The wailing will start again and as you all watch the grave-diggers begin to fill up the grave with earth, even the men will become tearful. Couples who have not spoken to each other in weeks will hold hands. I was too shocked to cry at my father’s funeral, but you had tears in your eyes even though you did not let one of them fall.
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I did ache when I said goodbye to the friends I’d made. I ached when I said goodbye to my grandparents, to my cousins, to my aunts, to my mother. I ached for lasting connection, for a place where rejection was not inevitable. No matter how many times I stood on bare floors, surrounded by blank walls, telling myself I belonged everywhere and to everyone, emptied houses never stopped feeling like ruin. Failing to fully belong in my father’s family, and my mother’s, never stopped feeling like disgrace.
He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.
“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.
Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.
If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.
OK, we’ll tell her you dug the grave.’ It’s the truth – stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?
“I traveled the next morning to my see my maternal grandmother. This is the grandmother I am named after. It is our custom that when we are to embark on a long journey, we must seek the blessing of our living elders as well as our ancestors. My grandmother and I prayed together. I could feel the joy, anticipation, anxiety, and hopes of my family. I was carrying the dreams of our people.