On Moving On

There’s layer of fine dust over everything in the house, and I’m thinking of how it will take another week to get the damn thing out of every surface, crack and hole in the house. Now, ordinarily, Hindu families avoid any new construction or major purchases for a year after a family member’s death. This job, however, was started by my father, and so we decided to complete it.

I stare outside at the hazy excuse of a night sky and I have a sudden moment when everything appears hollow, shallow and meaningless. Unreal.

It’s always at night that it’s the worst. When you’re all alone in the darkness with your thoughts, with no TV or guests or internet to distract you. When it hits you just as hard as the first day that there will be no father to wake you up, smile proudly at your test scores, to sing along anymore. People assume you look for an escape from the sadness, and so everyone gives the same advice: let life go on.

I object. I don’t want to move on, or let life go on. I want to stay right here, and trap the past in a bullet-proof glass box welded shut, so that I never forget any moment with my father. Every moment that I let life go on, my father drifts further away from me. And so I value the night, no matter how hard it gets, because that’s when I’m alone with the thought of the only thing I wish for: some more time with him…

I go back to the dust, and I have a moment of epiphany. The dust is like my life now. Every moment, every aspect of existence is tempered by the awareness of loss, waking and sleeping. The dust will clear away, and so will the pain, when awareness gives way to sweet remembrance…