The Song and Dance of a Funeral Party

taken in Chicago, 2015

Last week I had a dream that it was Eid and I was with my mother and sister and we were at a function and everyone kept coming up to me and showering me with condolences for my recent loss. This is how my subconscious learns that this is a dream where my spouse has died. 

I woke up, checked that he was there in bed, and ran through my memory to make sure this dream was, in fact, just a fluke and not that thing where your internal dream machine borrows plots from your life and boosts the fear factor. Anyway, then it was over. 

The reason I’m writing is that it wasn’t over over because I kept thinking about it. In my personal life, grief is a fateful and longstanding companion, one that I talk about and think about with gratitude. My dad got sick and died very suddenly when I was 19. I don’t envy the people who’ve never lost someone close to them. Everything arrives to me filtered through grief, and I swear to you, it is the greatest gift. 

I’ve since thought about what life might feel like on the other side of losing the most beloved people in my life, and while imagination has very real limitations, I know that, best case scenario, I will be devastated and transformed by death again and again for the rest of my life. And I don’t think loss is a great fear of mine. I think about death all the time, so I guess the idea that a dream could disturb me so badly caused me some friction.

But then I remembered the actual loss. Not what I learned from it and not the perspective I gained. Not the years after the hurt. The hurt itself. I’ve spent years appreciating grief and its beauty, but the loss period was something I have worked hard to skip over. 

One of the secret surprises they don’t tell you about loss is how dehumanizing it can be. It’s a circus of pity that you’re hosting in your own house. It’s no one’s fault, and you can’t change it. Everyone says a lot of words and looks at you with eyes bigger and more downturned than you’ve ever seen. You’re already in your own personal nightmare, now you’re on a pedestal, embodying everyone else’s too. You barely know what’s going on, they know even less. A huge part of why pity feels so bad is because its unhelpfulness does nothing to offset the weight of its burden. The other thing is that you can hardly feel yourself doing it. Welcome to the theatre of a funeral party, the song and dance of a species that loves ceremony. These rules are not real, and of course you know that, but everyone else is doing it, and you don’t have an alternative, so what else are you gonna do? 

The morning after my dad died, I was sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom with my sister, 17 at the time, and our childhood friends who had lost their dad some years prior. Downstairs, the house was filled with every adult I had ever known. But upstairs, the four of us were happy and distracted and laughing about dumb, non-heavy things and making inappropriate death jokes that only we knew how to laugh at. Ayesha and I were sitting with the only people who knew how not to pity us for our circumstance. It was a rare kind of support that allowed us to be human beings, still alive, with life still ahead of us, and not the end scene of a tragedy. My older cousin knocked on the door, dissolving our imaginary haven, to let us know she could hear us laughing downstairs and that we should probably come down too. In the moment, I felt a major sense of teen angst, like who cares, what does it matter, why are you telling us what to do, etc. But we listened anyway. 

To be honest with you, I don’t remember much from that summer, but I revisit this memory a lot. 

And I’m not writing this from a place of blame or snark toward anyone because obviously this is dying we’re talking about — what am I gonna do, tell people to lighten up? Mortality is probably the root of insecurity and desperation and the thing that governs human beings to be weird to each other. Every reaction to it is natural. People will say things that make sense to themselves, and you’ll find it insufferable, and both are reasonable. 

Over the weekend, I saw my friend Claire (also has a dead father). She’s written about it. She’s still writing about it. To this day, I never have, and I told her about that. How every time I begin something about loss, I stop when the story gets to the loss part. There are big spaces from that time that I just don’t remember. I want to be able to think about the things I didn’t have in me to think about eight years ago. And it seems like my dreams are trying to reach me. So here’s an attempt.

Visitor’s pass from my dad’s last day.

If you’ve made it here, I have a sincere request. I talk about my dad a lot with my friends and family because I love to. If you want to, please send me stories about the lives of people you’ve lost. You can DM me on Twitter or Instagram or email me. I would love to read them and talk about their lives.