When I was a little girl, my parents would let me sleep on our sitting room sofa while a movie ran its course on our box television. My memory recollects those faint footsteps tiptoeing around the couch, and the dialogues streaming seemed like gibberish to my toddler senses. I remember the feeling of receding into a vast ocean of nothingness and the ghostly sweep that gently levitated me and placed me on my bed. My being was made with the lightness of a feather, or so it seemed in the hands of my guardian. It was my father who always carried me.
I wonder if the last moments of life felt the same to him—being held comfortably and carried gently into rest as his body released its earthly limitations, his senses levitating. I prefer not to talk about it often, but I was present in his last moments. He died right in my arms. I did not let him go. And after all this time, I still cannot. It is a childhood debt, yes. But it is something far bigger than that, far more powerful, that fated me to hold my father at that sacred threshold. This all-encompassing, ever-present, heart-widening, oceanic love that I carry now, which in his absence looks a lot like grief. The fabric of time is twisted at its will—the father-daughter role reversal. When I entered life, he held me, and at his exit from life, I held him. The endless conundrum of who carries whom. Am I, the daughter he birthed, also his death mother? Did I deliver him into the realm of eternal rest? Can I ever be that significant? I, who cannot properly mother even myself, wobbling through this space-time.
Sometimes the moments of our greatest misfortune and misadventure are our greatest, if not the only, teachers in life. Sure, some people might meet true god-men or god-women who walk on water and turn tears into stones, but not most of us. For us, our teachers stand cross-armed at the edge of a tattered life event, waiting for us to pick up the remnants of our humanity and look them in the eye to learn the lessons. Our teachers are relentless shadows haunting our memories and wringing our hearts till we burst into compassion, till we set ourselves free.
I have been spiraling through these stairwells of grief, entering the darkness and emerging into the afterglow, only to enter into darkness all over again. There are bridges, even sheltered shacks, while nearing its raging shore. I tread carefully, avoiding being consumed whole by the endless, bottomless sea. The world down there feels strangely quiet, only occasionally galvanized by the shadow of perpetual loss. I see angels of mercy guarding its shores from phantoms and ghouls of suffering. Self-destruction is stationed there too, like a gas-fueled furnace that turns wood into low-ignition charcoal. Everything burns slow, everything destroys to bring forth something new.
Cigarettes caused his death. There is art in that — the act of lighting a cigarette, creating a pulse of release from the burdens and complexities of living, of blowing out the frustration of a troubled marriage, of the burdens of caring for and loving those who cannot care for themselves, of holding down a job that barely sustains you from financial obliteration and the social fabric of life. There is more art to smoking than to using GPT to generate art. There are nuances in breathing with presence and riding the dopamine shift that lifts you slightly before making you want to barf. There is fear in that, and the pursuit of escape; from loneliness, from abandonment, from addiction and genetics that promise cancer. There is denial in that; to life and its beauty, to love and its miraculous capacity to heal, to facing oneself in the darkest of their midwinter noon. Cigarettes cause death not just by cancer, but by trapping one inside a perpetual loop of artistic imagination of escape where there is none.
It is not my fault that I am human, that I carry the epigenetics of abused, starved, violated, colonized ancestors. It is not my fault that they whisper to me, that I carry them as I invent more ingenious ways to free them, that I strive to teach them a different way of being, while experimenting with the limits of the social privileges I inherit and am capable of creating. It is not my fault that sometimes I repeat their mistakes, of habitual asking for answers without relaxing into the unknown, in both my knowledge of death and its denial. The cynic and the poet coexist; they are not the best of friends, but they begrudgingly agree to collaborate. It makes me tread landmines of paradox more often than I would prefer. They flick my preferences through the air. My peace is mostly in surrender.
Grief still rages on the shores of my being. But like an ark, it carries me into a certain kind of existence that remains untouched by death. In the temporary realm of human perceptions, there is no spirit as permanent as death. However, grief, like a north star, promises a different journey. It takes me into the realm of dreams, where the sleepless Gods are vanguards to those we lost. I have touched this deathless place and met my father there several times. I am wandering again inside these corridors of grief’s ark, negotiating with its keepers for a promise or a peek. Anything substantial is hard to come by, but one of these days I shall fling open one of those doors and storm through to make my place in someone else’s museum of memories. You should come find me when it’s time. I will stay there, I promise, in your ark of grief.
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I will look for you in the ark.
Thank you for another extraordinary piece of writing, Swarnali... it feels like a transmission.
"Am I, the daughter he birthed, also his death mother?" This is the most beautiful cycle of life sentence I've ever read. This is a powerful and touching read, Swarnali, a compassionate and beautiful read and I feel mine and your humanity through it. Your description of the complex relationship with smoking is masterful and brilliant. I want to say something to lighten your grief but I have nothing. I can only say thank you for writing this piece. Thank you :)