He’d always loved the ocean, loved being submersed in the waves. When we were kids, he would always sit at the bottom of the swimming pool, just staring up, till he resurfaced to breathe.
To breathe, something he was having trouble doing now. How strange, that our most athletic friend, the one who could hold his breath for longest, who was never short of breath, was having trouble breathing. It was some kind of tumor in his lungs, spreading out, choking him from the inside.
I’m thinking detachedly again, I thought. What other way can I think of it, think of it without sobbing?
He wants to go to the beach one last time. I’ve been given permission to go with him, along with some lifeguards. It’s hard to maneuver a wheelchair across the sand, and it feels strange to do so; it feels even stranger to do it for your old friend. He still has most of his muscles, hasn’t atrophied much, but he can’t move that often, or he’ll start to feel short of breath.
He wants to feel the waves one last time. We wheel it in, the lifeguard and I, and my friend breathes a wheezy sigh.
It’s horrible to see him like this, I thought. His feet shifted slightly in the water, and then he lurched. With a burst of strength, he shoved himself out of the wheelchair, and took a hearty gulp of water. When the lifeguard and I tried to pull him away, he shoved us aside, stronger than we anticipated. He ran further into the sea, and gulped in more water, and started swimming away. The lifeguard jumped in after him, and it was a close race, but my friend kept just barely ahead. The lifeguard was a stronger, and swam swiftly, but my friend swam with the passion and practice of someone who swam as often as he could, a born swimmer. Then he dipped under the waves, and the lifeguard dived, but couldn’t see him. He returned, and we both waited silently by that beach, for hours, till the sunset, waiting for a body to wash up. But there never was one.
I wonder, sometimes, why he did it. He was always the reasonable type, until he wasn’t, I guess.
But sometimes I lie awake at night and think different thoughts. Drowning is a horrible way to go, and my friend, of all people, should have known that, having his fair share of incidents where he misjudged how long he could dive. Maybe he already felt like he was drowning, with that fleshy growth in his lungs. That made a bit of sense, but it didn’t fit what I knew of him. He just wasn’t the kind of person to do that. So maybe he didn’t drown. Maybe he’s just very good at holding his breath. A delusional thought, of course, but I don’t want to think of him as dead, killed by what he loved most.
Still breathing, why not? If a fish can breathe underwater, maybe he could too.
But for that you need gills, and we don’t have gills; and if we did, well, we’d probably start drowning in the air.