Farewell
Everything is transactional. You attend a birthday party and someone brings a gift for you. Other times, you are asked to write them a birthday card or gift them a teddy bear. Love for love. An algorithmic exchange. Everything is kept in mind, a reminder that people are always lending loans, their emotions a barter for community and companionship.
The day I visited my taiji in the ICU, I saw life staring back at me. I wanted to memorize her face, remember her every detail. I wanted to etch her memory onto the creases of my mind. I didn’t want to forget her. The day she died, I didn’t know how to react. I have never seen death so closely, except for my grandfather’s, which I believed was another form of celebration because every cousin visited and I felt it was a get-together. I was a child, and love was hidden in places of goodbyes too.When we reached their home and stepped into the room where she was laid to rest, I couldn’t help but notice her closed eyes. Her skin, still fresh from the remnants of life—I wanted to wake her up. To be very honest, we weren’t close. But I remember her as someone always welcoming, always asking if we had food, always smiling and asking us to visit her home. There was a permanence hidden under the always.
I don’t know what to make of grief. It is a fingerprint of our pain—of our love too. When she was taken away, adorned with red, silky, shiny clothes, I couldn’t help but wonder how farewells were filled with colors of love. She was sent off as a bride who had first entered our family in the 90s or 80s, perhaps. I have never asked. Now that she is gone, how does time matter anyway?I always called her badi taiji. The last time I met her in the ICU, I held her hand, her skin so soft, baby-like, as if she was returning to her mother’s womb. The monitors beeped with her heart rate, blood pressure, and other vitals—a mechanical sign of her life. Her hand twitched. I saw her eyebrows contorting, as if she were in a dream, disagreeing with what she was seeing.
During her funeral, the entire house echoed with loud wails. They say sound needs a medium to travel in a vacuum. Nobody knows where the dead go. But if she went somewhere, I think she wouldn’t hear us. The last sense to go is hearing. The chronically ill patient remembers the last words said to them. They carry these words with them, wherever they go.My brother, her son, says, “She is gone into nowhere.” How I want to deny the logic behind death. How I want to tell him that people we love do not leave us; they change once they go. Their hands intangible, they still listen to us. I have prayed to daadi so many times to have my wishes fulfilled. I do not put my faith in God. My religion doesn’t require a witness. My God doesn’t need saving. She is somewhere, floating as energy of minuscule atoms.My brother, with his searching eyes, sometimes sits patiently, looking at a place we don’t know about, where perhaps only taiji visits. Loss of a mother—how can one define it?
When my parents asked me to look at taiji one last time, I wanted to touch her once. Everyone crowded around her. She slept peacefully. Her body frail—what could have changed then? Miracles were probable. When I met her in the ICU, all I could notice was her carotid artery, pumping, beating, so prominent. She was alive then. Breaths as a mathematical function—how long is our life then?Now when she is gone, all I notice is the absence so wide that everyone walks around it, talks around it. Grief—ours and others’—scares people. Most can’t look it in its eyes, so we avoid looking altogether. But I see my brother’s eyes. I call him brother after so many years because in grieving, even naming a relationship helps. I call him my brother because we belong to the same blood. But now that the loss has altered his life and ours in some way, I do not know how to be there for his grief.My brother’s brother, whom I call cousin, I think will mourn in his own ways. Sometimes, even in grief, we choose the people we want the shoulders of. He doesn’t want mine. So I don’t force him. I don’t tell him anything.
Strength has become a judgment of character. It needs a witness at all times. So they don’t cry. They look at the ceiling above, but tears weigh more in the presence of the gravity of grief.The last time I saw my taiji, I wanted to thank her for always welcoming my family at her house’s doorstep. I wanted to thank her for always asking about us from my father whenever he visited their house. Nobody in my extended family asks about us. But she did. The mere act of asking has brought me here today.People soon will go. Time will be a wound none of us will tend to. When a loss so big stares at us, we do not dare look at it, for we will find our reflection in it. Who wants to be held by grief’s trembling hands? Who wants to be embraced by it?
People here have talked about all sorts of things. Some have wanted to change the nation’s politics; some have laughed at jokes with loud laughter. The absence of taiji was filled with conversation about everything. The dead return through reminiscing. As people talked and talked, they forgot to take her name instead.What dent can we really make in the fabric of the world? The sons didn’t get a chance to grieve, always attending to people with questionable tears—is this all the world allows? Taiji’s absence was felt in little moments.Today, at antim ardas, her death will finally become real.
Today, people will go back to their homes. Tomorrow, the calls will cease. A few days in, the world will have moved on as if nothing changed the course of this earth’s slight tilt. But the sons will look for their mother throughout life.It’s unfair how the world expects the grieving person to move on. Their discomfort with grief is so evident. Grievers are often shamed into forced acceptance that this is the eternal truth. If death is the truth of life, let love be the lie that hides it for a while.The last time I saw her is the only way I will remember her—a woman who fought cancer. She is gone. But this isn’t goodbye. I don’t know where the dead go, or if they go somewhere at all. It’s difficult to find hope against logic.How she visits her sons will be a lifelong process.
Some days there will be an empty cup of tea. Some days the flowers she planted in her garden will remember her. Some days spring will visit the house. Some days winter will be long. Our loss—her sons’ loss—is enormous. But one day, the wind will blow gently, and the sons will hear her.Until then, all we can do—all they can do—is sit with the absence. Time flows from her feet now. By the time it stops, she would have gifted healing to her sons.
A mother’s last sacrifice.
There is no next time,
G