CN: mentions of suicide
Questions about death always come up in inconvenient times and places. For example, you could be driving with your father to buy the traditional Hindu paraphernalia to commemorate your grandfather's second death anniversary, and you might pop the question to your father like, "How many years do you think you got left, Dad?"
I could have reminisced about how I taught my grandfather to play Spider Solitaire on Windows 2007 (a lifelong addiction that would keep him company during his years of complete deafness). Or I could have reminisced about how my grandfather himself taught me to write, buying cheap notebooks by the dozen so I could practice my penmanship. I come from a very loving patrilineal heritage, which is a privilege I do not take lightly. But reminiscing and nostalgia are associated with childhood. I was incredibly lucky to lose my first family member as an adult, because to navigate the emotional complexity of grief is not a small exercise.
My father says he can't estimate how many years he has left, because he thinks he is most likely to die from a car accident. He says this as we suddenly accelerate to 90 to catch the orange light 0.6 miles from home, and starts laughing behind the wheel as we slow down after the signal. But he is also a serious man. He has documents prepared for the transfer of his economical and legal assets to my mother and I after his passing. He has dreams still left to fulfill, but one of his largest dreams (the culmination of my education) has come to pass. He thinks he can afford to be a little reckless.
My first taste with death involved losing a close friend to suicide at 19. He was to be invited to my 20th birthday party. Instead, his funeral marked my turn into the decade. Death sits differently when it first strikes someone who is your age, in your age group, living through a life and circumstance that is very tangible to you. No longer is it some anonymous reportable thing in the news, a name/face/body mourned and eschewed for the next headline. I remember standing outside the cremation center in the late March, saying, "Damn, you chose a beautiful day to die."
When death strikes the elderly, I absolve some of the grief by saying that at least they had a good life, at least they have measurable impact in how they spent their time with the living. In some ways, because I had navigated the grief of losing my peers from a young(er) age, I was almost prepared for when my grandfather's death would come to pass.
Ever since I read Michelle Bastian's essay on the ecological measurement of time, I've been fighting against the SI unit of seconds measured out by a Cesium-133 bar maintained in somewhere in Paris, and determining what time is like for all of us worldwide. I do not believe that all the seconds of our life are made and marked equally. We might measure them equally, but we do not experience them equally.
Animals and the natural environment are external indicators of this phenomenon. We cannot measure the time it will take for a toxin to decompose in a whale's blubber, thereby making it a re-contaminant in its own habitat. There are no seconds to mark out how long it will take for two endangered species to finish each other off the face of this planet. When I ask my father how many years he thinks he has left, I'm not asking for an answer in unit years, I am asking for how much of his life feels incomplete.
Also, my father has already visited the doorstep of death for 17 minutes after a critical surgery in 2019. As with the orange light, he tries to play it cool. He came rushing back to life at the 17th minute because he overheard his nurses trying to convert his weight from unit pounds to kilograms, and the his brain had already computed the answer. I remember boarding a last minute flight from Boston with the assumption that I might not see my father alive when I land.
There are only three things that a loved one on the verge of death needs to know: that they are loved, that they loved you well, and that there are no major dependencies they are leaving behind. That is, they can leave peacefully. I was prepared to stomach the death of my father on these three rules alone. I am certain my father had a similar shorthand for the news of his father as well.
The traditional Hindu rites of a death anniversary are similar to most other remembrance rituals around the world. We remember not just my grandfather, but at least three of his forefathers (and foremothers). Each ancestor gets a sesame-seed rice ball to accompany them in the afterlife. We make my grandfather's favorite (vegetarian) meals; a problem I already foresee with my father's innate dislike of vegetables. After the prayers are done, we bury the rice balls and a plate of his favorite dishes into a deep trench at the back of our garden. The birds, rabbits and the soil will inherit what is meant for the spirits. All our meals today will be our grandfather's favorite meals. This is great because a love for potato curry cooked with poppy seed runs in the family.
Death rituals are fascinating not only in the face of human connection, but also because America's systemic avoidance of the emotionality of death has contributed to the emotional fissure that prevents us from processing grief. Longtime readers of this blog (or my older one on letterdrop) will remember how often I wrote about death in the time of the pandemic. We watched a society somehow try to piece itself back together from over 1 million deaths over the span of a year and a half, being unable to mourn the deceased at the pace at which we lost them. I wrote about death constantly, and even tried to be funny about it.
Lately, I've been reading Caitlin Doughty's From Here to Eternity. Doughty is an experienced mortician, and a deathcare professional. The book itself is a collection of death rituals and funerary rites from many different cultures all over the world, and almost each anecdote tries to answer questions around the emotional ritualization of grief, the environmental impact and process of death, and particularly, how the commercialization of death has lead to detachment from the concept, rather than inviting genuine contemplation of it.
Doughty describes how death care went from a private (and exclusively women-managed) practice to a commercial affair. In part, she addresses how the American deathcare industry requires death to be seen as dignified, and enforces this concept of dignity by creating as much emotional, physical and temporal space between the living and the deceased. But that’s not how death is. It’s physically and emotionally messy. Realizing that bodies decompose in ways that aren’t aesthetic is a genuine confrontation of how material and fragile we are. Deaths have their own way of marking time. For some women, death rituals might be the only claim to bodily autonomy. That is, after a life of occupying a body managed by other people’s rules, some women see death rituals as the final claim of independence.
In Hindu tradition, the oldest son looks after the funeral of his father. My parents are practicing Hindus, so they will expect the traditions to hold at least until their passing. I am my father's oldest by virtue of being his only offspring. Tradition does not require me, as a woman, to fulfill any of these duties. But I am also striving to be a responsible adult. I have to know if my father wants to be cremated in India or in the States. I have to know, legal documentation aside, of the sentimentality of the process. I have to know what he would like to eat in the afterlife because he hates any vegetable that’s not a potato. How many years does he have so that I can love him properly? Does he have an opinion on how it should continue after he’s gone?
That's why I ask him that question.
This is absolutely it and sums up so much of how I feel about american culture's relationship with death thank you thank you