb. When I was twenty-eight years old, he taught me, over the phone, how to select the lumber to build support beams, how to install them, and how to jack up the roof of my house that was caving in.  Greg and I together implemented his instructions, and to this day, especially after every heavy snow or icestorm, I’m grateful for my uncle’s guidance, as I can be confident the infrastructure of my house is strong and that my roof isn’t going to collapse.

            “I love you, Uncle Don.”  

            And in a barely audible whisper with his eyes closed, he said, “Thank you.” 

            Those were his final words to me.  Having just gifted me with affirmation as a writer in his eyes, he offered me a gift of thanks.  Here at the end of his life, as in its duration, he gave offerings and gratitudes; he was passing through and from life in a giving mode, in an embodiment of vulnerable resistance. 

            I never again saw him with open eyes.  I never again saw him with working hands. The painting he was working on was not yet finished, and so it remains eternally in process. It is a painting of his childhood home, the house he and my dad grew up in, my Sitdy’s and Grandpa’s house on Arago Street, the house with the steep wooden stairs leading to the dim sloping basement Grandpa dug with his hands, the basement I followed Sitdy into to watch her roll the dough for Lebanese bread, where I would roll the jar of wood-carved faded red and black checkers, colors swishing the black and grey checkered floor, cold beneath me, beside the ancient oven, hotter than modern, yielding loaves of unleavened bread.

            Uncle Don had been painting this house on canvas, building it brick by brick, in an ongoing process of tinting paints to create the bricks’ exact colors.  The frame of the house was fully sketched, with my grandparents sitting on the front steps, looking eerily just as they had always looked when they were living. The poetic fact of life’s incompletion, and simultaneous perpetuation, exists as the ghost of this unpainted house living unfinished on the canvas, a house whose physical existence lives only, and eternally, in the memories of my eight aunts and uncles who lived there, all heaped together into two bedrooms. The house lives on as a homeplace in my memories, and likely in the memories of my dozens and dozens of cousins, and the dozens of friends and strangers who sat at Sitdy’s kitchen table over those many years.  Home is a process of creation and cocreation, in our minds and psyches, in the physical everyday maintenance, in the ongoing making and remaking.  Homeplace is an event in as much as it is a place or a space, an event that creates moments of stability amidst its dynamics of perpetual motion.  Uncle Don’s painting of incompletion captures the ephemerality of homeplace, of memory, of life’s passage day by day, captures this ephemerality ironically through the stability and finality of these unpainted bricks he’d been painting day by day, sketched like ghostings of the physical brick by brick, etched onto this canvas and built by his steady, working, maintaining hands.

             The week after he and I shared our last words, he slipped into a coma.  I exited directly from the interstate to the hospital and found my uncle’s room.  He was taking his last breaths.  I had heard the phrase ‘last breaths’ before, but I never knew until this moment that ‘last breaths’ was a specific phenomenon, not merely a euphemism for somebody nearing death.  I’ve experienced a lot of death in my life, but this was the first time I was at the bedside of a person in transition. I was stunned at the amount of laboring he was doing.  I came face to face with the similarity between birthing and dying. These breaths were loud and hollow. They sounded like clear gusts of wind, tunneling gusts with concise stops. Each breath had a beginning and an end, but they were the deepest breaths I’ve ever heard, and there was cleansing strength behind each and every inhale and exhale.  The breaths did not sound human. They sounded as though they were coming through his body but not from his body. It was as though he was breathing every breath from the center of the earth to the outer reaches of the cosmos and back again.  It sounded as though he was laboring to birth himself into his next life, to launch himself, to propel himself with the force of each breath.  It occurred to me that birth and death are more than cycles, and death is not death but birth into birth, like a fractal--a repetition with a whole new field of particulars that might not have been seen in the previous pattern of living.  There is so much life in death, so much living in dying.  Maybe dying is just that—a process of dye-ing our life’s pattern with a whole new set of colors and seeing it differently the next time around. 

            I sat silently with my cousin Angie and Aunt Sue at the bedside of Uncle Don, listening to his breaths create the soundscape of the room. His body was turning cold.  His face had transformed itself and his skin was perfectly smooth. He had not one wrinkle. I’ve never seen such serenity on an adult face. His appearance of peace was as otherworldly as his continual laboring and belied the efforts of his chest heaving up and down in steady, repetitive rhythm, keeping time with the fierce pulsing of the soundscape, breath by breath by breath. 

            Listening deep into my heart amidst the soundscape of his breathing, I began to feel very strongly that he would make it through the night and pass early in the morning. I knew I should not be there when he passed.  This was too private a moment. Too sacred. The people or person meant to be there in that moment would be there, and for right now it was time for me to go. I helped Aunt Sue arrange her reclining chair so she could semi-sleep while being as close to her partner as she could possibly be.  Aunt Sue and Uncle Don were the embodiment of homeplace manifested through relationship. They spent their life together literally building houses, building life with their hands, side by side in the bricks and the mud.  Their partnership was their livelihood and their craft.

            I turned to my cousin and we hugged and hugged and hugged, as though we could squeeze away the sadness, like blinking hard to hold back tears; but the sadness oozed from our pores like leaking eyes.  I said my last words to my uncle.  I drove in silence, with Uncle Don’s laboring soundscape whooshing through my ears.

            Uncle Don died that next morning around eight a.m.  Aunt Sue was there, alone with Uncle Don when he died.  Aunt Sue told me he released one soft, beautifully long, final exhale.
--Diana Tigerlily