I Can Hold My Breath the Longest
Exploring crisis, family, and origins of my dream to disappear
The nurse at St. Ann’s rehab raced through my mom’s discharge papers. Her loud voice, besides being grating, was unnecessary—my mom could hear just fine. Also, her unmistakable upstate accent made my ears bleed. Jarring and elongated vowels whined through her stuffy nose as harsh consonants filled the room with fists. The sonic trigger awakened details of some of my most formative years.
I was eight years old in 1980 when my family moved to New York from California. We weren’t from the California everyone knew. There were no beaches, no skateboards, no celebrity sightings. My California was all cowboys. Ranchers with sweat stains on hat brims. Cow wranglers with leather skin and tucked in denim shirts.
I dreamed of someday driving a dually with a hitch, just like Buck, the tall man with shaggy red hair who lived next door and never wore a shirt. I didn’t know what I’d haul in my big truck. Maybe farm equipment or horses. Except I was allergic to horses. Still, the aesthetic of preparedness, of trying to be ready for whatever came my way, even way back then, was very important to me.
From that California cowtown we landed in a part of New York that also was contrary to assumption. There were no skyscrapers, no honking taxis, no nightly muggings, giant bridges, or populated boroughs. Our new home was delicately suburban and adjacent to working dairy farms on the Erie Canal. Our backyard stretched for more than a quarter-acre as my dad often chortled in social settings. Its fenceless reach fed into an open field that disappeared into a dense forest.
Eventually I ignored my parent’s insistence to refrain from wandering too far. The thick trees became my refuge. I’d enter the treeline and be immediately engulfed by red maples and black birches. All outside sounds of traffic and wind and the older neighborhood boys mashing their Mongoose and Kuwahara pedals would turn dull and I’d entertain myself with adolescent profundities. Thoughts of space and stars, time and consciousness, and also UFOs. Out there I’d both amuse and terrify my percolating juvenile brain with sweeping and incomprehensible ponderings. But those trees helped me along. They held me close as I fed my appetite for thinking about big things.
The forest was also a place where I happened upon artifacts—twisted nickel spoons dating back to the colonial days. Colored pieces of blue and pink china. Grey chert arrowheads made by one of the decimated Iroquois tribes. Every week or so there’d also be new evidence of modern visitors, too. Broken beer bottles, usually Budweiser, inexplicably damaged flatware, and an occasional stray pair of underwear. Every bit of this fed my appetite for mystery. Each was a prompt to a new story.
I’d bushwhack through the foliage, stare at the mangled ground rich with thorny vines and funnel webs, and dream of digging a massive hole that tunneled into a secret and spacious foyer. A place I could disappear to and be safe.
I never broke ground for this hideaway, but back in my dark, paneled room, I created a similar refuge. I moved my drawing desk into the closet and organized my array of mediums into small cardboard boxes. Watercolors, India inks, charcoals. In there I secretly drew pastel sketches of the naked bodies I watched on late night TV with my dad after my mom had gone to bed. As soon as I finished the picture, I’d black out the bodies' curves until the images became a solid box. Then I’d crumple it up and throw it away.
The nurse’s voice exacerbated my already stellar levels of irritation with this entire ordeal. The past month had been a blur—from the long haul Amtrak, to my mom’s fall in Montana, then the Great Falls hospital, a multi-leg flight back to Rochester, a rehab experience wrought with Covid and negligent nurses, and now back to my mom’s apartment in her independent living complex. All this in barely three weeks. She required a lot of attention before, but now her needs were mandatory and with life-altering repercussions if they went unmet.
Helping my mom—which I consciously try to not refer to as “caretaking,” has taken a toll on every aspect of my life. It’s yanked me from my daily routine and thrown a wrench in my personal and professional relationships. It’s inspired me to consider a move I’d never entertain otherwise.
I’ve also started to have semi-regular heart palpitations my cardiologist attributes to my new responsibilities. “Everything’s fine otherwise,” she said. “But you’ll be better served by some balance.” This balance, however, remains elusive.
In a perfect world, I’d share this load with my four siblings. But the world is not perfect, and none of our collective worldviews, perspectives, life situations, or anything, really, aligns in a way to make this effort a collaborative one. I now clearly see how families can get torn apart as time goes on. But I refuse to live with such resentment or grudges.
I believe the choices people make are theirs alone. They are not for me to judge. Maybe not even worth trying to understand. Ultimately we each make the choice we want to make. One that makes most sense to us. Still, it’s hard to stay neutral when someone’s response to a severe situation is, or at least seems to be, contrary to my own. I normally celebrate differences, but I am challenged by this one.
My mom-centric position has twisted my life into an amalgam of household, financial, and emotional supports for her new life as a widow. Helping her chart this uncharted course has been similar to what I imagine it would be like to parent a teenager. Never in her life has she lived alone—at 18 she left home to get married. And now such simple things like choosing towel colors and midday snacks are alarmingly empowering. She regularly makes comments about how proud she is, at age 77, to be learning how to live with herself, for herself.
The nurse threw an assortment of unlaundered grippy socks and tubes of petroleum jelly into a flimsy garbage bag. “Here ya go, hon,” she said, as she set the bag on my mom’s wheelchaired lap. “So, let’s see…do your exercises, mmm-kay,” she droned. “And, umm, you’re doing just fantastic, mmm-kay.” The memorized discharge script was obvious to me, but not to my mom. She heard these canned compliments as authentic indicators of progress. “You’re walking so darn well!” the nurse said without eye contact. “You’re ready to get on with your life!” My mom glowed, then looked up at me with a face that said, “See—I told you I was better.”
But she wasn’t better. Not yet. Not even close. She was making progress, sure, but what the physical therapists were calling “walking” was indeed not walking. My mom could stand up. She could shuffle, kind of, in a forward direction. But every step she took was wobbly and wrought with apprehensive gasps and teeth-sucking. This level of ambulation, however, was enough for the facility to pin a star on their chests and proclaim, our work here is done…BYE!
As we left the hospital campus, my mom looked around and exclaimed that she had no idea where she was. I couldn’t blame her—her past three weeks had been a blur of medical hoo-ha, fluctuating pain, and countless promises about what will lead to a quick recovery. Her rehab room’s window had been large, yet it afforded a nondescript view with no known landmarks. “Sometimes I wondered if I was still in Montana,” my mom joked. But she wasn’t joking.
We drove past a cemetery I suddenly remembered from when I was a kid. “You need to hold your breath until we’ve driven all the way past,” my mom would say back then. She never explained why—it was some sort of Catholic thing. I figured it had something to do with the living trying to remain inconspicuous in the presence of the dead. As in, maybe they won’t notice us. I was always able to hold my breath the longest.
These days I am fascinated by how comfortable I was as a kid hiding from who I really was. I didn’t want to be sensitive. Or artistic. I didn’t want to be tender or understanding or intelligent. Perhaps maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be these things, and more that I was taught it was uncool, or “gay,” or soft, or wouldn’t get me laid, or anything else that would make me unlike the men who tried to show me what I should be. I grew to believe my innate qualities were bad. I contained things that would not make me a good man.
Through the years I grew so adept at wearing masks that even I grew confused by who was the real me. This fog cleared over time, but still it amazes me, and yet also it’s not surprising, how many decades I spent unseen and worried that I’d be judged by both the living and the dead.
We took a left at a four-way intersection as the low morning sun reflecting on the downtown skyline. My mom perked up, suddenly oriented. “Oh—I’m not as far from home as I thought I was,” she said. We then discussed the coming weeks, and I reminded her that I’d be around for only a few days before I had to leave again. She nodded and picked at her fingers like she does when she’s nervous. She said something I could’t hear, so I asked her to repeat it. “I’m strong,” she whispered, barely loud enough for me to make out. Her words sounded like a question. “You are,” I said. Addressing her, as much as I was addressing myself.
Really powerful Tom. The way you pull details out of your present and past and place them so perfectly in your story (can I call it a story?). Your essays are like paintings to me.