Catching breath.

My daughter couldn’t breathe.

I watched her pink lips tell me, her chest rise and fall, short and sharp, as she said it hurt to try to breathe deep.

I watched her, trying to figure out what was bothering her and then trying my very best to stop trying to figure it out. I asked her what it was but she didn’t know. The monitor on her finger flashing up into 1 0 0, but it felt otherwise to her.

I asked her to try, to lay back, sit up, stretch out, to close her eyes.

In the morning she woke up the same. I had snuck in and watched her chest rise and fall, I watched her breathe deeply in her sleep.

I watched her pink lips again as she told me “I’m tired, feeling weird like this is making me tired”. I asked her again what could be bothering her, what it could be but she couldn’t say.

Until she could. Until she came to tell me with tears running down her cheeks. Tears of loss, grief, confusion. I watched her pink lips, I watched her shoulders drop.

I asked her to notice it had happened, how she could breathe. How the weight of what she had been feeling was lifting as it passed through her pink lips.

We talked about how it happens in life, how it will happen again. That people come and go., people leave, sometimes before we are ready. That things change, sometimes when we really liked things the way they were. Letting go is not always our choice, our timing.

The lungs hold our grief. Unacknowledged, unheard, unresolved grief builds in sharp layers that catch when it becomes too much. Sadness and confusion is hard to express. “Why did that have to happen?” are difficult words to say out loud. More difficult to hold tight inside, more difficult to breathe around when all they want and need is to hit the air outside of us and be received by love and compassion.

My daughter couldn’t breathe until she shared her sadness with me and softened the sharp edge on the hook her breath had been catching on.