N.K. Murray

People who know me, know that I struggle to breathe at times. Asthma has been one of my close companions since I was 8 years old, and if you’re doing the math, you know that’s been a couple decades worth of wheezing and inhalers and sparkly lights in front of my eyes when the oxygen levels in my blood decide to drop below optimal levels. It’s one of those things that I’ve learned to live with through the years, and I’m now at the point where I considered myself well-managed on most days.

This is not that kind of breathing.

There have been various times in my life where I have had the occasion to witness that moment where someone has taken their last breath. Unfortunately, those times have indelibly marked me in ways that I can only scratch the surface in trying to explain. My dad. My uncle. My mom. My first dog that was really mine. Several animals since. You never really forget the sound of someone breathing, and then not. The silence, the waiting for that next breath that doesn’t come, that hitch in your own breath when you realize it’s not coming. For more than a month after my dad died, I barely slept because I was haunted by the sound of the ragged breath through my dad’s cancer-destroyed lungs. . . and then nothing. No breath. No breathing. No resuscitation because of a DNR and a knowing that it wouldn’t do a goddamn thing to fix what was really wrong. No life.

I have had a number of conversations with myself through the years since I was old enough to start writing, and start cataloging the feelings and the demons which plagued my every moment. I first contemplated suicide when I was in high school. Older than some, younger than most. I was gawky. Awkward. Too smart for my own good, but not smart enough to be beyond reproach or criticism. I had enough friends, but wasn’t wealthy with them. I was on the fringes of any number of groups that didn’t care enough to care what might have happened to someone like me. None of that is to say that I didn’t have people who were close to me – I did. But I don’t know that any one person in my life knew how desperately I cared about what everyone else thought and didn’t think and deigned to say about me. I think that was the worst part of the whole thing – not that what people thought about me was this, that, or the other, but perhaps that they didn’t think about me at all. I didn’t matter.

I wrote that down in a notebook when I was old enough to realize what I was saying, but too young to drive. My room was messy and in a state where I felt that my words were just that – mine. For better, or for worse, and the jury is still out on that if you ask some of my more long-standing demons, my dad found what I wrote. He drove me out to Mid-City Plaza in North Tonawanda, and we sat in his truck in view of the McDonald’s and he told me he read what I wrote. I said little. I deferred most of it – childhood angst, blah blah blah, I didn’t mean it, but it didn’t matter because I thought it, and I wrote it. That might have been the first time I realized how weighty my words could be. My dad was not an emotional man, except when he was angry. His anger was a sight to behold, as someone who was at the south-end of his fury more often than not. He spoke very deliberately to me. We aren’t slow-talkers, us Colegroves, so for him to speak slowly meant it was something he wanted me to really appreciate. He told me that removing myself from this world was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. While my problems certainly didn’t feel temporary at that time, the fact that my father who didn’t cry, didn’t show emotion other than anger, was choked up in telling me in his own way that he didn’t want me to kill myself hit me harder than the overwhelming feelings I felt about dealing with my situation in my own way.

Since that day, there have been days, times, moments where I have thought about how things would be better for those in my life if I weren’t there. Those times have been kept to myself, held inside because I didn’t want to burden those around me with the demons that danced so freely in my head that they didn’t see. They didn’t see them because I didn’t let them out. They didn’t see them because it wasn’t appropriate for them to be seen. They didn’t see them because they didn’t align with the image that I had portrayed to anyone and everyone who might listen or pay attention. When my mom died, I spent a year contemplating how shitty of a human being I was – not just how shitty of a daughter, but how terrible of a person I was. Each time I considered whether or not I should be on this earth, I asked myself a simple question.

Is it easier to keep breathing, or is it easier to stop?

There have been more times than I care to count where I have asked myself that question. Breathing is something that should come easy to us human beings. It’s inherent. It’s something that we don’t even consider until the time when we have to convince ourselves to keep breathing. As someone with asthma, I have spent hundreds of hours telling myself to breathe in, and breathe out. Nights I have spent wide awake, listening to the air whistling in my lungs as my eyes dared to close, telling myself I didn’t need my inhaler.

There have been many nights where the pain I have felt from living, from breathing, from being, have forced me to ask the question was it easier to keep breathing, or was it easier to stop? I’m lucky. My brain has had this innate sense of self-preservation and has answered that question affirmatively every time, no matter how much fucking pain I’ve been in emotionally, physically. I’m lucky – my demons haven’t danced so vigorously so as to convince myself that not breathing would be simpler. Not breathing would be better. Not breathing would be so much less painful than feeling all of the loss, all of the anger, all of the depression about all of the things that I can’t change, that I can’t do any-fucking-thing to fix. Wondering if the people in my life would miss ME when I was gone, or if they would miss what I did for them. Wondering if the people left behind would fill my void with any number of things.

Not breathing is easy. It’s so easy.

It’s breathing through the pain, through the heartache, through the depression and anxiety, through the tears, through the anger, and through everything that comes along with living this life, that’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s breathing through the sobs that come so hard your eyes are swollen shut from crying. It’s breathing through the feeling that your heart is going to break from all that went wrong. It’s breathing when the last thing you want to do in the world is breathe. Breathing is the hardest thing to do in the world when it hurts so fucking bad that every last fiber of your being says it would be easier to stop.

I’m the first person to say that I suck at breathing. From the time I was a kid, I sucked at breathing. I can’t say that I’ve gotten any better at is as I’ve gotten older. I’ve spent more time than I care to count asking myself the question, is it easier to keep breathing, or is it easier to stop?

For those that think the answer is always to keep breathing, I ask you to contemplate what it would take for you to want to stop. For you to need to stop. What would have to go wrong in your life to make you want to stop? What would you lose to make you want to stop? Before you judge anyone who has chosen to stop breathing, stop, think, if there’s any time in your life where you have even spent a fleeting moment wondering if your life would be better without you in it. Stop and contemplate for one brief moment if you wondered if you’d be missed or if there would be a sense of relief that they didn’t have to deal with your bullshit anymore. Stop and wonder if not breathing would mean that everything you aren’t finally doesn’t matter, and the failures you’ve experienced in your life no longer mean that you’re not the sum of all of the things you’ve fucked up in your life.

Stop. Stop thinking. Stop catastrophizing. Stop contemplating. Stop breathing. Stop.

It’s easy to stop. It’s so much harder to continue. For those of us that have contemplated stopping, there is a defined moment where we have chosen to keep breathing. We have chosen to move forward in pain, in anger, in depression, in anxiety. We have chosen to be. We have chosen.

Is it easier to keep breathing, or is it easier to stop?