Breathe

While living temporarily in New Mexico on a research fellowship, Harvard professor Gerard McManus is first overtaken by a lung infection and then terminal cancer. His wife Michaela, a memoirist, keeps a vigil at his hospital bedside, overwhelmed by grief and disbelief at his rapid decline and the complete upending of their lives. Michaela’s shock and denial transforms into psychosis, as she (perhaps) imagines an alternate reality where Gerard survives. Occasionally—as when she attempts to help a student from her memoir workshop who’s in crisis—Michaela presents a front of normalcy and lucidity, but these moments are increasingly overshadowed by surreal episodes where she imagines seeing Gerard, or a version of him, in various settings. The New Mexico landscape and its indigenous gods (which Michaela finds threatening) also play a strong part in the narrative.