Rabindranath Revisited

Where minorities fear

and farmers hang high

Where criminals run free, and sometimes for election

Where our land has been stripped and poisoned

and then fertilised with the blood of little girls

Where lies are so loud

they muffle the truth

Where a tired hungry child

stretches its arm towards an air-conditioned car at the traffic light

Where the clear stream of reason

Is clogged with the bullet-ridden corpses of those who dared

to speak up against dead habit

Where minds are held tight by theologies and mythologies

that divide one nation into us and them

Out of this hell of hypocrisy, my People,

let our country awake.

By Nazu Tonse

Still here.

I suppose his bones are dust by now. Why can't my grief be like that? It should have crumbled apart and settled into the dark earth that is my past. Why is it still here? How do I bury my grief? I carry it around with me everywhere, and it just won't die.

People die so easily. No matter how, that final moment, that very last moment when they pass from life to death, is so simple and straightforward:  they're here, they're gone.

Why can't grief die, too? I want to sentence my grief to death. I want to murder it savagely or mercifully, but quickly, but I don't. I carry it around with me everywhere, like a corpse that will not rot.

Mockery in pink (and red, yellow and white).

It's not that they are mocking me. They can't help themselves. They are beautiful, and blooming. That's all they know.

I chose them for their colours:  red, yellow, pink and white; when I went to change the water this afternoon, I found them still vibrant, still alive. It hurt.

Three things, I found, are excruciating to encounter when grieving.

One is laughter from a group of people at the next table in a cafe. It burbles out of their throats so easily, while I struggle to swallow just one sip of a comforting coffee.

One is the sound of a child's voice, the opposite of death. It rings with her hope, but echoes my despair, magnifying my awareness of time running out. Of loss, and losses to come.

And one is the beauty of nature that shines out as a moon or a star or a flower, completely without empathy it would seem, just being what it is:  an amazing, eternally renewing mystery.

Unlike me.

Getting along with grief.

My grief and I go walking 

together everywhere.

It’s curled up like a foetus 

somewhere behind my breasts.

It’s not human. 

It’s not animal, or plant.

It just is. 

It’s a something I can’t describe, 

because I can’t see it. 

But I can feel it.

I feel it there almost always.

The moment I take my mind off 

mundane matters like being alive,

and staying alive,

there it is. 

Sometimes it sleeps 

but when it is awake 

it is a palpable ache I can do nothing about.

A name, a song, a conversation, a smell.

Gothic words from Books I once loved.

An I Love You whispered in the margin of a dead boy's letter.

Or just numbers added up on a scrap of notepaper,

in the quavering script of an old man’s hand.

A feather.

A regret.

A memory.

All these things waken it.

Some tears, some sighs, some pain,

And then I am ready to soothe it to sleep and try to ignore it again.

World's Greatest Dad.

It floats around a lot, that phrase. We see it on coffee mugs and t-shirts and plaster-of-paris trophies in souvenir and novelty shops all over the world. Moms are not that hard to shop for. For some unfair reason, it's always easier to buy a gift for a woman. For a man, not so much. Especially if it's for your father. So the t-shirts and mugs and trophies come in very handy when you've broken your head over what to get him for his birthday, for Father's Day, or for Christmas.

If you, reading this, are a father, you probably have received at least one World's Greatest Dad. If you've received more than one - all from the same child - you probably need to let him or her know that you've got the message, and then drop hints about something you'd really like as a gift. If you're a father who hasn't yet received one, be patient. It will come.

World's Greatest Dad. As I said, it floats around, and when we say it, we're pretty sincere about it. But here's the thing - you will only truly understand what the words meant, when, like me, you have lost your father.

Daddy

1 December 1926 to 21 March 2013

Two years today, and every day I discover more ways in which you earned that award.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, I am awake. I am exhausted. I am overwhelmed.

Tonight, I am awake. I am exhausted. I am overworked - but I am in control.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, for the first time in my life, I am not ashamed to let people see me cry.

Tonight, I realise that it has been some days since I cried, but that I will probably do some crying later when I think about how I didn't see him in hospital while his eyes were still open.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, I am heating a soothing mix of half water, half milk, with honey, crushed cinnamon and cardamom, and a pinch of turmeric, for a bedtime drink that I will make for my mother every night for a month.

Tonight, I make healthy tuna salad sandwiches in pita bread with fresh lettuce and olives, finely chopped coriander and mint, yoghurt, mustard and a big dollop of not-so-healthy ranch dressing, and my mother and I sit at the little breakfast table that was the first thing she bought as a bride,  and eat dinner together.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, I sit down next to my father and talk to him softly so that the others in the room can't hear me.

Tonight, I know that he is sleeping and that perhaps he can't hear me. I will talk to him anyway, as loud as I like.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, the child within me tells my father that he reminds her of Snow White, and that it's a good thing his paunch isn't any bigger or it would touch the top of the glass.

Tonight, I remember that, and can smile.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, cousins and aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces and friends are arriving, and phones are ringing, and I repeat the words over and over.

Tonight, I know that all these cousins and aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces and friends will remember me in the morning, and though I am an agoraphobic who always dreads the phone ringing, I will pick up if one of them calls.

Tomorrow, right now, two years ago, my father is dead, but not yet buried.

Tonight, I know that though my father is buried, he will never be dead to me.

Yesterday was Daddy's birthday.

I didn’t know how to celebrate it without him, so I didn’t. I remembered how I’d dig out the same two cards every year and give them to him in the morning, then take them home for another year until his next birthday. He liked it that way. He thought cards were a waste of money and paper, and appreciated my “recycling”. 

One was a funny card, from the little girl that still lives inside me. One was the perfect card, whose lines were just right for him.

All day long, I remembered:  today is Daddy’s birthday. He would have been 86. We would have had a cake of some sorts. He would have worried about my sugar and my cholesterol and my weight and how much I was eating and why I hadn’t stopped cutting my hair so short, and why I still needed to go out for a cigarette after lunch. We would have had our friends over, the ones with whom we have shared so many celebrations over the years once we discovered we had birthdays and anniversaries in common. 

Yesterday was not the same, not for any of us, so our friends had dinner with their relatives, and I had dinner with my mother. She had left over curd-rice from lunchtime, and I poured myself a bowl of corn flakes. We shared a slice of carrot cake bought from a Christmas bazaar. I wondered, but not aloud, if we ought to be celebrating his life in some way, if we ought to have gone to his favourite restaurant and ordered chicken varaval and coin parat’has. If we should have gone over to my sister’s and sat together, talking about all our memories of him:  the happiest, the funniest, the earliest, the best. Instead, Mummy and I sat across from each other at the dining table and ate, quietly. Afterwards, while she said her prayers, I washed the dishes, quietly. After she left, I watched some TV, played a few games of Solitaire on Facebook, and went to bed.

Today I remembered the cards again, and searched for them, all the time worrying that I might have ripped them up and thrown them away, sometime over the past year. I don’t remember doing that, but it seems like something I might have done in an attempt at closure:  a way to say to myself that I didn’t need them any more, that I was finished with them, that it was over.Close-the-page-rip-it-up finished.

I couldn’t find them, and I was scared to keep searching in case I never do find them. So instead I sat down at the Internet and read other people’s poems about their dead fathers, and I cried.

Now, after the tears that always seem to wash things clear in my head, I think I will stop looking. He’s gone, and so are his cards. Perhaps one day when I’ve forgotten, and I’m tidying up and not expecting it,  I will open a box and find them, the funny card and the perfect one, and it will feel wonderful. Far more wonderful than if I’d found them today.

(edited 16 April 2014)

Let him see you cry.

(For E.)

Let him see you cry.

He is a baby. He knows something about crying, already.

He will understand.

That you are cold and wet and alone.

That you hunger for something to fill the emptiness.

That you need a hug.

That you need him to love you.

Let him see you cry.

He is your son. He looks to you for answers

To questions he can’t yet ask.

He feels their absence too.

He senses your grief.

He watches both your sorrow and your strength

And sees how to become a man.

Let him see you cry.

He is not too young to learn what it is to be human.

Your tears teach him.

That it takes courage to show vulnerability.

That deep pain is only created by deep love.

That love is what matters.

That love is what lasts.