Mid-day Epiphanies

I do not know whether every other death is similar, or whether each death is different.

What I know is that since the death of my parents, I have become aware of a ruthless panic that is unlike any I’ve ever felt before. It feels very much like the panic of a fall: it is as if the ground is suddenly snatched away and my heart catches in my throat, except that this time, the panic is not momentary—it is continuous and unrelenting.

What I know is that it is worse in the evenings, when my mind checks for familiar sounds, as if it is unknown to it that the sounds will not come anymore. In the evenings, I am suddenly aware that I knew those sounds so well.

And I knew the silences, too.

But the world is different in the mornings. In the mornings, there are strengths that are doled out to wanting hearts, even though these strengths are retrieved at sundown. Oh, no, the strengths are not given for keeping; they are only lent. And while it is true that there is beggary in anything that is borrowed,  we beggars hold open our palms eagerly, because there is also salvation.

Mid-day epiphanies arrive arrogantly, knocking down walls and threatening the doled-out strength you picked up on the way to work. They are the kind that would drive you out of the office at lunchtime and make you walk in the rain so you could entertain the thoughts, fearfully, in the privacy of an unshared umbrella.

Mid-day epiphanies about loss are the worst. They arrive while you book a flight, and the form asks for emergency contact persons. They raise an eyebrow when you get comfortable in a conversation, and they scoff, “What if your friends indulge you only because they think you’re their responsibility and they’d really rather get on with their lives?” They march with you as you get awarded for Outstanding Teacher, and they whisper, in cadence to your steps, “There is no one to make proud anymore.”  The epiphanies help you arrange your brother's academic gown on his graduation day, and they chide, in many different versions, all throughout the day, "They had to be robbed of this experience, as well."


Epiphanies that come in the middle of the day are powerful epiphanies. 

They are those that make you stop at the turn of a familiar aisle in the grocery when you suddenly realize that you will not need to get anything from that aisle anymore. Right there, at the aisle crossing, in the middle of little kids playing tag around pushcarts, and above the din of half-meant threats thrown by parents at their unruly children, you suddenly realize you have actually ceased being a daughter.  

How is it that one actually stops being anybody’s child? 

How is it that one is brought into the world and then abandoned? How is the weighing being done at the moment when it is decided how much is too much for one heart? Where does one appeal about it? How does one keep his heart from looking for those who will never come back?

What I know is that while you deal with the loss of people you love, you begin to truly comprehend what never means. The comprehension does not come suddenly, of course. You will have been contending with it since Day 1, but one day, perhaps on a rainy Wednesday, without warning and without your consent, the thought suddenly crosses your mind. Never. Never is a very, very long time. The thought drives you out into the rain, because there, in the middle of the day, you are gripped by the panic. You are suddenly falling, not belonging to anybody. 

How does one un-comprehend that?

  

*My parents died two weeks of each other in October. We buried them two weeks apart, in the same place, after a similar ceremony, around the same people who knew them or who know us. We dug the earth again, while it was still soft— when it hasn’t even begun to heal at all.