I am in an extended cobbler’s pose, and my face rests against the mat. I hear the blood in my ears, pounding softly, lifting my shoulders and neck with each beat. I have been unable to stop thinking about this heartbeat sound. A tendency towards distraction is called monkey brain, but that’s something different. This is existentialist brain, rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light brain, theologian brain. Human brain.

My husband has been spending less time conscious each day as he transitions to active dying, and his heart continues to charge onward with a tremendous tattoo I know I can’t actually hear,but I can sense it. I’ve been listening to that heartbeat my entire adult life, always trying to commit it to memory. I have known for thirteen and a half years that he would not live long, but thirteen and a half years is long. I have known since the day a surgeon taught me the word glioblastoma, barely enough hours after becoming engaged that counting days was a legitimate measure of time, I knew Mike’s heartbeats were limited. Somehow I have never managed to memorize it.

I inhale slowly, expanding my ribcage, and exhale slower, releasing, releasing, releasing. Over the last two months I have fixated on Yin yoga, the process of lengthening and bending into long stretches of discomfort cathartic. I accept subtle but distinctly painful wrongness for a five minute pigeon pose, a seven minute threaded needle, not only because it is my only respite from a day of counting pills and inserting catheters and measuring injections, but because it is the practice I need at accepting and breathing through impossible things that have to happen. In the exhaustion of being nurse as well as spouse as well as mother as well as daughter and daughter-in-law and friend and somehow so many other things, I am also the household Zen master.

Cliché that yoga has done this for me. It feels trite, embarrassingly basic, like all these years I could have been a happier person if everyone who asked, “Have you tried yoga?” hadn’t made me want to shove their faces through a plate glass window.

How was yoga supposed to help me live with the ever-looming specter of death from brain cancer? But somehow, in the midst of a pandemic and the grief of my sister’s sudden Covid death and the children’s isolation and misery and my parents’ mourning, and my in-laws’ horror, yoga is helping me live with the shadow of more death to come. It draws near now, after watching it stalk the horizon for thirteen years. After convincing myself I had scared it away, that it was safe to bring three girls into this world with a superhero of a father— that it was safe for them to give him their love and him to give them his presence— they have lived long enough to understand when every quintessential truth about him began to slip away.

At the end of 2020, there are Zoom yoga classes all over the world, whatever the time of day. I take Vinyasa classes in South Africa, Hatha in Italy, Beginner’s Practice in Pittsburgh, Yin in London, Yin in Vancouver, Yin in Chicago, Yin in Jamaica, Yin in New Zealand, Death Metal Yoga in Australia, and Yin in Vancouver after the children are in bed.

Breathing again, I clear my mind, letting go of my tension and extending, extending, extending. I nestle my nose between my big toes and massage my face with my feet. I let my shoulders fall forward. I breathe.

Yin disrupts the passage of time. A longer class than other yoga practices, and yet with fewer poses, less physical stress and somehow more. The linear nature of experience breaks apart, and somehow the middle is the beginning. The end is the beginning. The middle never ends.

I breathe. I breathe.

From the room below me, I can hear the beginnings of the rattle in my husband’s breath, a rattle that will become inescapable in only a few hours. The rattle I will allow the children to flee on their father’s final day.

I do not know that I have spoken to my husband for the last time. I believe I am prepared. For days I have told myself, “This might be the last time you can talk to him. Make sure it counts.”

To him, as well as the children and his mother, I’ve said other things. In the preceding days I could sense it coming, and fought to ease into it, into the painful wrongness I hope will also be cathartic.

The day before, I commanded the children to tell him they loved him whenever they caught him awake. “You will spend the rest of your lives wishing you said it more, no matter how many times you say it now,” I warned “Give yourself the gift of knowing you said it all you could.”

To my mother-in-law, “He’s not afraid. He’s tired. He’s ready. You don’t need to project your fears onto him, your fear is what is causing him distress.”

And alone, I murmured, ““I want you to know how much I love you.”

Breathless, waiting, I heard my own heartbeat louder than his rapidly receding voice. “I love you, Lea.”

His breath was slow and heavy in an effortless way my yoga teachers described as ideal, absent of monkey brain. I watched his pulse in his temple. I heard an echo of it in my ears.

My human brain demanded I say everything, hyper aware of the passage of time, grains of sand slipping from an almost empty hourglass. “I want to tell you, thank you. You never asked anything of me, and you never asked me to be anything more than I was. Everything I am is because of how much I wanted you to love me, and you never asked me for that. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to be the person you always believed I already am.”

His breath was even, intentional yet mindless. He could have been using every bit of the effort of living to focus only on the inhale, the exhale. He could have been sleeping. He could have been dreaming. He could have left conscious thought behind, as the grains of sand dropped.

On an exhale he said, “You’re perfect.” It seemed to take tremendous effort. It seemed effortless.

Another day, or maybe an hour before, he’d told me he wished we could go back to the good times.

“They were all good times, Mike,” I said, thinking of the long hours we laughed together in hospital waiting rooms. Of how we scraped together meals on SNAP benefits with two toddlers. Of my devastating postpartum depression, the way he cried when he understood my suffering. The way I held him when he sobbed after his first stroke, learning he might never use his hand again, might never be free of the wheelchair now useless to him in the corner.

Before my yoga class on this day, when I did not know it would be the last day we spoke, he asked if the dishwasher was working.

“Yes,” I lied. “You’ve taken care of everything. The house is fine. We’re okay. We’re all going to be okay.”

Nodding, his breathing slowed still more, but his heart pounded on. And as I prepared the children for bed and myself for yoga, the rattling began.

I called the children in to say goodbye to Daddy before leaving for a night with friends in our pandemic pod. Their terrified grandmother tells them the noises their father is making are snores, and they look to me with disgust and mistrust.

“It’s called a death rattle,” I said. “It means he will die soon. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Soon.”

Saying these things to the children, the oldest 11, I breathed to ease the tension around my heart. Expand, and stretch. Expand, and stretch. The shape changes in my practice, pigeon to threaded needle, the beginning again.

Two days ago the family watched My Neighbor Totoro, and though he slept through most of it, he woke at the end when the girls said goodbye.

“I love you, Sophia. I love you, Rivka. I love you, Deborah.”

More perfect last words have never been spoken to one’s children. It is the middle again, and I tell them that.

“You deserve to have a fun night. But tell Daddy goodbye, and tell him you love him.”

“Why did Grandma lie?”

I exhale, and release. I inhale, and expand.

“She’s afraid that if she tells you he’s going to die, he’s going to die. But he’s going to die no matter what, sweetheart. She just can’t bear to say it out loud.”

Their eyes are wide and wet. Rivka, eight, cannot look at me. Sophia, eleven, stares with a face full of tears. Deborah, also eleven, has her eyes fixed on me as well. They are Mike’s eyes.

“But you should tell him, because even if he isn’t awake, he’s still there. He might still hear you. And you should say it.”

They nod, they cry, I breathe into the lengthening, releasing, releasing, and it is the beginning again. Time ramps up, the sand slips upward, freezes, holds.

Thirteen and a half years ago he asked me to lie. He didn’t know his odds of survival, but could assume enough from the words “brain” and “cancer” together. He did not know how much I knew, so I spent thirteen and a half years hiding the truth. Even after he learned the first horrible pieces, there was so much more to hide.

He was supposed to live sixteen months after his diagnosis. Instead, he thrived. Twenty six months later, our twins.

Five years after I’d learned his personality was likely to change, that he could become violent and erratic, he held our last baby in his arms as though she were made of glass, as though his hands could protect her from the harshness of the world.

Nine years after I’d learned he would one day be bed bound, losing all mobility to the tumors in his head, he carried me over the threshold of our dream house.

With an exhale, time leaps forward. In the midst of the pandemic, suffering so greatly he begged me for death, he moved into a rented hospital bed, positioned directly below our bedroom. 

I am in child’s pose, pressing my ear to the floor, listening for the sound of catastrophe below. I listen for the inevitable sounds that mean I am needed, now. I am needed, always. He needs me. They need me. The children need me.

I breathe, and try to let it go.

The voice of my Canadian teacher reads Hafiz, reads tarot, she reads that the hand of God is a light, or full of light, and the words “golden” and “softness” and “peace” lodge in my mind, and then vanish. Another shape. Time distorting. Breathing through the discomfort to find peace.

I remember Mike working at the steel mill through the recession, pursuing his Master’s degree at night. I was pregnant, the twins were toddlers, I was finishing my own degree and he’d had to lie about his health to get the job. Exhaling, he lived, succeeded, provided for two children and then three, graduated with his Master’s, got his dream job, moved to the suburbs and watched his daughters’ basketball games.

Inhaling, expanding, the third surgery, the stroke. Chemo infusions that sapped him, demoralized him. Tumors growing in the part of his brain that causes anxiety. Tumors growing, always growing, and so much slower than he could have known I knew it should have. More strokes. More surgeries. Blood clots. Infarctions. Infections. Pain, so much pain, pain at every breath. Yet his heart beat on.

The gentle voice of my teacher says to move into our last shape. We are sixteen months past his third recurrence of glioblastoma and he has spoken his last words to me, and they are to ask if the dishwasher is working. He does not know that I knew he should only have had thirteen weeks. He should not have lived until his daughter’s birthdays. Until Thanksgiving. Until Christmas. Until New Year’s.

Inhalation, time compressing. Three days ago he asked how we were going to get his Hoyer lift up the aisle. To him, we were preparing for our wedding. Our life was only beginning. The sudden prevalence of cancer in our every moment meant our life was just beginning.

The hourglass is refilling as it empties. I breathe through a pain that is not subtle, trying to find the release in the discomfort, expanding as he recedes.

“I’ll put a bow tie on it,” I said.

His voice is deep and easy, at peace for the first time in months. “You’re going to make the best dead wife.”

On Zoom, a Canadian Yogi in hemp pants says it’s time to slowly pull back, come to center, and then to corpse pose.

I lay on the floor above my husband, in corpse pose, my human brain listening to the rattle below. I lay in Savasana, listening for the voices of my mother and mother-in-law, one having just lost a child, the other losing one now. I lay with my fingers twitching near my phone, ready to tell my children I am sending for them to be here because their father is dying, dying now, dying immediately, actively dying. Monkey Brain, Human Brain, Mother Brain, Embrace the Dying of the Light Brain, Rage Rage Rage Brain.

He is ready. He has told the children he knows he is dying, and it’s okay. “I only wish I could have more time with you,” he said. To his mother he said, “It just sucks that I have to go first.” To me, he said, “You’re going to be the best dead wife. You’re perfect. Is the dishwasher working?”

I have told him it is good and right that he lets go of this life. That it will be good for him to let go of his breath. That he can release, release, release, and expand.

We lay in corpse pose together, breathing with the rhythm of our hearts.

I memorize the sound.