Composer’s Note

My aunt has been writing a family history, tracing the childhood and young adult lives of her parents (my paternal grandparents) as young Latvians living in Riga in the 1930s and 1940s, and mapping their journey through WWII and the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Latvia, as well as their decision to leave all senses of the word “home” behind and begin a trip to America.

When I was a baby, my grandfather was diagnosed with late-stage cancer; his decline was swift. In recalling her last moments at the hospital with him, my aunt writes, “I heard his breathing change, then stop, and woke up [my grandmother]. I will always remember what she did. She stood before him and made a bow, clearly a gesture of deep respect.”

In my preteen years, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and lived in our home for a time. I watched her understanding of the world slowly fragment and short circuit, and I remember so vividly in the early parts of her decline the moments of clear and livid frustration, punishing anxiety, and what to me looked like a sense that the world was closing in around her; the view, her reach, was getting smaller and smaller, and she was mourning the loss every time a familiarity disappeared. My aunt wrote that in her decline, she hoped her mother had let go of the guilt and regret she undoubtedly felt leaving her family, home, and country in Latvia in 1944. Over the year my grandmother lived with us, I saw moments where her breathing become tight and taught, weighted and grasping, as daily life became harder to recognize. In the years following, when the acknowledgement of those losses were themselves also lost, her breathing evened out. It became calm, steady, relaxed.

Our ability to and the way we breathe is a way we take stock of our own lives. Watching others inhale and exhale sparks the desire to match up or align our own air with those around us. A change in breathing indicates a change in some kind of mental, physical, or emotional state; sometimes we can control our air, sometimes our body tenses up without our mind agreeing to the alteration. When open to our environment, our own breath regulates with nearby bodies, and it is pushed and pulled by a yearning for ensemble with others.