Status: Widow

This is what happens:

__ You look at all your silk saris, those gorgeous weaves and colours that you picked out so carefully, and wonder if you'll ever go to a wedding again.

__ It's Varalakshmi Puja, and kolu is only a matter of weeks away. There has been, so far, one invitation from a lady who believes she is radical for having issued it. The others have one year in which to redeem themselves.

__ You never liked that colour that is like watered down kaavi or perhaps chandanam with a touch of kaavi. Now you see it everywhere.

__ The girl's basket has a high spiral of jasmine. You automatically take out ten ruppes as you come out of the vegetable shop and then you stand, looking stricken. When you come back to the car, I ask what happened. "It's become more expensive. I'm not buying malli at that price," you say. I don't look at you in the rearview mirror.

__ At night the bed feels too heavy on one side. No wonder you don't sleep well.

__ Your grandson says:

I Nani is a widow.

Yes.

D Pati is a widow.

Yes.

Periya Nani is a widow?

Yes.

Dadi also.

Yes.

And now you're a widow.

(beat) Yes.

Grief Is A Long Distance Runner

At the crematorium.

My son says, why can’t he be buried? Why do we have to burn his body? I will never ever see him again. If we bury him, we can look at him when we want to. He thinks dead bodies are preserved by the earth and we can take them out once in a while to remind ourselves of what they looked like.

My grandmother says before we leave, when they put the body in, say agni swaha, pavan swaha. I think, she said the body.

They lift the rails. The gates open. I don’t say anything but I am shaken by such violent emotion that I can understand how people throw themselves on the pyre. Not to die with the dead, but to pull them out, say, ‘nobody can stand so much heat’. Outside, I watch the smoke from the crematorium chimney. That’s my father rising up in the air.

To my son I explain that the body is like a flower whose loss we don’t mourn. That it is in the nature of bodies to perish. My explanation feels both right and extremely wrong. We have no unfinished business with flowers.

When he is alive we stay silent or uncommunicative; we fight because we believe there will be a tomorrow in which to erase unpleasant memories. Right now, though, he is alive and I am angry and I show it.

Tomorrow comes and in place of the person there’s a legacy of guilt. He knew I didn’t mean it, we say, with the same kind of certainty with which we say, ‘he would have wanted me to go on that holiday’. How conveniently well we know the minds of the dead had they been alive.

[incomplete entry]

8

8

If someone had said you passed away
this evening at 8, when my watch was still
an hour behind, on a few minutes to seven,
I'd be around for rituals with your loved ones.
We'd sip the last of your lemon tea, taking
turns to embrace you with private words.
Some would simply freeze you
with that wholly unsayable look of love.

In the quickening, we'd fold away your clothes,
close the curtains over the awful pouring
light, but couldn't do a thing for the beep
& brake of cars, the low hum of a fast
travelling bus as we'd help you to the awkward
angle of your bed, how you'd be found,
then we'd hold back for the aweful way you'd rise
to the almighty challenge of your punctual

heart-stop.

Making our journeys home

we were back in time
strangely prepared
when someone said
you passed away
this evening at 8.

Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming To Dover! Tranquebar Press. 2008*.

*

It's been seven weeks. 49 days. I can see myself getting used to marking the weeks but not tearing myself up over their arrival and departure. I can see myself looking into the room, at the bed and not feel a lurch of the heart.

Heart-stop. It happens. Get over it.

*Daljit Nagra's book was published by Faber and Faber in 2007 in England. This Edition is for sale in India only. The word 'aweful' in the poem is sic.

Prepared

I’ve been asking myself if one can ever ‘be prepared’ for the death of someone close. Rationally, it only needs some effort to get used to the idea that everyone is always dying, that the process is as inevitable as it is undesired. When is a good time to allow the mind to consider the possibility that a living, breathing body will one day be unable to respond to even a direct light shone in the eyes?

The thought of death is one that the mind refuses to admit; in fact, it makes of it such a strong taboo that it feels almost like bad luck to think of it at all. Bite your tongue! we say. Forbid the thought!

For the first part of this year, I had been doing precisely that: forbidding the thought of what should have been – was – obvious to me. As far back as this X-ray, I knew that my father had not got very long. And yet, in the last six weeks of his life, when he began to need four hours, then ten, eighteen and finally 24 hours oxygen support, I kept at bay the thought that whatever road was left open for him at this point, it was not one that lead to recovery.

We’re told warm tales of the power of positive thinking. The idea that fervent wishing can make things happen the way one wants them to be is seductive. But consider: just because we’re capable of blocking certain thoughts it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The moment you say, ‘I will not think of death and dying; he’s going to get better’, you’ve admitted the thought in and you have to live with it whether you want it to or not.

In early June, when my father was in hospital for the second time, the doctor called me to his office while my father was taken away for a very painful procedure.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you and not your mother.’

‘You can tell us the worst, doctor. We’ve been mentally prepared for some time now.’

I lied, of course. Just because I had to face the possibility of my father’s death, it didn’t mean that I was ready to submit to it. After all, what could the doctor have said? With what degree of certainty could he have said, he has two weeks or four or eighteen?

The reason, I am coming to realise, that our ‘preparedness’ for death is at all possible is that we do not know precisely when it will happen, even though we know that death is near. If we knew, we could not continue with our own lives because we would be waiting for that moment. Death deserves our total attention and we would not miss it if we could. We never miss it but that irony escapes us in our living moments.

When the moment arrives, when you realise that the person on the bed with his mouth slightly open, in an attitude of unnatural stillness, will never again change position or clear his throat – will never again be a person, but only a body – you find that you are not, after all, surprised. You find that those thoughts in your mind that did battle one against the other, did after all, prepare you for this moment. You are not surprised that hands can still be warm, hair can spring back from the forehead like it always did; you’re not even surprised when, if you accidentally bump into the legs that stick out of the bed, there is no reaction.

The only reaction is in you. You instinctively apologise and then catch the futility of that apology with bitterness and dawning grief. Once again your mind has admitted the impossibility of death.

And so it goes.

But death is not a matter of belief; it’s a fact, as hard and inalterable as birth. Perhaps what those who are left behind need is not the ability to live with it. Perhaps what we need is the ability to die to it.

What makes you depressed?

It's a question this blog will ask often.

Sometimes, though, the answers might help to punctuate the gloom here. Such as Zizek's answer to the question:

What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.

3

I dream of doctors. Not just any doctor, but that one, the one we knew for six years. Though the reason we visited him at all is now gone, I still have to go to the hospital, wait two hours and see him. I do not find it strange that after all this time, all I know of him is contained in his presence. He is the thin edge of the life he carries behind him like the beam of a torch that he shields just by being there. I ask him how his hand is. The last time I saw it it was in a bandage that he took off in the hospital room where three assistants stood to attention but one was slyly checking me out, and the one nurse had an old-fashioned examination pad in hand and a file under her armpit. But he is talking about schools.

My father's dead but the doctor wants to see me tomorrow and the file is incomplete, with the originals sent off and the xeroxes lying around in a plastic bag somewhere and what is there to say and why do I have to go there again?

Say A Little Prayer For Me

It was clear from the minute I turned the lights on that he'd gone. And yet, certainty battled with hope and we touched him, felt for his pulse, put our hands over his heart, looking for signs of life.

I knew, though and I took out the prongs from his nostrils and turned the oxygen cylinder off. We called his doctor, who said that because the death had taken place at home, there was no need to bring him back to the hospital. A family doctor would examine my father and give a Death Certificate, which would suffice at the crematorium.

We called a doctor we'd known for years. I suppose we could call him a family doctor, but we remembered his reluctance to put himself out in any way. Surprisingly enough, he agreed to come and take a look but he recommended that we go to the hospital. Only the hospital can give a Death Certificate he told us.

Later it occurred to me to wonder if his reluctance to put his name to anything official sprang from his not actually being a registered medical practitioner, a circumstance he had carefully concealed from all his patients all these years. I am capable of being uncharitable even in the most difficult circumstances.

So they came, the doctor and his wife. Meanwhile, my grandmother was certain she could detect a pulse. It's your own agitated pulse beating off his skin, I told her. We sat around, not knowing what to do.

He came, stethoscope and all, and a short examination confirmed what we already knew. Some slight changes in position were made and Aunty N gave my mother a sympathetic hug. She said to Dr. R in a hushed undervoice, let us pray.

With Dr. R at the head, Aunty N at the side, me at the foot of the bed and my mother and grandmother somewhere out of the line of my vision, we stood.

And the good doctor prayed, not for the soul of my father to be taken into the Lord, but he prayed that everything should go well for those of us who remained, in the getting of our Death Certificate. In all the paper work that would follow, Oh, Lord, let there be no trouble.

I was glad that I could not catch my mother's eye. Laughter over a newly dead body would be unseemly. Next to me, Aunty N shifted a little uncomfortably. Would that she had the directing of the prayer. I wondered what my grandmother was making of this. In a little while, the news that there would be no rituals or ceremonies would grieve her more. For now, the Amens were probably causing her some moments of discomfort.

Prayers said, the doctor and his wife left, not having given us a certificate that we could take to the crematorium. That was left to a friend of mine, an old school mate, to do.

Solomon Grundy*

Five weeks today since my father died. While trying hard to avoid symmetries and anniversaries and neat lines of days, I can't but admit that it is fitting that I start this blog (properly) today.

My father had said all year that he might not make it past this one. Don't ask how he knew. In his mind, his birthday was a marker and if he made it past it, he might survive.

He didn't. He died on the 3rd of July. Would have turned 71 on the 4th and have been married for 40 years on the 5th.

Neatness must be genetic.

* Everyone knows the rhyme, right?