On Bereavement

I wrote this in the July of 2005. Still just as applicable in the January of 2017, and was equally applicable in April 2008.

I am a bad person

Surely relief should not be the overwhelming emotional response one should feel at the death of a parent. Aren’t waterworks and chest beating more the lines along which one’s reaction should be? Are the mundane, banal minutiae of everyday life really all that important when your father has just been buried 3,000 miles away and did not even find out until after the event? Should hunger not be banished at this point? When do the brain’s mechanisms for dealing with shock turn into callousness?

I know I am officially in mourning, but I did just buy an iPod. So my left brain is praying and my right brain is listening to upbeat pop anthems. I am the epitome of the confused noughties Muslim. Listening to music and praying at the same time? I can see just about everyone I know’s faces rearranging themselves into masks of incomprehension. Am I walking proof that not all music is the devil’s, or a recruiting poster for Purgatory ‘R Us? I suspect the latter.

I am a bad person. 

I am relieved that his end was as painless as death can be, all things considered. But I do not want to know all the details, thank you very much. The grip on my mobile phone tightens as I am talked through his last hour or so. I am feel my face switching to an expression designed to give nothing away, although this in itself probably gives too much away. A part of me stuffs its figurative fingers into its figurative ears and starts a chant of “la-la-la I’m not listening!” at the top of its figurative voice. I continue to spoon pasta into my mouth; I d not want to upset my friends who have made this effort on my account. I have no appetite, but the food does not turn to ash in my mouth. It remains delicious.

I am a bad person.

I am told again and again that he was not alone when he went, which is a rare blessing indeed in a house where everyone except him worked. I am repeatedly told that all his other children were there with him in those last minutes. I should be glad for this, on his behalf. Yet, there is a voice inside me selfishly pointing out that I was not one of those thus present, although what value my presence would have added is extremely debatable.

I know that it would have been nearly impossible for me to cope with all the clerical details of death, and a part of me is relieved that I did not have to. I hate the undertaker at our community graveyard; he is a ghoul and a money grabber. I am also caught between ire at the news being kept from me until after my crucial exam, to some relief that it was so that I could focus fully on it. 

I am a bad person.

Would I have felt differently if it had been by biological father and not my adopted one who had been the one to go? I think not; my feelings towards both of them are roughly the same.

I am a bad person.

I feel like hanging up on people who, with the best intentions, mouth the most clichéd of phrases at me. The “death is inevitable”, “he did not suffer” (yeah, right – have you ever had a heart attack and not been able to breathe? I am sure it is a total walk in the park) and “you must be strong” speeches run fingernails down the blackboard of my soul. The awkward silence of a friend who was with me when I got the news, his fumbling to understand and failure to do so, the frank admission of another friend of not knowing what to say, have been more eloquent than any production line elegy.

I am a bad person.

I laughed out loud at a memory shared between my friend and I about our days at university. 

I am a bad person.

My eyes are dry. Not a cloud in sight.

I am a bad person.

And yet…

There is a clenched feeling in my sternum I cannot explain. I dread to think how I will react when I go back home and find a room, a bed, empty. That clenched feeling has just become stronger at that thought, and threatens to travel upwards in the general direction of my throat. I exhale – I did not even realise that I was holding my breath – and force my lips into a smile that is more of a rictus. The threatened showers disperse. The iPod shuffles to another peppy tune.

I suddenly resolve to find a picture of him and put it in my wallet; the thought surprises me. I have never been a picture-in-the-wallet kind of guy. Before I can ruminate much on this change of heart, I realise that there are, to my knowledge, no recent pictures of my father and I; certainly none since I left the country for University about eight years ago. So it will have to be one from his younger days, maybe the one of him astride his Lambretta from the Sixties, if I can find it. 

No pictures in eight years.

I am a bad human being. 

Somewhere in my head, a list has been insidiously compiling itself. It is a list of no mores. No more smell of grilled tomatoes for breakfast. No more interchanges in my pidgin Gujraati when I return from work. No more being fanned by pages from the Qura’an (to what end, I know not) in the early hours of the morning. That lump in my sternum seems to be composed mainly of bile right now. 

No waterworks, but it was a close run thing. 

I don’t know how I will react when I finally do get home, but I think I have identified that entity that has taken up residence inside me like some special effect germinating inside an extra in a science fiction movie. It is loss, and I dread the moment when it will, inevitably, unleash itself from with me, and am in equal parts scared of and curious about the form it may take. 

It seems, then, that I am human after all.

At least, that is what I tell myself in order to sleep at night.