Liam Heneghan in Emergence Magazine:
1. Before my father’s final illness, I had not understood that when the call goes out to assemble family members dolefully about a deathbed, it’s because a decision has been made to let the loved one pass. The timer is set; the sand is trickling down. Death—that omnipresent possibility at the best of times—becomes calculable when sustenance is withheld. Paddy Heneghan, born in Tralee, Ireland, on 29 March 1927, lived ninety-five years and, though defying predictions by lingering beyond his appointed hour, is now, by all reasonable standards used to determine such matters, dead.1
2. During those nights holding vigil at my father’s hospital bedside, I stayed awake counting his breaths. Human breath, or so Aristotle conjectured, supplies the air—the most divine of the elements—needed to form the pneuma zôtikon, the living spirit.2 I counted as my father’s living spirit—still hitched to his wracked body—was sustained by twelve breaths a minute; seven hundred and twenty ragged breaths an hour. When he breathed a final time—the last of six hundred million by my calculation—I was away. My mother and two siblings were at his side.
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