II.II.II – Anger
II.II.II
ANGER
I stood tall and put on a brave face. Remember I’m too proud a person to admit weakness and vulnerability. I wasn’t the one in need of consoling. I was the one doing the consoling.
My mother, my brother, my aunts and uncles… They were all a mess, as if their entire life had just collapsed in front of them. And I stood there, as if I hadn’t just gone through the same thing. Maybe I was in denial? Or maybe it was the simple fact that I actually didn’t have time to process any of it. All those stupid, damned protocols.
You lose someone you love but you don’t get time to grieve. What you do get is small talk with other people. Relatives, friends, co-workers, acquaintances and anyone who might have once said hello to them out on the streets. “Oh, you know, he was such a good person!”, “He was a family man that guy!”, “The world has just lost a great person…”. And you nod and pretend like you haven’t heard the same words fourteen thousand times before. Then you start getting all kinds of messages from people offering their condolences. Whilst to some these might bring comfort and solace, but to me it was another kind of hell. I was growing bitter with every single text. All I could think was that they were all projecting their weakness and fear of death onto me.
I might have been in denial or I might have been just too emotionally stunted to feel as destroyed as they expected me to be, but really, I was fine. And not in the passive-aggressive “I’m fine” kinda way. I was okay. He was dead. Gone. Expired. And that’s it. There was nothing else to be done. The fact that I’d never get to see him again, hear his voice, be around him anymore… It sucked. Big time.
But that’s life. And considering how old the event of death is, I would’ve assumed people would have grown accustomed to it by now. It might have been too much of an objective and empiric perspective but that is how I always looked at things. I didn’t need any of their pity. “I am not as weak and pathetic as them” I’d tell myself. So maybe I had been past the stage of denial and moved on to the anger stage after all.
Then came the funeral. I had to walk down the church aisle carrying a bouquet of flowers which was dripping smelly flower water all over my shoes and sit through a ceremony I couldn’t give less of a crap about.
Watching people I had never seen before bawling their eyes out and crying hysterically. Watching the priest fumigating the entire parish in incense, making sure the cadaver in front of him was really dead, along with the rest of us. I know, I know. I’m awful. And I’m a lesser man for saying these things. But I’m being honest. I don’t believe in any of this. I don’t believe in the afterlife, that he is watching over me from heaven or that he’s sipping mojitos up there with a bunch angels. So to me this was just another protocol that had to be followed to accommodate other people.
It wasn’t just my thoughts that were inappropriate. I couldn’t stop laughing for a second. I must have made such a bad impression. But I couldn’t quite control myself. It wasn’t just the ceremony that was hilarious. It was right during that mass that it kinda started to sink in. For the first time, it dawned on me how ridiculous it was that I’d never get to see him again. I finally understood how ephemeral life is.
Throughout your life you’re accustomed to seeing people come and go, but there are some people who have been there right from the very beginning and were there constantly. People who just stick. And suddenly they’re not there anymore. And they’re never coming back. It made no sense. I wasn’t as rational and phlegmatic as I thought I was, after all. Of course, I had to realise all of this during the service. And so, I laughed. I laughed and I joked as if it were a joyous occasion – much to everybody else’s annoyance. Looking back, I’m kinda glad that’s how it went down. I don’t look back on that day as one full of sorrow. I mostly remember the jokes… So damn good!
And then life got back to normal; rapidly so. That was the most painful part about it. The emptiness he left behind seemed to be overlooked quite easily after a short while. I know that life goes on but somehow it felt wrong to be in a world in which my dad wasn’t. It felt wrong for life to go on without him. And then I realised. A whole day had passed, and he hadn’t even crossed my mind once. That one day would suddenly turn into a week and then into most of the time.
Then one day, as I lay in my room, someone slammed the door. The dogs started barking and I heard the clang of the keys. I rushed to the living room ready to welcome him. You see, all those things on their own mean nothing. But somehow, this time, there was just something about the tempo, the notes struck, the cadence… that seemed to reverberate across time itself. The sequence of it all was just the same as when he used to come back home from work.
Finally, it all made sense. “He just came back from work. He was away all this time. It all makes sense now…”. I rushed to the living room ready to welcome him; only it was my brother at the door and he’d never come back. It was almost as if he had never existed.
I had a hard time picturing his face and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what his voice sounded like. How could life move on so fast? It had only been a few months since he died and life had moved on. How ruthless the passage of time is…