It’s the tenth month and all I feel is guilt.
The most merciless thing anyone said to me was “Oh, be honest. Do you ever really think about the dead?” as if I’m not persistently peppered with sudden pangs of his body lying lifeless on that slab. I feel it the way you’d feel a splinter, this uncomfortable, throbbing wound that spikes when pressed. The question was an accusation, a dare for me to deny. Do I really think about the dead? About him? Do I really?
Sometimes, I sit tongue-tied in front of Mom, swallowing the words I don’t know how to deal with my grief and I am hurting because she’d lost a father and she doesn’t know how to deal with her grief either. Sometimes I glance at Dad and imagine them shrouding him, trying to stuff his wayward hair into the cloth. I assume the effort will look ridiculous and it makes me giggle. Maybe they’ll shave it off and I could hog a few strands for keepsake.
It’s the tenth month and the anniversary is drawing near. I can tell because the grief is contorting itself. It is slow bubbles simmering on the surface of a pot, almost melodic, almost poetic. I am dreading the spill. This time last year, Mom told me they suspected something. Sometime later, she’d say it doesn’t look good, and they’d take him abroad, and I’d call my boss, choking out the words Hi. Um, kaafa niyaavejje?, sobbing on the last. In the midst of this disbelief, I’d also take a minute to marvel at how composed my boss was, displaying every inch of the essence of a picture-perfect flight attendant. There were no gasps, no barrage of questions, no pause fillers, no distress. In hindsight, he has probably dealt with worse than a woman crying on the phone. In hindsight, he didn’t just lose someone he loved, so why on earth should he panic?
When my five-year-old niece addresses my father, I wonder if she knows the gesture is on borrowed time. She speaks effortlessly, the voiceless velar of the kaa and softness of the fa rising up her throat and rolling off her tongue, in a sound squeakier and thinner than mine. I wonder if she takes it for granted.
He pops up in my dreams occasionally. Someone told me you see the dead in your dreams because their soul meets yours in the unseen realm. Someone else told me it’s my brain’s cognitive something or the other rummaging through my memories and manifesting my subconscious. In it, he’s standing and walking and smiling, he’s sitting lost in thought, and he’s always wearing his pastel shirt and matching pants. He does not limp. The rest of my family is nowhere in sight.
(Fun fact: My family egged me to compose his biography. I didn’t know the first thing about writing a biography, and they didn’t know the first thing about writing. I refused under the guise of the half-assed excuse, “oh I want to write fiction” because fiction was convenient. Yet here I am now, carefully burrowing all the obscenities I dare muster in the same paragraph as “kaafa” and “death”. I am disgraceful and this isn’t fiction, this is a testimonial of sorts of his life. None of you will want to read this.)
I often think yeah if he sees me right now he’d roll in his grave bro, because I am told humor is a coping mechanism, but I am not coping. I am festering in guilt, in not thinking about him enough to do enough. Enough to me is flashes of my childhood, of how he used to go to the beach herding four little kids. Enough is in the form of the green chick that died under my foot. Enough is daring to barge into his funeral with my hair uncovered to the chagrin of some. Enough is him grinning, saying “Mamma ethanah fonuvaalaafa dharifulhu migeyga hunnanveenu?”. Enough is replaying the song Marjorie till my ears bleed. Enough is willing the voices in my head to shut the fuck up. Enough [ih-nuhf] is a stupid word that doesn’t look like its pronunciation.
It’s the tenth month and I am trying to fathom what’s left of him is trinkets, all objects, all these books and clothes and shoes and pens and items left to rot in the wake of his absence while the rest of us live on. It’s the tenth month, and the only thing I’ve done that’s really enough is embracing my parents just a tad longer.
