Without Air

Geof Huth, "Our Own Air" (to Jeaneen Ferraris), written 27 May 2010, recorded 16 January 2011

My aunt died today, coincidentally on the birthday of two of my siblings (themselves born two years apart). Everything is a coincidence. We just have not figured them all out.

Since she had been sick for years with emphysema, her death wasn't a surprise and yet it was a shock. When someone finally leaves us, our bodies yearn for that person to fill that void their passing has created. But there's nothing to fill it with but words.

I was worried that my aunt would die the year I was fifty, so when I started writing a book of poems, one poem a day, each in the form of a letter to someone I know, hers was the third letter I wrote. Secretly, I wrote to her at the beginning of the project so that I could make sure she would receive a letter from me before she died. I had something to say to her, and there was some urgency to it.

The poem was called "Our Own Air", because it referred to her need for oxygen because of emphysema and mine because of sleep apnea, but it was "ours" in a larger sense, in the sense of our broader family. And "air" in the sense of life.

Today, to remember my aunt, Jeaneen Tanner Ferraris, I recorded myself reading that poem aloud, and I present that above. There's not much else to do. I'll spend most of the next week in California, a few miles south of San Francisco, in the place I am from. (My aunt died in the city where I was born.) And I will talk to my family. Because all we have now is words.

Two of the people I will talk to are her brothers, both of whom are older than she is. The world doesn't always turn out the way we expect it to. Out of a family of two boys and two girls, it is the girls, the two youngest siblings and the females, who generally outlive men, who have died. The other sister in that family was my mother, now over a decade dead. I can't be relieved that she is dead, but I know how she would have gone—slowly, and gasping for breath. Her emphysema was beginning in the months before a nurse looking for her cellphone on the floor of her car, slammed into the side of my mother's car, killing her instantly.

People die, but parts of them are left behind, in memories, in photographs, in words. I'm going to a funeral, which means I'm going to a celebration of a life and of mourning, which means I'm attending an event of vernacular poetry, a place where words bring the dead back to life so that they can hover before our eyes for a few seconds before evaporating back into the invisible air.

ecr. l'inf.