Breathlessness – a state where one cannot breath properly. Every breath takes about 2-4 seconds. As long as one is alive our breath powers on every 2- 4 seconds, 24 by 7. Our breath only off day is when one ceases to live, a perpetual off day. Hence our breath is intimately link to our survival. A lack of breathe or breathlessness is really like a dance with Death itself. Living being that is so used to living is never a willing dance partner with Death. This dance is often lace with immense pain, fear and suffering. The dancing ground is usually near the gate of afterlife.
The physical engine that powers our breathe is our heart. Being in our physical realm our heart has an expiry date. A date that it starts deteriorating. According to a doctor, if one’s heart function drop to below 20% the risk of it stalling is very high. On top of that sufferer will be experiencing breathlessness throughout until the heart function manage to go beyond the 20% or the heart stalls. Usually when there is a way, a remedy or a cure for this suffering then it seems reasonable that the sufferer goes through the suffering for the possible salvation. But when there is no possible cure, the suffering for the sufferer to go through till his final moment is a cruelly sad period.
A sufferer in this instance is usually overwhelm by their suffering that they ask for an instant death. For a living being to ask for instant death, their suffering must have crushed their living ego to bits.
As a caretaker of the sufferer. When being plead by the sufferer on ending their suffering life, it is an unusually difficult moment. A moment when a portion of the suffering is being transferred to the caretaker. In honoring the truth of the sufferer and himself. In honoring the fact of life and death. In honoring this difficult final phase that the caretaker is journeying with the sufferer. The caretaker can only be as present as he can to assist in whatever that the sufferer may need in his dance with death.
A sudden breathlessness consumes me, my denial on impermanence may be giving way.