I was just going through a few photos from the last Thanksgiving I spent at home. Everyone looked so healthy. I miss then. I know I wasn't in a great place then, I know that is was right before everything fell apart, but it was a beautiful time. The weekend was unseasonably warm. I remember sunshine flitting through apple trees. Changing leaves and the smell of fall. It was a good weekend.
My father is dying. I am almost certain of it. The doctors told him he had five to ten years to live, and in about two months it will have been eight. He looked much healthier two years ago. Now he looks, more or less, the way he did before the surgery. There's something about it. The look of someone who is content. Someone you love. Someone who is happy and healthy. It is satisfaction. Not for him, but for me. Now he looks grey. He is depressed. He is dying.
My grandmother's birthday either was two days ago, or will be in two days. It's not really her birthday, as she predates things like record-keeping in rural, late-colonial India, but legally, her date of birth is something to the effect of January 27, 1914. She is somewhere around 93. I think her name might be Khadija, but I'm never sure. My grandmother lived with my family for quite a while before I was born. She used to stay in what was once Asim's room and is now a meaningless, unused space with the most comfortable bed in the house. She left when I was 6 months old. I spent a few days with her when I was fourteen. It didn't mean much to me. I don't know if anything means much to her.
Asim and my grandmother used to wrestle.
I am convinced that she will bury us all. Not literally, since she pretty much has nothing to do with us, but I honestly cannot imagine the woman dying. Sometimes I wonder if this might be the case with my father. He wants to die. Really spends his days waiting for that moment to come upon him. But it's fatalism. He lives for death, and so he dies. He doesn't live at all. Just dies. But what if it takes him a long time? Losing him will be hard. Not losing him might be harder.
I am at a loss.
