“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Our father passed away. It has been 44 days since. My mother is with me for a little while. We are healing from this enormous loss together. You see it doesn’t go away; the grief, the sorrow finds you in the midst of a normal activity, like cooking a meal, driving, or waiting in line. It never will leave, for I miss my father, and the idea of loss is hard to reconcile with, but we are learning to accommodate grief, we are carving space around it, and perhaps softening it. In the end resistance to loss and grief is futile, one has to accept and make amends with it sooner or later. We are working on it one day at a time.
I wrote a little eulogy…
My father Dervis…
He loved baked goods, chocolates and mango margaritas it turns out. Being an introvert, he needed to have his own time and space, and quiet. He was a disciplined man, and he liked to have things in order. Our chaotic family life, with the demands of 4 children at various ages, and his and my mom’s goal to have us succeed must have been tough on this orderly man when we were growing up.
My father liked to go against the mainstream; if everyone was buying Pioneer, he’d get Panasonic or was it Samsung?, when everyone got Pinokyo bicycles he got us Kaptan, an orange, big bulky bicycle, better in his opinion, heavier in mine, and he then relentlessly spent hours running after me (and my sisters, but I admit I took the longest) till I got a hold of riding it. Everyone was getting Commodore 60, of course ours would be the only Atari XL around. He was forward thinking especially when it came to electronics; he loved computers from day one and made sure that we had one in our house before anyone else did. Of course in those early days we didn’t know what to do with it, but he somehow knew they’d become a vital part of everyone’s life.
Every summer, he’d drive us to camp by the Mediterranean in our bright red Renault station, he’d magically set up our beloved, and rare brand (of course!) tent just by himself, with a serious face as we silently, and nervously waited till he asked us to hand something. He taught all of us how to swim before we were 5 I think, and he loved to swim. But driving was another matter, he was too cautious a driver to teach a rookie how to drive, those lessons did not go so well…
He encouraged us to explore, and learn. I remember when I barely learned how to read, a big box of children’s classics he ordered arrived, I remember him opening the box and placing them on the bookshelves with a smile on his face. Those books turned out to be the best gifts that forever changed us.
Among my fondest memories is years later all of us watching Northern Exposure Sunday nights, easing the tension of Sundays, that cozy, happy feeling of a family gathered in a room under blankets with a favorite show still lingers…
We always knew he genuinely wanted us all to succeed, wanted us to open doors to new things, believed in us, and was utterly proud of each and everyone of us and his grand kids.
After the accident, I was with him at the hospital one night, he had come out of the coma and couldn’t talk, eat, drink, move etc. yet, and we didn’t know if he would. I remember him looking at his toes, and trying to move them, putting such an effort that gave me so much hope those days, he seemed so focused and determined just as I knew him to be… With that will and lots of effort he regained his speech, and partial movement but when Parkinson’s was added to his bill two years later, we could see he was discouraged. Yet he stayed on, and struggled for our sakes I have no doubt. We are forever grateful to and will forever miss this courageous man, who loved us so dearly and never gave up on life.
