Good Grief

The Kaz 19’s had their Mid Service Training last week, which was a good time to catch up and give each other inspiration and encouragement for our last year here. I returned home to find that in my short time gone, my host grandmother had passed away.

Her death should not have been such a shock to me. She’d been increasingly ill since the summer, and for the past month, my host mother and her relatives had been trading off sleeping with her at night.

In the days that followed my return, my host brothers were more subdued (no wrestling matches, no dance parties), and one of them took to sleeping during the day and staying awake all night. He said he couldn’t explain why, he just couldn’t sleep at night. So we continued with our routine, hoping for something to shake us out of our drone-like state.

Before I’d learned of her death, I got home to an empty house. I found that the cat had pooped in a corner of my room. Now, you’re probably going to judge me a bit, and I’m going to have to deal with that, but I didn’t clean that poop for a couple days. Why? Because a) I don’t know where they keep the cleaning stuff. Every time I ask “where is the soap for _____?” as long as it isn’t laundry detergent, my host parents make my brothers clean it. b) I didn’t want to make anyone clean that while they were mourning their grandmother. So I kept silent. But after the second night, my younger brother came into my room and saw that Ricky (the cat) had left me a “present”. He thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He ran to tell Maksat, who also laughed, and for the first time in a few days, we all laughed together. It’s nice to get a bit of the joy back. Then he cleaned it up. I tried to say, if they’d just show me what I should use I could do it…

They kept telling me it’s because “we’re without mother” so the cat was left inside. She hadn’t been home at all, mourning rituals require that she stay at her mother’s all week. “Without mother” nothing happens smoothly. “Without mother” we didn’t light the pichka the way we should. “Without mother” we forgot to eat meals. “Without mother… things are bad.” And it became our little joke, that without our mother at home we were just going to have to accept that our life would be sub-par.

She returned for one night to see us, and she sat down and told me the details of her mother’s passing. She explained that apa had died in the first day of Eid-al-Adha, which many people said was a blessed day to die. She seemed to have aged 10 years in one week. I didn’t realize how much energy it would take out of her. Her eyes were tired, and her voice frail. She told me that for the next 40 days, she would be gone a lot. “I will be preparing her house, taking care of things. Remembering her… Mourning her… Without mother… things are bad.” And then she began to cry.

I’ve had the misfortune to be abroad when some important people in my life have died, and I didn’t realize until that moment that I hadn’t really grieved those deaths as freely as I might have liked. When you’re on the other side of the world, and you start crying because your grandmother is dying; there is no one else around you who knows her, no one else to sympathize. A girl in my gym class in Belgium told me “Yeah, well. That’s life.” And it’s true, but that wasn’t exactly what I needed to hear. And when you have no visual proof that the person is gone, you can sort of push it aside in your head. Not denial, really, just forgetting. And now here I am, in a foreign country where I don’t know the rituals, I don’t know how to console someone. But all the evidence is there. There is a really nice old woman who let me drink chai with her and use her banya, and I will never get to listen to her give me advice again. There is a family that I live with in a pain I’ve never experienced with my real family because I’ve been absent for it. And although she wasn’t my real grandmother and I only knew her a year, I get to grieve in a way that helps me remember and grieve all those I’ve not been able to. Although it is sad, I am grateful I got to be here for this time.

And so we cried a bit, knowing that pain crosses all cultural boundaries, death affects everyone, and that without that person you’ve lost, your life is going to be sub-par. For a while, at least, without them… things are bad.