How To Breathe
And Other Truthy Ponderings of My Life As A Massage Therapist
She sat naked on the edge of the massage table, her spine curled into a question mark, her skin a brittle papier mâché wrapping her aging body.
It was a well-worn body. A body with scars. An asthmatic body. A cancer-ridden body. A body I loved more than the sun and moon itself because it was my grandmother’s.
See grandma, the problem is you are not using your breathing muscles correctly, I said as I watched her rib cage swell and shrink in sharp contractions with each labored breath.
You’re using a bunch of tiny neck muscles instead of your diaphragm. Here, try it like this. I placed one hand on my belly, and slowly inhaled, until I filled my lungs to capacity, and then like a beach ball that had suffered a pin prick, I exhaled ever so slowly.
Her eyes looked at me slant. Between gasps of air she said, You’re telling me I’ve been alive for 80 years and I don’t know how to breathe?
No, grandma that is not what I’m saying. Look, never mind. Just lay face down and we’ll get started as soon as I get my anatomy book.
My grandma’s body was my go-to practice body during massage school, which she didn’t mind, although she wasn’t the sort of woman who would have sought out a massage under different circumstances. Self-care just wasn’t her thing.
In the meantime, I had spent about a decade practicing yoga and studying yoga therapy and at the risk of sounding like a new age asshole, the practice totally changed my life.
Yoga showed me how to regain trust in myself. How to make friends instead of enemies with a body I used to treat poorly. Above all else, it taught me how to hold my shit together and breathe when life was really giving it to me. These were all lessons I wanted to share with my grandma, who had been falling apart since my grandfather’s death a year prior.
For the first time in all her 80 years, she was living alone.
Even though she still lived in the same three-bedroom home she had lived in for the whole of my life, she didn’t spend time anywhere except for the smallest bedroom in the back. The rest of the house was banished to the shadows, disappeared into the night, a meaningless ocean of black surrounding her little blue island of televised soap operas.
My grandmother’s body was not just a practice body. Hers was an actual body. A body I wanted to save with knowledge and practice and great big miracles of love.
That Thursday, we were supposed to rendezvous at her house around 6pm for massage practice, but halfway through the day, I realized I was going to be late.
Hey, let’s push it back to 6:30. Staying after class for a minute to study, I texted.
Moments later she responded, Ok. Take your time. I’ll be here.
As I closed out the message, my phone blinked a red warning of Low Battery, the diminishing power in the icon reduced to 3%. By lunch, my phone was dark and dead. I tossed it into my backpack, where it stayed until later that afternoon, when I finally made it home to pick up a charger on the way to my grandma’s.
I left the car running in the driveway as I darted inside for what I thought was a brief pit stop. Inside, the house was dark, save a soft yellow light spilling into the hallway from my roommate’s open door.
I slid past the foreboding light toward my room as I heard her calling after me, Hey, did you get my text? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for an hour.
Seconds later, I reappeared, phone charger in hand. Sorry, my phone was dead. What’s up?
You need to call your mom. Something about your grandma. I don’t know. She sounds worried.
A sudden sink hit my gut. There was a pirouette in time.
She held her phone towards me. You can use my phone if you want.
I snatched it from her hands and scurried to my room, trying to dial the phone number I had dialed hundreds of thousands of times before.
5, 1, 2, I started, but instead of pushing the 2, I hit the 3 and had to start all over.
5,1,* God damn it!
On my third attempt, I got it right. My mother’s phone rang exactly once before she answered the call.
On the other end a sniffle… a somber voice… the world spinning wildly…. now tilting from the light in the hallway towards the darkening of my room.
Mom?
The longest and most painful silence.
Honey, Grandma’s dead.
I stood there in the dark, absorbing the poison of those words until the only thing I could think to say spilled out of my mouth like vomit.
What do you mean, she’s dead? I asked indignantly. I’m supposed to give her a massage in thirty minutes!
Next thing I remember, I was holding a black phone to my ear, my mom gone, my roommate gone, the entire house silent except a small sparrow outside singing around and through the black, which at that point had swallowed up everything.
I arrived at the hospital less than twenty minutes later to a room filled with my family and a small man dressed in black, who I can only assume was the hospital chaplain.
I tossed my keys and my still dead phone on an empty surgical tray with a clang and floated toward the mass of relatives collected like driftwood in the center of the room. The hospital staff busied themselves darting from patient to patient as if there weren’t a dead body behind the white curtain just down the hall.
There she lay in the center of the room, underneath the sick blue of florescent lights, everyone around softly weeping, each machine deadly quiet.
She was still strapped onto a hard plastic stretcher, a violent orange contrast to her grey and purpling skin. Blue and white electrodes were stuck all over her body, their wires dangling in the sterile air connected to exactly nothing.
How? What happened? I looked over at my mother.
The doctor says it looks like respiratory failure. She just couldn’t breathe.
I flashed back to weeks before, back to the safe and familiar confines of her house, spaghetti sauce simmering in the shadows, her sitting on my massage table in the living room.
Try it like this, grandma: Inhale- 2- 3- 4 — — now — — exhale-2–3–4. Ok Ready? You try,
She took a sharp gulp of breath and sealed her lips, curling them up at the edges into a teasing smile. For the rest of the count, she held that breath like a fish with a bubble, the pressure building with each passing second until at last it burst out of her pursed lips with all the pop of a blown-out tire. With a red face, she started laughing as if the whole exercise were the funniest thing in the world.
In that moment, happy to see her smile, I started laughing too.
Back in the hospital, soaked in bright lights and the nauseating stench of antiseptic and death, things didn’t seem so funny.
I made my way to the head of the stretcher and calmly started massaging her scalp.
Well, I guess this means we should cancel the massage, I said to her with a lighthearted chuckle. No one in the room laughed but me. My mom gently placed her hand on my shoulder.
I almost dropped out of school that day, but I was two weeks away from graduation and my tuition was all paid up. Besides, I desperately needed some pattern of normalcy to cling to. A week later I gathered all the guts and gall I had left and went back to school to finish what I started.
The morning of the estate sale was the first and only time I saw the mess the paramedics made of her front door.
My fingers grazed each long splinter of wood as gently as if they were touching her cheek. I imagined the bang and the struggle for breath as I lifted my other hand and took a slow drag off a freshly lit cigarette.
The apartment complex I lived in was just over a mile away from my grandma’s house and I still called it my grandma’s house, even though she had been dead for 7 years. My mom sold it to some lady from Nevada shortly after the estate sale and after making thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs.
At that point, I had been working as a full-time massage therapist for as long as she’d been dead, minus the last few months of school and however long it took to get my license from the state.
I was good at what I did and I found joy in my work and purpose in helping others, though I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could save anyone — I learned that lesson the hard way.
I walked to my grandma’s house several times a year. Mostly for the exercise, but sometimes just because I missed her.
It comforted me to know that there was still a surviving link that connected us. Something touchable, like a knock-able door. A turn-able handle, a place I could enter were it not for the silly little threat of trespassing.
It seemed to me the woman from Nevada was never home. There was never a car in the driveway. There were no flowers in the flowerpots or decorations on the door.
All that was left was a shrunken little house with sandy yellow bricks that looked muted in the thick of overgrown grass.
I worried that Ms. Nevada had sold my grandma’s house to someone else, most likely to someone who didn’t even live in the city. Maybe an investor from California, New York, or God knows where. She wouldn’t be the only one to do it. It was happening all over the city.
Wealthy investors were circling old Austin, looming like famished vultures watching and waiting for someone to die, or a home to go into foreclosure, or a family to be driven out because of gentrification.
When they smelled blood, they pulled out their wallets. They made cash payments. They bought up the homes and tore them down and built in their place those boxy modern monstrosities that look like prisons manufactured by Ikea.
It happened to the house two houses down. To the one across the street. It even happened to the house next door, so to think it could happen to hers was not only reasonable, it had become rather likely.
During that time, I had dreams of her house being swallowed by the earth. Of wild orange flames searing the kitchen. Of a wrecking ball with a swing so powerful it could send the whole of the neighborhood straight to the moon.
Sometimes I would drive by her house just to make sure it was still standing. And each time, as sure as the sun, or as promised as the change of season, there it stood — as eternal to me as ever.
It was the latest of winter when I got the news. My dog and I were on our morning walk leisurely meandering around the neighborhood, him peeing on everything in sight, me taking in the sweet greening aroma of what promised to be an early spring.
Suddenly, a sharp ding came from my pocket. I fished out my phone and a bright green bubble greeted me: They’re tearing Grandma’s house down today.
I stood there staring at the screen, reading those words over and over until a red sedan rushed by so close the wind jostled my hair and snapped me back to my body.
I could have gone home.
I could have waited until sunset, till they tore the house down and the whole thing was just a pile of rubble. A memory as gone as gone could get. I didn’t have to watch them do it. I could have spared myself the heartache.
But, of course, I didn’t.
I was instead driven by my inner masochist, the mean plucking thing inside that must touch and see and feel a thing to know for sure it is real.
Whatever force it was that started walking me to her house at that moment, it was the same one that massaged her scalp that day in the hospital and the same one that had caused me to haunt the old neighborhood ever since.
My purple Aviators gazed out stoically onto our asphalt path as my dog and I made our way down the tired and twisted streets to her house. Behind the purple stoicism, however, I was frantically trying to prepare myself for the things I might see.
There will be twists of metal, I warned. And wet earth that hasn’t seen the light of day since sometime in 1962. Foundation. Cement. Bricks and tiles and large chunks of driveway.
But none of these things truly matter. She is in the ether and sunshine. The snow and the rain. She is not in the god damned drywall. She is not a tile in the kitchen.
As I turned on her street, the piercing beeps of a back-up alarm coming from a demolition truck greeted me. Thick plumes of dust wafted out into the sunlight as a yellow armed crane swung in and out of the cloud.
I lowered myself onto the curb in front of her house and watched the talons of that hungry crane scoop her soft pink bathroom tiles into the gaping mouth of a bright blue dumpster. As the crane squealed and swayed and crushed, men in orange hard hats chatted light heartedly in the shade of my grandfather’s oak tree.
I inhaled deeply, trying to catch a hint of the wood paneling in the den, or the thick green carpet in the living room or something, anything, that I could remember, but all I smelled was earth, rot, and gasoline.
I held that breath in my mouth like a fish with a bubble as I closed my eyes and remembered us there, spaghetti sauce simmering in shadows and skin.
You’re doing it wrong. Try it like this. Ok, Ready?
I see her take a gulp of breath and relive the pressure building and building until she pops like a purple balloon and then laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
Sitting on the curb watching her house fall like a deck of cards, I started laughing too. Here she was, dead over six years, and she was the one teaching me how to breathe.
I exhaled, sure and slowly.
A thick beam of sun defined itself in the fuzzy air and landed like a spotlight in the center of what remained of her home. It was a beautiful beam of light, like a divine finger pointing to the exact source of pain.
If I believed in heaven, or God, I would have told you that ominous beam was the spiritual manifestation of my grandma smiling down, saying something like, There you go! You got it! Jig is up. Joke is over. Everything will be back to normal in the morning.
But I didn’t believe in heaven. And I didn’t believe in God. And I didn’t believe my grandma was the orchestrator of some cosmic joke. She was, like me, just a part of one.
Instead, I believed in what was real. What I could see. What I could smell. What I could, were it not for the silly little threat of trespassing, get up off my ass and feel.
Next thing I knew, I was floating through the clouds of dust, drifting past piles of debris. The shattered glass. The bends of pipe. The very last fuck I had left.
I stopped at a pile of sandy yellow bricks crumbled and broken next to the foundation, and from that pile I picked a brick at random that I would keep forever.
I held it in my hand and for one bittersweet and dust filled moment, I let myself feel the weight of it.
On the next breath, I tucked it underneath the soft underbelly of my arm and signaled to my dog that it was finally time to go. As I turned to leave, one of the construction workers started walking towards me with a hat so orange it bounced the sun, and a face that was bright, warm, and friendly.
If you want, I can save you more, he said. I can stack them over here by the tree.
No thanks. I smiled half-heartedly. I really only need this one.
