Every Breath Ever Taken is Still in the Air to Breathe
By Ariel Oakley
The chest and abdomen are strange in their emptiness. The curve of her ribs the vaulting nave of an abandoned church. A steel retractor holds open the chest where the sternum has been halved. Pinkish lungs are all that is left in the chest, too much fluid in the lower lobes to be viable, they said.
I reach my gloved hand in and feel the cartilage rings of the primary bronchi. The cavity, with some slush still melting, feels like putting my hands into a glacial stream.
“Get your hand down under the lower lobe of the lung,” the transplant surgeon tells me. “Feel how light it is.”
He presses the tissue so I can feel the air move inside. It’s spongy but shimmering like some as yet unnamed sea creature.
He shows me the transected aorta, and head vessels, both carotids and subclavians. I trace a finger down the aorta then the vena cava, those great vessels. My fingers slick with icy blood, I follow the length of the esophagus, stomach, and intestines. All barely beginning their turn from warmth and life to chill decay.
What are we? Not this meat, but nothing beyond either.
I want to ask him so many questions, but there is only one I have words for:
“How will she look when they’re done?”
“When who’s done?”
“The bone team.”
His eyes meet mine with a weary gentleness when he says, “her family was advised to choose closed casket or cremation.”
–––
Before I brought her down to the operating room, she was dead. A kind of dead. Machines kept her organs and tissues alive, the body persisted. Flushed cheeks belied her state. Brain death.
Her body will become other people, in pieces: kidneys, liver, and heart. Four people will live. Her tissues will be taken: skin, corneas, bones, ligaments, and vessels. 75 people will be made whole.
When I checked her armband, I was surprised to find we were born the same summer of the same year. Her mouth hung slack around the breathing tube, and her unblinking eyes were stuck pupils wide. Her cortex a mess of clotted blood; a handful of tissue in her frontal lobe died, and with it every thought and memory too.
She was gone. The mind was gone. 100 billion cells singing, axon to dendrite. For scale, that is twelve times this world’s population of humans, or all the stars of the Milky Way. I imagine them raising their voices, harmonizing in rounds, to make the vivid fringe of just one memory.
–––
The bone team is just a few guys with more coolers, more equipment. I scrub out to help them get situated.
“Let’s get some music in here,” one says. “Something sexy. Motown.”
The tall older guy’s name is Gary. He puts on glasses with magnifying loops, he pulls the toggle tight on a neoprene strap that makes him look like he’s going boating. He sways to Aaron Neville. So go on and live, baby go on and live. He leans down and tells me I don’t have to stay for the rest if I don’t want to. When they’re done, they’ll let me know so I can get security to open up the morgue.
“Okay,” I say, blinking into his luminous, magnified eyes.
It wouldn’t be so bad to be here all night with the bone team, laughing with them as they meet their night’s work with a casual goodwill, but I don’t want to watch them dismantle her.
–––
On the roof of the parking garage, I take a moment in the night air and lean against my car. We all die by degrees now, in pieces. It's hard to know where the line is. I imagine a galaxy of stars, all gone out at once.
Joey Kerlin, Avoiding Attachment Leaves Casualties In Your Wake, 2025, multimedia monoprint, 4" x 6".
A note on the title:
In his revelatory book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson Yunkaporta writes, “Every breath ever taken is still in the air to breathe. I breathe the breaths of the Ancestors, and everybody else’s too. Always was, always is, always will be.”
Ariel Oakley is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art, and her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. She spends her days as a nurse in surgery at Keck Hospital of USC, where her passion for open-heart surgery continues to inform her art.
Joey Kerlin has been actively making and exhibiting work in the Denver Metro area since the early 2000’s in media ranging from functional ceramics to printmaking. His contemporary work is a synthesis of multiple media and techniques. He has been working as an art educator in both the private and public sector since 2010 and currently teaches at Aurora Central High School in the Charles Burrell Arts pathway.