The Season of Breath is a true story. The places are real, the people are real, and so is the illness. “Michael is me,” Mr Schaka writes on the very first page. Here is the story behind the book, and why it talks about a disease almost nobody has heard of.
An illness you can’t see
Mr Schaka lives with interstitial pulmonary fibrosis. In the lungs, the tissue around the alveoli, those tiny air sacs where oxygen passes into the blood, thickens and hardens, “like a scar that never stops scarring.” The lung grows stiff. On a CT scan, doctors see “honeycomb” patterns appear. He prefers to say: “my honeycomb lungs. It sounds nicer, and it changes nothing.”
At first, almost nothing: a little breathlessness on the stairs, a dry cough that won’t go away, a tiredness you put down to age. Then the breathlessness comes sooner, with every step. “You can look perfectly healthy and breathe like a man who’s just run a marathon. That’s why it’s such a lonely illness.”
One number, once a year
Once a year, at the CHU de Liège university hospital, he blows into a tube as hard as he can. The result is compared with that of a healthy person of the same age and height, and that gives a percentage. When it drops, the disease is progressing. In the book, that number goes from 71 to 64. “It’s the only number that really matters in my life, and I know it by heart.”
Three months in Thailand
That’s where the story begins: a fifty-year-old man, a number that keeps dropping, and a decision. To spend three months in Thailand. First with Gabriel, his best friend, for the nights on Khao San and the pool tables of Pattaya. Then with Chu, the woman he loves: Bangkok, where he waits for her every evening in the lobby of Saint Louis Hospital, the beaches of Koh Samui, and Isan, where her family welcomes him.
Between the temples, the steps counted one by one and the customs learned while laughing, this is not the story of a man who is going to die. “We’re all going to die; it’s the only statistic that’s a hundred percent. This is the story of a man who knows roughly how much time he has left, and who has decided to make use of it.”
Funny, in spite of everything
What strikes you in The Season of Breath is the humor. A man from Liège down on one knee before a resin mannequin in a Pattaya shopping mall. Two towel swans on a hotel bed, to whom he explains that at his age, strong emotions are best avoided. A floating restaurant in the middle of a lake where, if the cable gives way, “then we live here.” The illness is there on every page, but it never gets the last word.
One last message
The author’s note ends with a simple piece of advice that’s worth repeating: “If you know someone who has been coughing for a long time and gets out of breath for no reason, tell them to see a lung specialist. The earlier the disease is found, the better it can be monitored.”
And to those who are ill too, he wishes “people who hold your arm on the stairs without making a show of it, and a step to stop on, just before.”
The book
The Season of Breath: a true, funny and luminous story about the art of living with an illness no one can see. Available in English as a PDF ebook.
