I'm a girl. This journal is almost 10 years old, when I started it, I called it Almost 21. Before that, I had a journal called Soap on a domain that no longer exists. Some things have changed since then, some things haven't. I always wanted to be a writer. I live out that dream here.
This is precisely the message my dad sends me the minute my grandmother dies. I stare at the phone, wondering whether to believe it or not. Without thinking, I call my mother to ask her, but she is unaware. She will call my dad at the hospital, she says, and ring me back.
So, it is confirmed.
It is a weird feeling, this. Suddenly I am crying for a woman I never thought I would cry for.
"It's so strange. I still can't believe it." I am talking to my aunt at the funeral. "We've been waiting for her to die our whole lives, and now that she is gone I don't know what to do."
Work needs to be done. Arrangements made, food cooked, people accomodated. They want to cook food in her kitchen. They want me to get a trays and glasses out of her cupboards. At one point I find myself standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, glass in hand, tears flowing.
Her things are so carefully arranged. She has ornaments hanging from every visible hook, obsecure, even ugly, ornaments hung with such care. This is not right, if she were alive there would be no way she would be allowing this invasion of her kitchen. It makes me sick.
"Look how beautiful my mother's face is."
My aunt says during the bathing of the body. It is our culteral duty to bathe the body. I wondered, when I walked in to see her lying there naked but for a white sheet wrapped around her lower body, if I would faint, but then I was okay. There are four ladies there, two of them my aunts, and two I don't know. They wipe the body with a damp cloth, turning it over this way, then that.
"Actually my mother's heart was also very beautiful." My aunt continues. I want to laugh, both out of hysteria and the sheer ridiculousness of the statement. My grandmother's heart was anything but beautiful, everyone knows this.
"Touch her, feel how cold she is." My other aunt urges. I refuse. They sprinkle talcom powder over the body, and ask us to spray perfume, an order to which I oblige with shaking hands. They tie her hands and feet together, and send for the coffin. I liken the event to dressing a chicken. It all feels very unreal, I'm not even sure if I'm there or not, not sure what I'm seeing, still not believing that she's dead.
"She is the kind of woman books should be written about."
Our neighbour says in his speech. My sister looks at me. I had always said that I wanted to write a book about Dadi, but I never started because I never thought it would end. Now, I have an ending, but I don't know where to begin.
Upstairs, I expect to hear her screen door thud, then her laboured footsteps as she climbs up the stairs, opens the sliding doors without closing them, sits down on the couch and makes some nasty remark. These are the things that I miss, the things that made her. It feels wrong to know that this will not happen again, ever, because it has been happening for as long as I could remember. It is so hard to get my head around, still.
We all knew that she would die one day, death is inevitable. We just never thought she would. To us, she was immortal.
"You didn't even like her, and you're so upset."
People don't understand the way I feel. Even I don't understand it. No, I didn't like her. No, she wasn't a very nice grandmother, but she was the only grandmother I ever knew. It was her nastiness that gave her character, the things that everyone cried for as the coffin was carried away. Who would have thought, crying because you wouldn't be verbally abused anymore.
I wondered, when she was sick in a coma, what she was thinking. I wondered if she was afraid. I wondered if she would be able to tell me what it was like one day. I never thought she would die, I felt it, but I didn't let myself think it.
I like to think that she didn't hate us all the time, that she did like us for brief moments when she wasn't yelling at us and chasing us with sticks, stealing our toys or eating my pet chicken. I like to think that at least once, she might have been proud to have had us as her granddaughters. Perhaps on those Sunday mornings when she would get dressed up and ask us excitedly to go to the temple with her. I would be there with her every week when I was younger. Then one day, I was old enough to say no.
I cry even now, as I write this. It has been almost a week. I have no regrets, but I make them up because I regret not having regrets.
Perhaps I should have called her, like my mum would always tell me to do. Perhaps I should have been nicer to her, but I know that she would never have allowed it. Perhaps I should have gone to the temple with her the last time she had asked. Perhaps I never should have stopped going.
"It doesn't feel like she's gone."
Because she was supposed to be immortal. So strong, so viscious and so full of life.
"I never thought she would die so quickly. I will miss her very much." A tear of my dad's fell on my shoulder the day of the funeral. It is the first time I have seen my dad cry. I hope to never have to see it again.
There are periods of acceptance followed by waves of denial. I have this vision of her sitting on her couch in front of the door, sometimes lying down getting up the minute someone walked past to see who it was, to give them the third degree. I have this vision because she was always there in that position, every day for as long as I can remember. It is embossed in my mind like some kind of fossil.
Suddenly, death is more real than it ever was.
"It's not natural not to change."
Perhaps this is why nobody thought she would ever die. So many years passed, so many things changed around her yet the entire time, she remained the same.
Now, I am faced with the ultimate change, and I wonder if I will be able to pull through this. It is like someone has pulled the floor from beneath my feet, and I really don't know what to do.
Do I walk, or do I fall?