maybe
because I don’t know how to define soul, but spirit is defined: breath. Inspire.
When people sleep, they still have something about them that is them. Steve sleeps and he’s still my husband, still recognizable and beautiful and present.
People say that phrase, ‘and then she breathed her last breath’ but they don’t say ‘and then her heart beat its last beat’ or ‘her eyes blinked for the last time.’
When my grandmother died, she had been in a hospital for maybe a week, and her daughter, my aunt, had seen her in all states, in pain and asleep and composed and watching tv and eating hospital food. she said goodbye and left the room, my grandmother died, and she returned.
My aunt made a joke about it afterward, when we all arrived, about how funny my grandmother looked dead. It had only been a few minutes between seeing her living and dead, but her face wasn’t the same anymore.
So maybe that’s the moment. When the baby breathes for the first time. Maybe it’s not at conception or when the heart first beats or when the brain registers wake and sleep, but when it’s pushed or lifted out into the world, when the body literally joins spirit. Inside me is preparation. Some say half of early pregnancies dissolve, but out here we’d notice and hurt.
My friend says that you don’t breathe — rather, you’re being breathed. you don’t think about it like you think about lifting your arms or eating. Something fills you with air again and again, rhythmically, even when you sleep. I can’t even imagine that moment, I’ve never seen it, of being filled with breath for the first time.
