His needs from a relationship are much simpler now.

I’m going to juxtapose two passages from the heartwarming short story Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. An old father and his daughter, Ruma, are slowly coming to terms with the death of the most important person they shared between them — his wife, her mother.

Daughter

For when Ruma pictured that house in her mind, her mother was always alive in it, impossible not to see. With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times — simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: “He is made from your meat and bone.” It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now — that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.

Father

He remembered his children coming home from college, impatient with him and his wife, enamored of their newfound independence, always wanting to leave. It had tormented his wife and, though he never admitted it, had pained him as well. He couldn’t help thinking, on those occasions, how young they’d once been, how helpless in his nervous arms, needing him for their very survival, knowing no one else. He and his wife were their whole world. But eventually that need dissipated, dwindled to something amorphous, tenuous, something that threatened at times to snap. That loss was in store for Ruma, too; her children would become strangers, avoiding her. And because she was his child he wanted to protect her from that, as he had tried throughout his life to protect her from so many things. He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start. But these were an old man’s speculations, an old man who was himself now behaving like a child.

— from Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.

This particular story remains one of my favorite short stories. The father’s and daughter’s memories are intertwined beautifully with their current perspectives and subtle expectations. The rest of the story brings out how the father’s needs from a relationship are much simpler now, and why his daughter’s home cannot be his, and why his grandson cannot take the place of a companion.