If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.
Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavors and colors.
I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.
Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.
You can’t nice your way to being loved.
Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.
It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.
I am afraid of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after...
We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve.
There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.
Silence hangs over us, but it is a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. I have nightmares about the other kind, the silence of when Papa was alive.
Do you try to treat cancer sores or the cancer itself? We cannot afford to give pocket money to our children. We cannot afford to eat meat. We cannot afford bread. So your child steals and you turn to him in surprise? You must try to heal the cancer because the sores will keep coming back.
I liked to call him ‘a gentle man and a gentleman’.
I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.
I wish... I wish... the guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could’ve happened, and all the ways the world could’ve been reshaped to prevent what happened on that day...
I remembered my father coaching me before I took my GCE exam and how he said, as I stalled in solving a long equation, ‘Yes, you’re getting there. Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t stop.’ Is that why I believe now in always trying? It is, of course, too easy to draw simple causative lines. It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.
I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.
I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.
The frequent flare of sad longing.
It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise...