shapes of grief
“And then the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.
The three words contain no sense for her. She cannot bend her mind to their meaning.”(Maggie O’Farrel on ‘Hamnet’)
When I lost my father almost eleven years ago, the first things that I thought were trivial: he’s gone, he cannot drive or pick me up again from school — then who will? he can’t attend the school meetings nor pick my report card again, can he? I can’t kiss the back of his hand again every morning? I can no longer hear his voice again?
It was a bizarre and for a twelve years old me, those things seem didn’t make any sense. I don’t remember much what happened after that, I just remember praying Subuh and recite Yasin (because the adults told me so), I remember walking behind keranda and clutching my mukenah that was given by someone I couldn’t remember. I remember stepping in to the mosque then to the cemetery. I remember listening to one of kyai in the village recite dua, and then the burial process finished and I went home.
The memory was hazy and it feels like I see through a collection of photo; a faded image of myself without sound or movement.
But I remember clearly: how my mother nearly fainted and couldn’t stand without support from my aunts, how her eyes were swollen because of crying too much until it stopped producing tears, how she refused to eat until the day after, how my brother was quite all day long that I, probably, didn’t have any single conversation with him that day.
And as I grow older, I notices how my family process grief and loss of my father. By hiding our griefs deep within ourselves, not talking about it, and then moving on with our lives.
It doesn’t mean that we’ll forget about him, we just chose to not talk about him.
My mother rarely, almost never, talk about father unless I start it first. If I did not ask specific stories about the past memories about father, she will not tell it voluntarily by herself. Mother never show her sadness, her tears in front of me. She would process her grief, her loss, alone by herself in a place and time where I could not see.
And I did too.
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We mourn separately, hide our feelings from each other, and never talk about how we probably shared the same feeling of losing and longing. We keep our memories of fathers within ourselves, not between us.
I know that each person process grief differently. That grief itself can take in any form, any shape. That we are moving on at different steps and pace.
But this shape of grief, where we chose not to talk, gradually felt heavy.
Because I begin to feel scared. I’m scared because of I cannot remember exactly how my father sounded, every time I trace back my memories of him, his sound doesn’t feel right at all. And sometimes how his face look also begins to slip from my mind, like watching movies except only the actor’s head is blurred. I want to tell my mother about how I desperately trying to remember my father voices but I can’t. I want to tell her that I keep on wondering how my life, our life, would’ve been if he were still around. I want to tell her that I am sad, very sad of losing him and I miss him so much, so much, that I want to meet him.
But I don’t tell. I feel hesitant to tell, for reasons I don’t understand myself. Maybe because we are used to mourn alone. Maybe because we already had turn our back that had burdened by loss, from each other. Maybe because we are afraid that our wound torn by sadness and loneliness would sting again. Maybe because we are not brave enough yet.
Because time keeps running in one way; it might’ve already stopped for father but not ours. So we carried on.
***
Last month, my grandmother took her last breath and passed away peacefully as if she was just gone sleeping. And once again, I noticed how grief creeped into my family. My mother, who is usually calm and collected, seemed to have lost her way and was unsure what to do. For the first time, I heard my brother’s trembling voices through the telephone.
But this time, our griefs take in the different from than the previous one. We talk about her: how she kept insisting to cook the rice in the stove instead of rice cooker, how she would wake up early in the morning to clean the bathroom even though we repeatedly told her not to do it, how she would sit in the living room and stare outside the window. My mother and I laugh about how stubborn grandma was and how she would upset if we didn’t do things according to her way.
I feel like right now, we process our griefs together instead of just hiding it from each other.
I know there’s probably still some things that mother won’t share with me, but I know that we are keeping grandmother alive between us. This shape of grief feels lighter because I know that we shoulder it together.
And then, I know too that we will able to carry on hand in hand, the three of us, while waving our hands for the last time to grandma.
