What if I want to lie down too?  

“Abu? Abu!” Mama calls for her father on the phone. Her bedroom door is closed, and it muffles nothing. “Bhai! You’re right next to him, right? Abu? Abu!” she insists, as if convincing something to return. “I’m here, Abu! Forgive me. I tried. But I couldn’t be there for you.”  

“Please, Bhai. No, the funeral can’t be over. No, Bhai, please, I still need to say goodbye. He’s right there. You didn’t let me say goodbye.”  

Mama never says goodbye before the phone connection cuts off. I don’t think she planned to. 

***

The person who loved Mama most was my grandfather, my Nana. Last year, Nana died alone on his hard mattress in Pakistan after years of battling painful Alzheimer’s, depression and cancer. Before Nana died, he, miserable with illness, begged my mother to visit him every night on the phone. The opportunity never came. 

When Nana died, Mama asked everyone back home to postpone the funeral until she arrived. But my grandmother, my Nani, said the funeral must be arranged quickly before the body decomposes and that Nana died on a holy Friday, and Fridays wash away a passing soul’s sins. Since Mama couldn’t attend the funeral or say goodbye, she believes Nana died angry at her.   

Two years ago, my mother and I visited Nana for the last time in his apartment in Karachi to take care of him. When we left, I remember staring at his face as Mama dragged the apartment door shut, its ledge gradually cutting him away. Somehow, I knew that was it. The last time. I hauled my suitcase down the elevator and back to the airport. 

***

Whenever Mama stops eating, Nana’s memory seems to halo her. This is when I reminded her that Nana’s illness had altered him—Nana always moved the wrong chess pieces, mistook Nani for an intruder after 8 p.m., and hated staying inside the apartment in his last years. So whatever frustration he felt towards her, I insist to Mama that it came from a sick person who wasn’t completely her father anymore. 

In turn, my most vivid memories are now of Mama’s grief. I hear her scream goodbye to her father’s corpse through her phone. I hear Nana’s WhatsApp voice messages, the ones where he mumbles Mama’s name that Mama saved to my Google Drive. I hear Mama rambling aloud about every flight she could have caught to see Nana but failed to.

I tell her what I hear: living is easier than dying. When we die, we don’t feel pain, we don’t feel fear. There is no reason to cry for Nana because Nana has nothing left to hurt him.  

But then I waver, and so does Mama, until we’re crying at the breakfast table at 9 a.m., because how do you reconcile with a ghost? 

***

Nana died on the same mattress he taught me to walk on, and now it feels like a betrayal to keep living without him.

“Every day I wish I were dead,” I hear Mama say one day in her bedroom, talking to a grieving cousin on the phone. “I wish I could have laid down in the grave right next to Abu so we could be buried together. But the worst part is, Eraj doesn’t cry.”  

It’s not the first time I’ve wished for our doors not to be so thin. The first few nights after Nana left, I stifled my sobs in my bedroom until my ribs contracted. Grief left me limp on my work desk.  

When Nana died, I decided to forget him. I decided Nana moved to Denmark, his favourite vacation spot. I pretended Nana forgot me or that I never had a Nana, hoping the lie would give me back the mornings I didn’t wake up with a throat clogged with memories. To erase Nana, I decided it was him who left us in that Karachi apartment one summer day. 

 But Mama will never do the same. 

Instead, Mama seems ready to leave me for a dirty grave even though I’m not ready to let her go. But I understand because if she left me, I would follow her, too. I understand Nana loved Mama the way Mama loves me, and love is a hard thing to find in an immigrant family so far from the right shores.  

Tomorrow, Mama will leave me. So, what happens when it is her turn to lie down? How will I stop myself from curling up next to her in the same dirt we dodge by leaving our shoes by our door? I will surely close my eyes and pretend I have also found silence in my veins until I see her again.  

When I am standing on the edge of the grave, what do I do then, God? Why must I live when my family doesn’t have to, when there is nowhere left I hope to be? 

***

“Does Auntie show up in your dreams? I keep expecting Abu to show up in mine. But he’s not there,” Mama’s voice breaks, speaking to her cousin. “I thought he’d come to see me after everything, and he didn’t.” Mama believes that when a soul moves on, it still visits their loved ones. If a loved one visits your dreams, it means they’ve decided to stay with you. Mama refuses to produce Nana’s death certificate because it’ll mean he truly left her. 

Nana sometimes appears in my dreams. Sometimes he’s sitting in a lush chair in a law office, sometimes he’s walking around my university. Every few months, he comes back. I don’t tell Mama because I don’t believe in what she does, and if she knew, she’d ask me things I don’t have answers to.  

But I know that Nana always smiles in my dreams, and he talks to me. He’s not sick anymore. He’s Nana. And he smiles at me. 

***

Some time after Nana died, Mama told me Nana knew something.  

“The night before it happened, I called him like I always do, and he said something funny,” Mama says, vaguely staring at a spot beyond my ear. He said,  “I wish you were here, and life wasn’t so quick.’ So, I asked him, ‘Abu, are you afraid of dying?’ and he said, ‘No. I’m afraid of staying like this.’” 

“Abu’s always been a lot smarter than me,” she continued, “I tried so hard to hide his illness from him, and he knew anyway. He knew everything, and I think he knew he was about to die.”  

Mama finally looked directly at me. Nana had wanted to leave. For the first time in two years, Mama looked at me the same way I looked at Nana when the apartment door closed. With a look of sureness, Mama acknowledged that Nana had died.  

It was then I knew that Mama had finally said goodbye. 

***

I never thought I’d survive the loss of a loved one, but things have been changing. 

Mama has started giving me Nana’s old hoodie and socks to wear. She started sharing her favourite stories about him at the breakfast table. I think she knows now that Nana’s memory doesn’t haunt her, instead, Nana’s memories have always celebrated her, and in turn, Mama now celebrates her unwavering love for Nana.  

We used to think Nana’s last breath of anger fossilized his legacy, like a fly trapped in amber. But his breath was just one of many, and it took us months to realize that.  

Still, how do I prepare for a loss I know will break me?  

I think Nana prepared me to accept living as a responsibility. One day, I’ll be on my own, and I’ll miss Mama’s hugs. But Mama will miss nothing because in another life, Mama will have found a certain kind of peace the noise of our immigrant life never gave her. One day in this life, I will continue living with a sureness—the sureness of a parent dropping their child off at daycare. 

There is relief in carrying a burden for someone else. Sometimes that burden is living, breathing, seething, sleeping, but always waking up. I found hope shovelling dirt onto a familiar face and turning the light off in a bedroom with a stiff mattress this summer. I found hope that suffering would end.  

I think Mama and I are less anxious about living and losing now. Life and loss are funny like that because maybe they’re the same thing—always preparing us for the other.