Gasping For Breath and Forgiveness

Whenever I hear it now, I fall back in time. Persistent mechanical breathing always brings me back to my youth.

Air pushed through plastic tubing enters my mother's mouth. Our hope was that it would reach her lungs in time.

This is the background sound of my childhood. Although we were able to move uptown to a better neighborhood, we could never leave behind the yellow-brown suitcase, which contained the portable respirator which, when turned on, kept my mother Victoria alive.

Oxygen tents, Cortisone shots and monthly trips on the #4 Bus. Traveling south from Washington Heights through Harlem pass the Metropolitan Museum of Art until we reached 60th street where slowly my mother and I would walk two blocks to her allergist. After these visits, if she was up to it, we would eat lunch at Zum Zum Delicatessen. She would always order a liverwurst sandwich with yellow mustard on black bread. If my mother was really feeling good, we would visit Alexander's fabric department or Bloomingdales' interior design floor. Room after room filled with furniture for lives I hoped one day to live.

My mother got sick the year I was born. The Asian Flu compromised her health and aggravated her childhood asthma. Bottles of pills filled the center of our kitchen table. Plastic medi-inhalers; grey with pink covers housed the medicine that kept my mother from faltering. These were the artifacts of an illness, which colored my life. Believing my birth had caused her severe asthma; it was not until 35 years later that a chance remark revealed a lifetime of misinterpretation.

I am fifty now and my mother is eighty-four. Her gasping for breath and my grasping for forgiveness is long gone, replaced with ease, humor and the occasional longing for the time lost.