the tentacles of time

The prelude to death scares me more than death itself. How vain of me to be twenty-two years young and petrified of ageing, but it’s not the mental image of wrinkles or dentures that make me quiver. 

It’s the thought of the gradual erosion of everything – one’s eyesight, one’s memory, one’s selfhood.  

It’s the inability to climb a flight of stairs, or bake chocolate cake, or read Douglas Coupland anymore.  

It’s the feeling of everyday, all-the-time helplessness as someone else scrubs your back, feeds you lunch or plaits your hair; the things mummy used to do for you when you were six.  

It’s the indignity of having to greet visitors when you’re in a hospital bed and your chest is exposed and you are wearing a urine bag. 

It’s the inevitability of loss as your children surround you, and you relate memories of your youth and remind them to bury you next to your husband.

It’s the unmistakable sound of your own gulps for breath, and the taste of too many pills and the slow tears of no more hope.  

It’s the quiet, bewildered surrender as you lay there, empty, having come to the end of yourself.

Transience

There’s nothing like a run in with mortality to bring one closer to Allah. Even if it was not mine; especially because it was my father’s.

He was shot in the chest on the night of the 28th July in our kitchen, by one of two burglars. They escaped with nothing but our peace of mind. My brother, who was in the next room, drove my dad to the hospital while my sister, barefoot and hysterical, tried calling my mum and family members for help while in the car. (Her R12 of airtime lasted, somehow).

She called me too, in desperation, but stuck in this tiny town a thousand kilometres away, all I could was pray. Please keep him alive, please keep him alive.

[Oddly, I remember thinking of the novel Shades during those hours, and Father Charles’ belief that those who have enough faith don’t need to bargain with God. I didn’t. None of that “Please Allah, if you do x, then I promise I will do y”, because my dad also taught me that His will doesn’t come with conditions.]

I flew home the next day, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. My dad has always been my bastion, my cliched pillar of strength. I love him like he is invincible, as daughters often do. But seeing him outside of our lives’ template - in a hospital bed, wires protruding from his body, struggling to breathe, grimacing every time he moved – was a hack to the heart each time.

Two months later, he’s almost recovered from his injuries. He’s got his smile back, but not his verve. And sometimes I can tell that the puffiness around his eyes is not from exhaustion but tears.

Life persists, we comply dutifully, rehearsing platitudes that “we’re okay now.” Even if my sister has nightmares and my mother has insomnia and I cry in the bathroom.

I fluctuate between sheer gratitude and abject rage, ineffably glad that my father is alive but repulsed and terrified to be living alongside people with no humanity.