unrecognizable consistency.

 my father never knew he was enough for me. 

i never told people that they were enough for me. they would mostly take advantage of that. 

but he was. he was horrible, but he was enough. but he always thought i deserved better.

they all thought i deserved better.

and i was always confused when they chose not to be better. 

it's like living in a hospital and sitting in a waiting room for people to get better. 

they mostly did not get better. they mostly died.

and the rest got better and climbed down the fire escape where i wouldn't see.

it was the same, because they all left. leapt. 

it would be so comical, if it weren't so sad.

everyone gets sick and i get strong and brave.

i'm not strong, or brave.

i'm mostly practical now.

you can't get panicky in a hospital.

*

it doesn't feel very nice realizing you love someone who doesn't deserve it. it feels worse when you have no choice but to love them.

you can't get mad at patients.

even if they don't deserve it. even if they deserve to rot in hell for the choices they make every day.

it doesn't feel nice.

my father was really mean until he became really quiet. 

and now people say we should've loved him enough.

they don't know i loved him the most.

he had a way of making people care about him. like he was forever wounded.

they don't know that it feels like a guilty confession when i say it today. 

because he didn't deserve it.

you can't get mad at patients.

you can't even wish it.

you've got to suspend all of that to save people. 

even if they don't deserve it.

and then they still do what they want.

so your savior complex remains unfulfilled. and your jesus makeup looks damp.

and all of it amounted to nothing.

because you could still have done more

for all those that run from their consequences.

so at the funeral you'll hear 

i wish someone did something

you cannot get mad in a hospital.

*

more than his anger, i think i feared his sadness.

because i was born with an inconvenient need to take care of things. 

but then i got told that i would be a shitty mother.

i read something someone wrote about their own father recently.

we were both diagnosed to fall from great heights.

but he fell further than i.

that was not nice to hear. 

then i read that children that suffer from parental suicides are more likely to die by suicide themselves.

it's been very restrictive all these years, i reflect. i wonder how much of anything i have done has been out of my own willingness. 

all these people finish reading me before i even start writing. 

it's always been so restrictive. 

no free will in a hospital.

*

i used to think of death as a small child. not in a grim way, just speculation at best. how it would feel if either my parents died. or anyone else, really. whether i would be equipped to deal with that.

and there are these really profound movies about protagonists with estranged family members and their passing, and them dealing with all of that on one road trip with their urn. nobody really talks about having a consistently inconsistent relationship with a parent who you can't really see as an adult.

and having them die in a really public way.

and nobody really talks about the feeling.

you know

like

i wonder how it would be if my baba were here.

and it almost feels like you're 8 again.

you're 8, discovering mortality for the first time. 

*

the biggest part about losing someone is accepting that you lose everything associated with them. the certain feeling that came with them, the sense of safety and understanding. losing all of that. i don't think a lot of people acknowledge that.

my dad wasn't my biggest cheerleader or anything. sometimes he was just there. sometimes he'd just pick me up, no questions asked.

it's difficult to explain that you'd do anything to feel that again, but not from anyone else.

it's almost excruciating to explain, that i wouldn't want to hold hands with anyone else. i would however like to hold his one finger in the crowd.

it's never the action, and no one believes that.

it's scary. to have a parent be something you feel and not someone you know.

or not wanting to forget them, but not wanting to see them in home decor.

it's like

i miss you

and i missed you

and it's all in the mist.

you're in the mist baba.

*

i stole my father's ashes and put him in a flower pot.

the flower died.

maybe in a year i can tell people

hey i got a pot of baba

*

my dad always joked about him getting old. he did not like the idea of aging. he said i wouldn't come see him, take care of him when he was old.

joke's on him i guess.

his corpse was almost taxidermed. and he was cold. and he didn't look like my father, really. 

plus his death made into the news paper and the media, which was extremely strange and baffling.

that made me think of all the people who's deaths had been published for other people to see.

and that was an odd moment of solidarity.

something none of these other people understand. so, if anyone tells you they understand, they don't.

ironically, this incident put a lot of things in perspective. because now, the world had stopped for me. and it was just another day for all these other people. it was almost, just another story.

which, i won't lie, was sort of a really cruel realization at that point of time. for a second i wondered how i'd react if that happened to someone really close to me. i wondered whether my world would just keep spinning.

there was just one person who stuck through it, and treated it more personally as compared to the rest of my social circle. it was strange, because she didn't really know anything about the whys and the hows and the oh-sos. none of the technicalities none of the terms. and it impressed me, really. 

she knew how little was right to say. when to say. 

so i refrained from speaking about how much it had affected me to anyone else.

that did not play out well, but i believe that it is outrageous for that to happen. especially since all these people have alive parents. (a couple of entitled assholes)

*

turns out, you don't really realize how many 'i need my dad' moments you have, until he's dead and not just an asshole. because 'asshole' doesn't erase the potential someone has of not being one. being dead kind of does. 

it was like i was a bystander to the end of his life. other times a lifeboat. there were no in betweens, ever. and now there's this strange distance created with grief, when i had wanted to mend things with him before i left. 

the last proper conversation i had with him was ugly. there was a lot of unresolved things hanging from the ceiling that would drop from time to time. i wasn't really allowed to get mad, and then i would because i taught myself boundaries. and then he would curl up. sometimes i'd see a glance of who he really was. a glance. 

sometimes he really made me hate myself. everyone i loved did. it started with him, perhaps.

the last thing i ever was to him, was indifferent. that's not all i was to him, but the good stuff feel like dreams than memories.

funnily enough, i thought i had buried who he was to me a long time ago. it was when i watched him being pushed into a furnace that i couldn't remember how long i had been telling that lie to myself.

there was no way to burn all that regret with him. it was like this whole bag of stuff with nowhere to put. 

i have these friends with confusing relationships with their fathers, but i've never been able to find one that relates. when they speak of their fathers, it always shows how much love there is in that. just love, masked in uncertainty at best. 

but i've never really known what my relationship with my father was. i never tried to dissect it. it was always too messy. i have loved him and i have hated him. but now whenever i catch myself hating him, it sort of turns back on me. i hate myself for hating him.

it feels strange now.

it's like i'm grieving the love of my life and the person i hated more than anything else.

and there's just grief that remains.

grieving everything he was. and everything he wasn't.

on bad days it feels like there is no end to this. the rest of the time i know that there is a life to live. just maybe not the one i had speculated.

it is always ironic to think how i spent so long trying to tear that life down, and now i would do anything to live it.

my mother always says, i wish i could take that weight from you.

she couldn't take any more weight. plus even if she could, i wouldn't give it. it's all i have left of him. truly.

*

i think when baba left, he closed the door that i had desperately kept open for all these years. waiting for him to be the adult i needed him to be. the same door a lot of people took advantage of, when they entered my head.

he closed the door and it is quiet inside. and now it is time to fill all the gaps he left in me. 

all the love i had for him, claimed by all these other strangers, now vaporize into thin air.

it will be a little sad, but it will be alright.

and it will be okay for me to wonder how he would look at 70.

*

a few days ago, i got up to some strange youtubing.  an interview with a mortician taught me that when bodies are buried in christian cemeteries, they're laid with their heads toward the west and their feet toward the east. this is so that when the second coming of christ occurs, and all good christians are brought back to life, they will rise facing jesus. 

i found that tradition interesting, though not in any literal sense, much how i feel about christianity in general.

dealing with a dead body can be confusing. because it's an annoying place to be, thinking something is ridiculous and yet fearing it all the same, wanting so badly to do the right thing for the person you love but feeling so out of your depth about how to do that, you're willing to surrender to something fantastical or superstitious.

after the mortician interview, i watched a video about an indonesian tribe, the torajans, whose tradition is to keep the bodies of their dead loved ones around weekend at bernie's-style. 

they honor the descent into grief by going slowly, caring for the body as it decays, intentionally planning a meaningful funeral, and even after burial, ritually exhuming the body for ongoing care. their love had somewhere to go, the absence of which is exactly why grief can hurt so much. they would kiss their loved one on the forehead or brush their hair, and they'd even clean and redress the body for a refreshed burial. 

while i may not have been interested in doing any of this with my baba's corpse, i could understand feeling calmed by some physical reminder of him, like seeing his hands again.

but it turns out, it was sure that he would be cremated. scientifically put "mechanically pulverized into an unrecognizable consistency." these words, i morbidly chuckle at. and consequently feel a quaking sickness about.

in any case, him being cremated felt like another "finality" in the whole thing. not because i was still actively trying to negotiate his death - he's dead and usually, for the most part, i know that. but because the death of a person so large in your life leaves a lot of things undone and those things are constantly being remembered unexpectedly. i think about conversations left unfinished, questions left unanswered, phone calls never received. on the heavier side, weddings, graduations left unattended, partners left unapproved of, fickle behaviors left un-commented at. 

heaviest being, toes left uncracked, hair left unbrushed, puzzles left unsolved, hugs left unhugged, video games left un-played, music left unheard, jokes left unlaughed at, and then

the apologies left unsaid.

i confront a new finality of him every day. that day, that his physical body no longer existed. his cells and his dna, his fingernails and coloured over hair follicles, his eyes and his bumpy nose and the heart that made a mess of things in the first place, however previously unalive, are now no longer. 

it is weird to me. not sure of how he would feel about that.

maybe there's still a way to tell me.

love you baba.

safe travels.

h.b.

*

                                                 i'm sure we're taller in another dimension.

                                    this house she's quite the keeper. quite the keeper, of you.

it was heaven, a moment ago.

i had it, almost.

we had it,

almost.