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All About My Mother
It has now been four months since my mother passed away, all the relatives and friends like migratory birds have returned back to their own world. In my family of two older brothers and my father, no one talks about her anymore. The verbal denial of her death now stages our everyday interactions, as acknowledging her absence would bring about a cathartic pain of grief that is slowly unfurling and recoiling, underneath the shroud of willful amnesia.
I have not been able to process her passing, and with each passing day, the tentacles of grief seem to now rapidly subsume the comfortable facade of denial. Over time, the grief has now cemented itself around the periphery of my throat, making me unable to utter words without bursting into tears. I can feel it swirling inside my stomach, screaming with pain and indignation, aching to be released from the confines of my body. I had to come to terms and face the new reality.
At A Dinner Table Conversation With My Father
At a dinner table conversation with my father, he tells me how he’s recently started feeding a lot of birds back home. Half listening to him go on about how the Hadeeth mentions that birds can earn you a lot of grace, bless their helpless little hearts, I think of how poetic it is that his love for animals finds religious sanction so he can now serve them joyfully, without it being a necessity of his profession (he's a vet), or an attack on his masculinity.