What Remains

For The American Scholar, Jennifer Sinor looks at the precarity of birth, the certainty of death, and the impermanence of all things as she remembers her love of a young foal, participating in an anatomy class populated by cadavers, and her relationship with her dead father.

I had always envisioned the lungs as light, like balloons inside the body that lift on inhalation. But lungs are heavy, meaty things, not unlike the liver of a chicken in terms of color but enormous and slabbed. The lobes are marked by edges that flap like gills, almost frilled, but dense. I push my finger into the meat of the lung, like I might a steak, and the tissue is thick and fleshy. There is nothing airy and light about lungs, nothing transparent or fragile or translucent, like eyes. When you breathe air into your body, you are taking the air through a sieve of thick tissue, the weight of a chihuahua.

No air remains in Genevieve’s lungs. We all end our life on the exhale. Empty like a pocket.