Elissa Altman on Permission to Breathe
When a familiar family story in one cousin's house is a secret in another's, resulting in abandonment, grief, and, in the end, deep inner healing.
So I was delighted to learn, Elissa has a new memoir: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. (pub date: March 11th. Preorders really help the writer!) It’s a mix of master class and memoir; a narrative, practical meditation meant to inspire, shepherd, support, and lead creatives in every arena through the emotional hazards and pitfalls of art-making; an antidote to shame, it provides a roadmap to telling the stories you want to tell but have been told you “shouldn’t.” Sounds like exactly the sort of book we could all benefit from!
I interviewed Elissa two years ago, and can still feel her warmth and dazzling intellect. And she played guitar! Born and raised in New York City, she currently lives in Connecticut with her family. She also teaches the most incredible memoir workshops. If you’re interested in learning more about Elissa, I’ve lifted the paywall on her interview for the next week.
In celebration of Elissa’s new book, I’m so happy to share an essay Elissa wrote about family, love, loss, grief, and, well, learning to breathe. It went right smack into the middle of my heart. I think you’ll feel the same. Enjoy!
xJane
⭐️ Elissa is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Permission! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “PERMISSION” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, February 17th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️
Permission to Breathe
2015.
It is two o’clock in the morning, and the city rumbles twenty stories below my mother’s guest room window. My wife is sound asleep next to me; she’s quiet, and gently snoring. I can hear, coming from my mother’s bedroom, the sound of a Perry Mason rerun. I am propped up like an emphysemic on three threadbare pillows dating back to 1986, to the days of my living at home after college. Every breath I take in whistles like a tea kettle; every breath I exhale rattles like a snake.
I am a former competitive squash player, a tennis player, a swimmer; despite my parents and three of my grandparents being heavy smokers, I have always hated cigarettes, and rarely used weed. I’ve gone years without a cold. But on this breathless night in 2015, for the fourth time in as many weeks, my chest aches; a spot between my shoulder blades burns. I think of Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story – a healthy Cambridge rower, sober for years – succumbing to Stage IV lung cancer at age forty-two, seven weeks after she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. This is familiar territory: my grandfather died of pulmonary sarcoma when I was six. My fevers are worsening with every lung infection and in six hours, I will be nebulized for the second time in three months. For now, I lean back against the headboard and weave in and out of sleep, or maybe consciousness; I am as hypoxic as I was when we hiked in Colorado, my older cousin, her family, and I, ten thousand feet up on a warm July afternoon in the mid-nineties, back before my first memoir was published, back when the idea that writing a single paragraph about our beloved grandmother – the elfin one; the concert pianist; the card shark with the salty sense of humor; the one who left my father and aunt when they were small children a century ago and returned three years later – would be enough to excise me from their lives.
*
I loved you she says, her lip curling like a wave. She adds: -ED, -ED. LovED, yelling over the music.
She bends down so that we are face to face.
My back is pressed up against a tan-painted cinderblock wall outside the ladies’ room at a small family wedding in Minnesota.
My cousin emphasizes the d --- loved --- in all its determined finality, so that there is no possible chance of my misunderstanding her intention, or being left unsure: our relationship, and my place in the family are, she has decided, over.
We don’t love you anymore, she says.
She speaks for them --- my aunt, and my other cousins who are inside dancing, unaware of what is happening a few feet away. She is the repository for all familial approval; she gives it and she takes it, and nobody dares cross her.
We’ve decided that we’re better off without you, she says.
My knees buckle as though I’ve been struck. The wind is knocked out of me.
It is 2013. My first memoir has been out for three months. Embedded in it towards the end is a short backstory, a century old family myth; it had been dinnertime conversation during my childhood, but it was, unbeknownst to me, kept a secret in my cousin’s house when she was growing up. Our grandmother had walked out on my father and aunt in the 1920s; she came back after a few years. No one ever thought to ask why – was she living with spousal abuse? had she fallen in love with someone else? did she have postpartum depression like almost every other woman in our family? -- and she was made a pariah, as women who leave their children usually are. It was a story of abandonment and childhood trauma concealed in plain sight, encased in shame like a chrysalis; my father told and retold it until it and a visceral fear of abandonment became part of my history, my DNA, and as familiar to me as the color of my eyes. My aunt hid the story to shield her children from the terrors of life, and to fashion around them a protective veneer of perfection and safety. In her home, no one knew.
At this wedding, this moment of joy, my cousin is enraged. No one dares tell secrets in our family, intentionally or inadvertently.
You don’t love me anymore because I told the story of something that happened a hundred years ago? I say. The muscles in my throat contract; I can’t breathe.
That’s not the only reason, she says.
What else? I ask.
You know, she says, tapping her finger hard into my chest.
I don’t know, I say.
I lovED you. LovED you, she says.
She straightens up and saunters back to the party.
After the wedding, we return home, my wife and I, to Connecticut, where her ninety-four-year-old mother is dying of congestive heart failure. I’m distracted, dazed, inattentive when the woman I love needs me most. Instead of holding her hand while she is slowly losing her mother, I become obsessed with making my family love me again. It becomes hysterical; a compulsion. I write letters; some raging, some pleading. They go unanswered. I make phone calls; they go unreturned. I spend weeks looking at piles of old family photographs, dating back years: on vacation together in Turkey, in Aspen, in Florida. At Thanksgiving in 1968 – I was five; my cousin, twenty-one. On tennis courts and golf courses. At another family gathering in 2002, right after my father died. I have endless dreams of my cousin and awaken into the inky sliver of morning that fools my sleeping brain into forgetting, just for a few moments, that I am dead to her.
She cuts the cord at a wedding so that I can grasp the magnitude of exactly who and what I have lost. I will now be excluded from every family function and holiday. I will never see my cousin’s granddaughter --- my godchild --- again. Her little brother will never know me. We weave in and around each other on Facebook; we follow each other as if we’re lurking behind hedgerows. I watch my goddaughter and her little brother grow up on a computer screen, like television characters.
*
It is the Chinese who believe that grief is held in the lungs, that left unresolved, it festers and burbles like a stew until the life-breath of the sorrowful is spirited away, little by little, into a sea of self-loathing and despair and ultimately, death. A month after the wedding, I awake in our bedroom in Connecticut, gasping for air, sucking it in like a fish out of water, in small, hot sips. My health collapses: I erupt in spontaneous fevers that spike to 104. I’m given medicine for patients exposed to Bubonic plague. I abuse my puffers and gain ten pounds on steroids. I travel to London for work, and a Chelsea physician threatens to put me on a medical no-fly list. I cough poison and blood; I rasp and wheeze and one night I faint in my wife’s arms in our hallway. I hack until my hands shake, pass out in a Mill Valley gift shop while holding a pale blue silk scarf, and hate myself for being the wretch that my cousin assures me and the rest of our family that I am.
Standing alone in my kitchen one sunny afternoon --- Susan is at work in New York --- I reach for a small, delicious paring knife hanging on the magnetic strip next to my stove. It is one of my favorites, bought at Dehillerin in Paris: French, wooden-handled, ideal for slicing a radish or a bean. I want to hold its polished ebony grip in the palm of my hand, to nick myself just so that I can feel the pain and see myself bleed, just so that I can know, somehow, that despite being dead to this person who had once been like a sister to me, I am still alive and sensate and real. I stop; I put the knife back.
I engage an astrologer. A friend reads my Tarot cards. I meditate holding a 108-bead rose quartz mala, which is supposed to heal my heart. Every morning and night, I pray for the call where my cousin will say she loves me again, that they love me again, that it was all just a mistake, a blip, and that I am still part of a tribe; I pray for the moment when I can feel oxygen fill my body and mend it.
*
A small, personal Holocaust, is what a therapist-friend calls it. “You went to bed one night and they were there, and you woke up the next day and your tribe was gone.”
I crave silence and peace and stillness to quiet the ongoing war in my lungs; my arms and neck ache from straining for breath until my back spasms and I can’t work. On a bitter February morning two years after the book and the wedding, the excision and the chronic illness that followed, a bodyworker I find in an arbitrary search touches my shoulders and I gasp as though I’ve been branded with a hot iron; I turn over, drop my face into the cradle, cough, and taste a bitter, alien funk roll into my mouth from my lungs that makes me gag: it is the poison of fury and shame. It is grief.
Breathe, she whispers.
My chest bangs and whistles. The room spins.
Breathe.
A week later, I lie on a cheap blue latex mat with thirty strangers in a cavernous, brick-walled yoga studio down the hall from the bodyworker’s office. I stare out the window near the ceiling and watch clouds float by; I cough and fold myself forward into child’s pose – balasana -- my chest pressed flat to the floor, my arms wrapped protectively around my head like a fighter. It’s familiar to me, and easy; muscle memory. My body knows it. I used to sleep this way as a baby.
You don’t have to move, the teacher says to the class. Just breathe.
My body stops fighting and thrashing and begging for air; it’s exhausted. My lungs crackle like wrapping paper, and finally, after two years of relentless sorrow, they let go.
I’ve lost my tribe, our customs, the family of my history because in my first book, a love story, I wrote a short paragraph about something that happened to my father and aunt almost a century earlier, the tentacles of which touched me directly and made me who I am; I never asked permission to write it because I didn’t believe I needed to, since I never knew it was a secret. Two years after my excision, there’s finally a pulsing, nugget of life inside me, and intuitively, suddenly, my body knows what it needs to feed itself: the comfort of ritual, community, breath, and the promise of renewal.
It took me a decade to understand that we are the storytelling species; it is what we do to make sense of our world, to metabolize it, to fathom it. It is the way we claim our place at the human table. Amidst the muck of our imperfectly beautiful lives – the fragile egos and the mess beneath the deadly armor of perfection that we craft out of fear --- we instinctively hew to survival. The stories we tell are messages for the generations that follow, like the ancient pictographic cave hands representative of a distant ancestor who only wished to be known by his truth of having once been here, too.
Learning to breathe again after a decade aerated and watered me, like a parched lawn. It gave me back to me again. It reminded me to live, and to keep writing.
If you enjoyed this essay by Elissa, you might also like this one by Oritte Bendory;
I’ve recommended MOTHERLAND to many and savored this essay. How terribly sad that one paragraph about events of a century ago could cause a family to turn their backs on one of their own. This is the defensive brittleness of shame—of people feeling obscurely tainted by the actions of others who may be long dead. Elissa has carved out her own identity, at great cost. The others, not so much.
I tried to remark to my pulmonologist about the association between grief and the lungs in Chinese medicine, and -- hoo-boy -- his boredom and irritation snatched a few more months off my lifespan. Thank you for this essay; I feel I have finally been heard! PERMISSION