Who knows?.....what's happening to me? At the end of some treacherous, painful, hard and suffocating twelve months, I ask myself again and again... Am I now remembering my father after a year of being without him? Or, Am I forgetting him as the days pile on top of one another, and his permanence, his place in my life, his role in my scheme of things is getting hazier and hazier?
The last thing I want is to let him go - even though materially and physically and for all practical purposes he is gone - my will playing no role what so ever in what transpires in this world. Who lives and who dies is all decided in another realm by another power and we are left standing dumbfounded, mouths gaping, eyes vacant as to what's happened - totally helpless, impotent and useless.
I am a coward. Deep inside me seethes raw anger, hatred, angst, frustration and sheer repulsion against my own self, for I stood mute while my father was taken away from me, all silent and quite. I deplore the paralytic state that took a hold of me, rendering me immobile and stunned. After, a lapse of 365 days, and thousands of hours which separates that horrific day from today, I have seen my father in hundreds of dreams while asleep, and encountered him so many times while awake. I yearn for him to appear in front of me, in person and not as a vision, tangible in three dimension, warm and expressive - simply - alive. Ha! Am I being naive in wishing a child's wish? am I being silly in asking for something to happen knowing very well that it can't happen or perhaps won't happen no matter how much I pray or want. Whatever, I am being, foolish, silly and childish, SO?
How does life expect us to go on...after an essential part of what it means to be alive is snatched away and tucked some place unapproachable and totally forbidden? How can death take away from us someone so close to our hearts and souls without as much as an explanation, a warning, a prescription of what to afterwords? One fine July morning, my father, whom I loved with all my heart and being, failed to wake up from his sleep. I was informed of his 'leaving us' as if 'everything has come to be over', and indeed - its over! all my thoughts, my life, my actions and my routine of the day, my friendships, my relationships all came to an end last day of July, last year. Life and its nuances as I knew them fled from me never to come back and I found myself standing alone in the middle of a desert in absolute crushing heat with no place to go, no sign, no direction, no plans and no way - complete silence and complete space on all sides with no inkling as to where I must lug myself to....
Isn't it insane? that one minute you are alive and breathing, and hear and speak, you can feel and show emotion, you are a person with all trappings of life, you are alive and form a cusp with the life of other people - your being alive isn't a state in vacuum, you breathe and be, not only for yourself but others as well. And, then, all of a sudden you are dead? Between this moment of being a person and the next when life leaves you you become a body, a corpse, a dead weight signifying nothing. And the living around you, the left overs, the remaining people are left standing around in complete shock! Your dying is inclusive of many deaths - the lives of those around you are finished that day as well, their lives are fractured, broken, dilapidated from that time onwards till death knocks on their door.
That fateful morning when I was told that my father is no more, that its all over - since then my life has been over, it has died. Yes, I am alive, am living, but that part of my life that intersected with my dad's is lost to me. I have ceased to be a daughter, I have ceased to be a person loved by her father to bits, I have ceased to be Lubna, as seen and cherished by him and him alone. Our talks, our chats and discussions are over and finished, and maybe, being dead he does not feel their absences tremendously, as much as, I feel them. The daily visits, the daily interaction, the thought of reassurance, the being of a child all has gone to naught.
What do I feel at the anniversary of my father's death - nothing - it isn't his death only, but my death as well, death of feelings, of emotions, death of my being a daughter, the death of my life as I knew it.... I am as NUMB as I was on that day... For I think I have crossed the river Lethe and in consequence forgotten everything, I am as much of a corpse as he is....
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