Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive
Estrangement is a funeral that never gets a date.
My father is alive. I know this the way you know facts about a stranger: from other people's photographs. Last month he appeared in my cousin's wedding album on my aunt's phone, third row, cream shirt, holding a plate of food and laughing at something out of frame, and I stood in her kitchen studying him like evidence. He has new glasses. He has become an old man without my permission.
We have not spoken in eight years.
I want to be precise about this, because people are rarely precise about it. Nobody hit anyone. There is no police case, no property dispute, none of the dramatic machinery people imagine when you say estranged. There was a marriage he forbade, a boy he had never met and had already finished judging, and a sentence spoken across our dining table in the flat I grew up in.
"If you do this, you are dead to me."
I did it. And it turned out he was a man of his word, my father. It is one of the things I had always admired about him.
What nobody tells you is that being dead to someone does not feel like being dead. It feels like being the one left standing at a funeral that never gets a date.
When a person actually dies, the world snaps into motion around you. There are rituals older than the language you cry in. Relatives arrive, food arrives, someone competent takes your phone and handles things. Your loss has a name, a certificate, a first anniversary. People know which sentence to say and roughly when to say it.
But there is no word for grieving someone who is still alive.
There is no ceremony for it, no leave you can apply for, no almirah of his things to sort through, because his things are all exactly where they always were, in a flat forty minutes from mine, being used by him, daily, in a life I am simply no longer in. You cannot bury a man who keeps appearing in other people's photographs.
And people, kind people, people who love you, will look at your grief and offer the one sentence that proves they have never stood in it. "But he's still alive. Just call him."
Just call him... As if I have not composed that call a thousand times in the shower. As if grief with an open door is easier than the other kind, and not worse, because everything unsaid stays technically sayable, so nothing can be laid down. The dead cannot pick up the phone, and so eventually you forgive them for not calling. The living can. Every silent birthday is a decision he makes again.
Mine are the strangest days. My mother, who conducts our relationship in secret like a resistance operative, calls from the temple or the market, never from home. My sister sends cake photos. And every year I watch the phone through the whole day, hating myself for watching it, an atheist checking the sky.
When someone dies, you grieve once, and the whole world helps you carry it. When someone is alive and gone, you grieve on a schedule nobody agreed to, alone, in a queue that never moves.
For years I handled this the way I handle everything, by being productive about it. I wrote, because writing is the one room where I decide who enters. But I wrote around him with tremendous skill. Poems about loneliness with no cause in them, weather with no house under it. Then one night I read an essay on why safe poems lose, about how readers can smell the thing you are walking around, and I sat with that accusation for a long time. The next poem I wrote had a dining table in it, and a cream shirt, and a sentence I had been carrying for eight years like a stone in the mouth. It was the first true thing I had written about family since I lost mine while it was still alive.
I thought that was my turn in the story, the writing. It wasn't. The turn came this February, in a hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and cold coffee.
My father had a bypass.
My mother called me from the temple, except she was not at the temple, she was outside the operation theatre, and her voice had a crack in it I had never heard.
I drove there without deciding to.
I sat in the visitors' area on a green plastic chair, two floors below him, for six hours... I did not go up. My sister shuttled between us like a diplomat, carrying updates down and, I assumed, nothing up.
At some point past midnight, she sat down next to me, exhausted, and said, "He knows you're here. Ma told him before they took him in."
"What did he say?"
She looked at me for a second too long, deciding something. "He said, tell her the parking here is a racket, she shouldn't pay more than forty rupees."
I laughed.
In the middle of the worst corridor of my life, I laughed until the reception staff looked over, because that sentence was him, the whole man, and it was aimed at me, the first thing aimed at me in eight years. My father, half sedated, on the far side of his own opened chest, had sent me a message about parking. He could not say come up. I could not go up. But we are, both of us, people of our word, and he had found the one sentence that broke neither of his vows and still reached me.
That was five months ago. Here is where I am supposed to tell you we reconciled, that I climbed the stairs, that there were tears and a wedding-style hug.
We did not.
I drove home at 3 a.m. when they said stable, and I paid forty rupees for parking, and I sat in my dark kitchen with the rain starting up against the window and understood that this was not an ending, just the first date the funeral had failed to keep.
On my birthday last month, my phone lit up at 11:58 p.m. Two words... "Happy birthday." No emoji, no name, as if there were any chance I had deleted the number.
I typed and erased eleven different messages... Paragraphs. Accusations. An invitation. In the end I sent back two words, because I have learned this grief is measured out in doses neither side can overdose on. "Thank you."
That is the whole bridge, for now. Four words across eight years. I have stopped calling it nothing. People who study forgiveness from the outside think it is a door you fling open. From the inside it is a wall you take down brick by brick, and some nights all you manage is to stop adding bricks.
He is alive. Somewhere across this same rain, forty minutes away, an old man in new glasses is probably standing at his own window, grieving a daughter who is also, inconveniently, still alive. Neither of us will get the mercy of mourning and being done. The calendar will keep offering its small chances, birthdays, bypasses, weddings in cream shirts.
I watch the water run down the glass and I let it be what it is: not hope exactly... A funeral, postponed again. Both of us still standing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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