About Death

It was winter. My father had passed away three weeks prior. Clueless as to how to continue on normally I volunteered to take my nephew to the museum during daytime on a weekday.

There were no doors in the next exhibit. There was a hall you could walk through, with lush red carpet and the omnipresent velvet ropes that clung on as guardians near the exhibits. I was high. Everything scared me. The hallway with its high ceiling, the deep carpet that gave way to my heavy feet all caving down as the guilt filtered through the sinking feeling in my heart. The Buddha statue in this room had a missing eye. That was the only thing imperfect in an otherwise perfect room.

It bothered me and I felt sweat slipping on my neck under the collar. I dragged Hazeenh, my nephew, out of the hall way.

The next exhibit wasn't any less flattering. It had the picture of a dead woman covered in jewelery. She was hideous. I felt nauseas and announced to Hazeenh, that we had to leave. I walked...I actually wobbled my way to the exit as Hazeenh followed. I passed the doorman on my way out, as the doorman's shifty eyes met mine for a moment. Hazeenh passed the doorman a few seconds later.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I wanted to do something but nothing seemed important. Everything was ordinary and everything I did seemed auspicious and forced. Hazeenh sat motionless in the passenger seat as we made our way home. Nothing we did seemed to excite or interest Hazeenh. "I want to be a role model," I thought to himself. That thought drifted away and disappeared as soon as it appeared though.

My father had passed away three weeks prior. But what was wrong with me? For the past 5 years, I took care of him. He, who was sick with a non cooperative heart until it finally refuse to function. And now I would spend hours pondering what I had to do to continue my own life after my father.

What incredible luxury the next morning was then. The marijuana and her remnant magic had left me by then. I was sitting by myself in the sun-drenched porch, a cold porcelain mug of chai was steaming a few hours ago when I had sehri outside and it was chilly. Now, outside a crisp, clear and impossibly fresh October day was working its way into full swing. The world at that moment seemed full of fall. Everything seemed a little richer and infused with a spice drawer of color, like they have in the movies sometimes. I did not go to work.

I had been a set of contradictions. I was simultaneously reveling in silence of the things that were present, yet torn about things that were in the past. I was feeling individually isolated yet somehow still connected, managing to anchor one foot in my daily life but keeping the other hanging outside in a nightmare reality. I had gotten in touch with a few folks who called for condolence but the vast majority still hadn't heard from me. I still hadn't slept for more then a few hours. Largely because I couldn't. I was stuck in this strange timeless limbo zone in between flooding thoughts, images, and feelings of things and the present reality of nothings, a state which on more than one occasion left me wondering whether it all really happened. This inability to render the experience in any sort of linear fashion pretty much summed it up for me--I felt both like it hadn't been a short while since the passing of my father, but also that I'd lived many lifetimes over the past few days. Calendar time simply did not apply.