The Many Shades of Grief: The Day Dad Died

I always believed that nothing can happen to dad as long as I was around. But that was soon evaporating.

“They have taken him to the hospital. But he doesn’t look ok.” The calmness in her voice was damming her spilled broken heart to protect me. When they took him from home, his heart had stopped.

When mum called that evening, at around 5pm, she knew dad was gone.

“We are coming.” The earliest flight was at 6am. At 8pm, bhai informed that they managed to get his heart going and oxygen up but his sugar had plummeted, so now he was on a ventilator.

Somewhere deep down even I knew he was gone.

A part of me did not want dad to wake up stuck to tubes and catheters. And that part, like a drop of ink, was rapidly blotting my heart.

My dad was an adamant man. And a fighter.  He lived through two kidney transplants, hepatitis, a dysentery that took him to the ICU, a couple of falls that left unhealed wounds, persistent cough with debilitating effects, and after effects of 39 years of medication. So when he tested positive for COVID in January 2022, I told him, “So this is the end of COVID. You will kill it papa.”

He was my superhero—the kind that fought illnesses and diseases.

Years of medication had made his body a very delicately balanced chemical equation. COVID messed with his sodium levels. When I had met him in April, a few months later, I sensed his fighter’s spirit diminish and my belief that he was invincible as long as I was around evaporate.

The last few months of his life had become an ordeal he wasn’t willing to fight any more and so he decided it was time. He refused to go to the hospital. He warned Ma, his partner of 44 years, that it will become too much for her. It would have—his reports from that night showed his lungs were filled with water and his one remaining kidney had failed.

That Ma wanted to give one last shot, he obliged. He asked for his slippers, sat down on a chair and then in that brief moment when everyone was distracted—mum locking the terrace, bhai getting the car keys, Naro (his man friday) getting his slippers, the anaesthesiologist neighbour discussing logistics with another neighbour—he left. He crossed the border never to return.

My dad of 43 years went on his own terms. He never gained consciousness. Sugar got him at the end. Ironically, he aced the sodium levels, that had put him through the ringer the last few months. He died at 1am that night.

We were driving to my Mama’s en route to the airport. Around the time dad died, I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my forehead, albeit just for a second. A pain that makes you both acutely aware and oblivious about everything around you at once.

Bhai called a couple of seconds later.

I picked up the phone. “Papa…”.

“Oh. Ok,” is all I could muster.

I looked at Udit and looked away. At this very moment, a very dark thought flashed in my head. “You don’t get along with your dad and he is still around. I loved my dad and he is dead. HOW IS THIS OK?” I SHOUTED at Udit, in my head.

I confessed this to him a few months later. All he did was embrace me and pat my head while I howled my heart out.

In that car, sadness and grief engulfed me, drowning the dark thoughts momentarily. I panicked. I would never hear his sweet sweet voice again. “Betaaa, how are you. Are you exercising? Are you taking a bath every day? Be happy Betaaa.” Never again.

I cried. But I don’t think people cry the way they show in films. It is a sob. It is a silent cry. It is the howling heart that goes through a shredder again and again and again. It keeps crying, it keeps shredding.

When papa was brought home the next day, he was glowing, was the sweetest looking person in the room, his warts had vanished, his swelling gone, he looked 20 years younger and there was a smile on his face. He is happy, I remember thinking.

Dad had defied death many times in his life. Some were close shaves. But he always returned to give us a good life. My best life. The doctors, after his first transplant in 1984, had given him 10 years at the most. He lived for 39 years. The grief within me is often nudged aside and washed by immense gratitude, to him, for making it this far.

He lived with dignity, and when he finally crossed over, he did it with dignity.

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I wrote this to a prompt during the Ochre Sky Writing workshop. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes On Grief gave me the courage to publish it. I hope to write more on this.