Essay: One year later, overcoming the loss of a parent
The week before I left for college I got my hair cut in the bad part of town.
My older sister drove past variations of Family Dollar; the Taj Chaat House, (known for its low end but authentic Indian cuisine) and a carniceria before arriving at Bridafly salon tucked into a corner across from a lavanderia in a suburb outside of Dallas.
My younger cousins, who were visiting from California since my mother’s stroke in July, came to the salon with us. My sister told Alex, the stylist, what to do; I vaguely noted that she described her own haircut. I gave Alex an apathetic smile as she led me off to wash my hair.
An hour later, I thanked Alex noncommittally and the four of us crammed back into the two-door coupe.
I pulled down the front passenger seat mirror and slowly touched my hair.
“It’s horrible.”
Suddenly, I was crying my eyes out like I hadn’t since my mom was diagnosed with cancer 13 years ago. Since it moved to her lungs last summer and I wheeled her oxygen canister around when she got too tired to pull it. Since it moved to her brain two months before. Since she had a stroke a month ago. Since she moved to in-home hospice care three weeks ago. Since she lost coherence two weeks ago. Since I lifted her up and into her wheelchair a week and a half ago. Since I brushed her teeth and washed and combed her hair and cut her nails a week ago. Since she didn’t recognize me a day ago.
My cousins, at 8 and 10 years old, were confused that a mere haircut could cause such a violent reaction and they worked hard to console me.
“No really, it’s so nice, it looks so good on you!”
“Yeah, really it’s not as bad as that one time Sana cut my hair.”
“Or the time Aishah cut her own hair.”
I cried harder.
From the back seat I heard a concerned. “It’s OK, it’ll grow back, it’ll go back to normal.”
But I knew it wouldn’t ever go back to normal. I was finally realizing there was no normal anymore.
To my left my sister hissed at me to control myself in front of the kids.
I got home and crawled over the railings into my mom’s bed. She looked at me and I knew how much it hurt her to see me cry; yet I did it anyway. I cried into her left side, the side she could still feel.
I left for my first semester of college on Aug. 14. I saw my mother twice more after that. She spoke with difficulty and spent most of the day asleep in her bed with its metal railings raised. She looked at me dolefully when she woke.
In truth, I lost my mother months before she died. By the time she had her stroke, my mother was no longer the master programmer, the Cambridge alum, the cosmopolitan daughter of a general in the Pakistani army, the women who proved you could have it all; job, family, even cancer. That woman, the one who raised me, disappeared slowly with the growth of her brain tumor.
What was left was a fragile shell that only echoed everything I’d needed in my mother, then 52. Honestly, at the end, seeing my mom, in pain, dying, scared me.
Toward the end, when my mother spoke she often wasn’t lucid. The times she was lucid, she knew she was dying and tried to set her affairs in order, begging everyone who came to see her for forgiveness and assuring them that they had hers. Once she said she was ready. Mostly she slept.
On Sept. 9, I woke up from a nap in my dorm to six missed calls and 14 text messages. That evening I was on my way back home for the funeral. I sat silently in the car with my uncle and his wife who picked me up on their way from their home in Kansas to mine in Texas.
Once home, my sister, our aunts and I cleaned the body, as is Islamic custom. We wrapped my mother in white linens that had been washed in water from a well on the other side of the world in the holy city of Mecca. The story goes that Abraham’s infant son Ishmael kicked the ground in the desert where the Zamzam well miraculously sprang into being.
My grandmother, my sisters, my father’s family and I buried the body the next morning in a portion of the cemetery reserved for Muslims. Save for my maternal grandmother, my mother’s family was all in Pakistan and unable to attend their youngest sister’s funeral. We were surrounded by massive dragonflies and sparsely marked graves.
Before her stroke but after her brain tumor my mother had decided what her three daughters should wear to her funeral. And so we stood in the heat in matching white eyelet lace shalwar kameez with white scarves.
I did not shed a single tear. I caught myself smiling for a moment. I felt terrifyingly lightened.
Consciously, rationally, I explained my reaction to myself. I was merely relieved that someone I cared deeply about was no longer in constant physical pain.
Emotionally, in the moment, I was horrified that I could stand there and smile after watching my mother’s body go into the ground, after throwing three handfuls of dirt over her grave.
I have never felt more dissonant and at odds with myself than I did at my mother’s funeral on a bright, hot Texas summer day.
This Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of my mother’s passing. For a while I was convinced that I should be past any bereavement at this point, well adjusted in my grieving process. I’m not.
Six days before the anniversary I went back to Bridafly for a much needed haircut. My front bangs reach past my chin and I feel like Cousin Itt.
“I have an appointment with Alex at 6:30!” I said, pulling out my braid, mussed from sleeping on it during the two-hour car ride back home.
While she washed my hair in the sink, working the shampoo and conditioner through it, I told her how I came straight to the salon from Oklahoma.
“We’re having a memorial for my mom.”
“Has it been a year already?”
I’d forgotten how wonderful it felt to have someone wash my hair with warm water, run their fingers over it and gently pull through the tangles, scratching the scalp and loosening stray hair.
I’d forgotten the feeling of someone combing through my curls, softly, parting my hair over and over to trim here, thin out there, layer at the bottom.
I remembered my mom washing my hair when I was little, I remembered her combing it out, parting and re-parting it until I told her the part was up to my standards, absolutely, perfectly straight.
I reveled in one of the first times something normal felt good in almost a year.
