The Thursday I stopped holding my breath

My father died in October and I did not cry.

Not at the hospital. Not at the funeral home in Brunswick, where I picked out a box and made small talk with a man named Randall about the Patriots. Not at the service. Not once in eight months, which I know because I kept track, the way you keep track of a thing that is starting to worry you.

I was fine. That was the problem. I was extremely fine. I went to work, I mowed the lawn, I answered my mother's calls. I had the flat, competent quality of a man doing an impression of himself.

A woman I work with mentioned a breath circle on Munjoy Hill. I said that sounded like something. She said, "Yeah," and left it there, which was smart of her.

I emailed in June. Owen Kealey wrote back with a list of medical questions long enough that I took it more seriously. Heart conditions, blood pressure, seizures, surgeries, medications. I answered all of it. He wrote back and said come Thursday, get there at six fifteen, bring water.

Forty mats. I counted, because counting is what I do in a room I do not want to be in. Mostly women, a handful of men, one guy in his seventies in a Sea Dogs shirt who looked as out of place as I felt, which helped.

Kealey did about eight minutes of talking. He described exactly what would happen. He said your hands might cramp and go claw-like and that this is normal, it is called tetany, it is not dangerous, and it passes. He said you may cry and if you do nobody here will look at you. He said you can stop at any time and lie there and that is a complete and acceptable version of the practice. He said, twice, that nobody would touch us without asking first.

Then the music came up and we started breathing.

It is exactly as stupid as it sounds. In through the mouth, out through the mouth, no pause, continuously. Like you have just run up a flight of stairs, except you do it for half an hour on purpose while lying still.

The first ten minutes I was bored and self-conscious and my mouth got dry.

Around twelve minutes my hands started to close. I had been told. It still frightened me. My fingers pulled in toward my palms and my forearms went tight and I had the very clear thought: I have made a mistake. Kealey's voice came over the music, not to me specifically, and said, "If your hands are cramping, that's the thing I told you about before we started. It passes. Slow down any time you want to."

So I kept breathing.

I do not have good language for the next part and I have tried several times.

Somewhere past twenty minutes something in my chest, which I had been experiencing as flat, turned out not to be flat. It was more like a door that had been shut so long I had stopped registering it as a door. And it was not that it opened. It is that I became aware there was one.

Then the sound started. It came out of me and it was not crying, exactly, at first. It was more like a noise a house makes. I heard it from a slight distance and thought, distinctly, that's me.

And then it was crying. Eight months of it, on a rented floor above the Eastern Prom, surrounded by thirty-nine people I had never met.

Here is the thing I need to say about that room, and it is the only reason I am willing to have this in print.

Nobody looked. Nobody came over. Nobody put a hand on my back or told me it was okay. A woman two mats to my left was making her own noise and a man behind me was completely silent and none of us were an event. I was not the guy crying. I was one of forty people doing the thing we had all come to do.

If I had done that alone in my house I would have been a man having a breakdown. In that room I was a man breathing.

That is not a small distinction. I think it is most of it.

It ended. There were twenty minutes of lying still while the music went quiet. Then tea, which I did not want and drank anyway, and standing around, and a woman named Priya asked me if it was my first time and I said yes and she said "yeah" and that was the whole conversation and it was enough.

I sat in my truck on Congress for twenty-five minutes before I could drive.

I have been back eleven times. It has never been like that again and Kealey told me it probably would not be, which I appreciated.

I still miss my father. Nothing has been resolved. I want to be clear that I am not reporting a cure.

I am reporting that I stopped being fine, in a room where that was allowed.

If I had done that alone in my house I would have been a man having a breakdown. In that room I was a man breathing.