A
Hierarchy of Grief
Dipika Mukherjee
For the past two
years, Dr Nash has been prescribing sedatives and antidepressants. It must be
the medication taking a toll, slowing my heart down so that I can’t climb
stairs. Causing the breathlessness that wakes me up at nights, gasping for air
and finding none.
My wandering
irritates no one, there is nobody to be disturbed by the sound of the TV at
three in the morning when insomniacs are peddled things they don’t need. There
is no child to climb sleepily on my lap, such weighty love.
Dr Nash has
shepherded me through the past years; she knows how fragile I have become, I,
once undaunted by life. I had thought the universe modulated its flow to make
my life easier, to make the desires of Aneesh and Anwesa come true because of
the merits of past lives and daily prayer.
Then MH370
disappeared, like a star extinguished in the night sky, taking Aneesh and
Anwesa from me.
*
When Kyra hooked
me up to the ECG machine at Dr Nash’s office this morning, her hands were
clumsy. She is young, interning while waiting for medical school acceptances,
and very apologetic. She peeled the monitors off my skin again and again. When
the sheets printed out and Dr Nash told her to wheel me into the emergency room
at Northwestern Medical, she stumbled near the elevator, pitching me forward.
My blood pressure registered 181/120. They did another ECG at the emergency
room and mumbled about nonspecific T wave abnormality.
Kyra asked
whether someone could be with me, and when I said no, she didn’t press further.
She bought me lunch from Saigon Sisters upstairs (thoughtfully Asian and only
slightly spicy), and I ate on a gurney in the emergency room. Kyra looked
defeated when she left.
Now I am in the
cardiac care unit, a place filled with old men my father’s age. I think of my
father, so far away, seated in front of the TV, windows open to the tropical
heat and pollution of Damansara Utama because he can’t bear air-conditioned
rooms. It is early morning in Malaysia; my mother is reading the papers over
her morning tea.
There is a cry
from a room opposite, sobbing, then all goes quiet.
I know now to
interpret signals of grief. Sobbing does not come to everyone, such easy
relief.
*
I am watching
the screen; a human heart in action. It is a beautiful thing, this pulsating
pumping masculine organ within my female body, creating lines that squiggle
into mountains and hills with flat lands in between. I inhale air and life, and
then hold my breath wondering if it will change slightly. It doesn’t, this
mechanical thing. The black lines on the page continue a traitorous path.
Anwesha is a
writer. She talks of black lines on a page and their ability to transport minds
like magic. She is learning to read and write Bengali now, and delighting in
curlicues of the script in her own mother tongue. Aneesh and I tease her about it,
but we are secretly thrilled that Anwesha is a freshman at the University of
Chicago, and still so close to home.
Was close to
home.
Ina, the
technician, shifts slightly, allowing cool gel to probe the underside of my
right breast, and a long tongue, flapping as if torn, appears on the screen.
‘Is there a
problem?’
Ina is measuring
cavities and edges with precise red cross marks. ‘That’s a valve that blocks
the regurgitation of blood. Perfectly normal.’
‘Would you tell
me if you saw something abnormal?’
She smiles. Her
eyes are kind, used to dealing with frightened patients who find themselves in
this room without much notice, but then again, maybe she knows. ‘The doctor
will read these images and speak to you later. Let me put it this way ... if I
see something concerning, you won’t get on that treadmill.’
‘So if I take
the stress test, my heart is fine?’
‘I can’t tell
you that.’ She carries on probing.
The radiologist
is a blond Midwesterner who probably wants to be out on the streets, just like
Ina, ushering in another New Year, with its promise of new beginnings. Instead
they both focus on the pulsating screen.
How did that
little heart keep on pumping through the months when it seemed so much easier
to just give up? I willed it to give up, for my body to also become a
non-corporeal thing, spiralling towards Aneesh and Anwesa in a galaxy of stars.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. A young English poet, I forget who,
had written those lines, and died an early death. Anwesa had driven me crazy
while memorising that poem for a slam event, juxtaposing its macabre lines with
a modern poem on police brutality on black bodies. She had performed this dark
piece at the Printers Row Literary Festival; on that bright summer day filled
with young families, that performance had left the audience bewildered.
I now understand
the conceit of singing in a dark garden, the happiness of death. I once stopped
taking the medication that regulated this body, controlled my hypertension,
until I had simply collapsed, needing to be whisked into Northwestern
Memorial’s Emergency Room in an ambulance that shrieked past the holiday crowds
thronging Michigan Avenue, and into a room of people asking me whether I knew
which year it was, who the President of the United States was, and which city I
was in.
I was becoming
old friends with Northwestern Medical but the only room I really wanted to be
in was their morgue.
*
I have seen
therapists. I have mourned with Aneesh’s family and mine in Malaysia for
thirteen days, loud bhajans every evening, the community coming together as a protective
comforter around me for the two months I stayed. I followed the rituals, even
taking imaginary cremated bones to the Malacca Straits on a boat and setting
the flowers-that-were-their-ashes free. I eat nothing made out of any cereal at
ekadashi, no onion, no garlic, no meat.
Nothing helps.
No one warns you
that grieving is really just another game of one up-manship. In Malaysia, women
who had been widowed, parents who had lost children, even women who had
miscarried ... they all came to tell me they understood my grief. An Aunt told
me about a neighbour who lost both her sons in a car crash, as if losing one
child was easier than losing two, as if death was a hierarchy of grief. I had
to get up and walk away. I grew tired of the ‘how are you?’ when no one
understood how I tottered from moment to moment, veering between disbelief and
hope.
I came back to
Chicago, which has been home for the past four years but where we are still
strangers. In this big city, I can go for days without talking about Aneesh or
Anwesa, teaching my students, then returning to the closet where I sleep
surrounded by Anwesa’s fragrance. Sometimes I sleep on Aneesh’s shirts, the
ones casually discarded in the laundry basket.
Dr Nash wants me
to not read the news reports or watch TV anymore, at least until I am stronger.
So I don’t. But this morning, on the purple line to Evanston, the man across me
was reading the Chicago Tribune and there was a picture of a little boy, like a
doll, washed up on the shoreline.
My heart started
to pound. I thought of the parents of this child, prayed that they too were
washed up on some shore like this, instead of bearing the worst curse of
humanity. I got off at the Dempster. I sat in the train station for an hour,
but my heart would not subside.
*
I know the drill
by now. Ina asks me to get on the treadmill, run until I can’t run anymore, and
then quickly slide onto my right side on the examination table before my heart
has a chance to slow down. I have my running shoes on.
‘Good job,’ she
says. ‘This isn’t very comfortable, I know, but you’re doing great.’
She knots the
hospital gown over my chest as a male technician walks in to look at the
screen. He nods.
‘Can I go home
now?’
‘Probably,’ she
says cheerfully. ‘We’ll have to wait for the doctor.’
They will not
find anything wrong with me. The midnight MRI, the stress tests and EKG, will
be clear. No Evidence of Ischemia, No Arrythmias, Normal Resting BP with
Appropriate Response to Exercise. I have done this before too many times
before. Random pictures – a dead child, a plane in the air – sets my heart
palpitating and sometimes that forces me into Dr Nash’s office, then the
hospital.
I imagine Anwesa
in the firmament, her hand clasped with Aneesh’s, and I know he will never let
her go. If one of us has to be with Anwesha like this, Aneesh is the intrepid
parent, the doting dad. But usually, this image is followed by Anwesa
plummeting to earth with terror in her eyes.
Maybe there is a
hierarchy of grief. I mourn for Anwesa in a way I don’t for Aneesh. Perhaps we
both mourn for the child we birthed, but only one of us has been sentenced to
this life of cruel and unusual grieving.
*
The nurse wheels
me back to my room, where the TV is on. The dead Syrian child has a name now
and the talking heads are debating on why the Middle East isn’t taking in any
refugees, whether Europe can accept the burden of more; one man calls the
parents selfish for putting a child on a boat.
Even if I don’t
read the news, I know that what is happening in Syria on land is worse than the
risks at sea. But why did we, Aneesh and I, take Anwesha away from her land of
birth? We didn’t put her on a boat, but we too cast ourselves adrift from
everything familiar to escape the ethnic politics that the government was
fanning. When his multinational company offered to transfer Aneesh to Chicago,
we grabbed the opportunity for Anwesha. That is what we told ourselves as
Anwesha wrote through an alienated year of High School, grieving for home, one
of the few brown kids in class. Always searching for something a flight away.
We had taken Anwesha out of a failed educational system, a country festering in
corruption, but we had also taken away who she was before she could become
someone.
MH370 is still a
mystery. The politics of Malaysia do not make the news, for Malaysia is no
Syria, but we were allowed no public rage. We were herded into newsrooms and
then dragged out if our grief became a national shame.
Our children are
not washed up on seasides. They have disappeared, as if they had never lived.
Is there a right
path? Sometimes we get to choose our own passing – a slow erosion or a sudden
goodbye. I will leave no survivors to mourn my life, no legacy of this
hierarchy of grief.
Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and sociolinguist. Her debut novel, Thunder
Demons, Gyaana 2011, was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize; it is
being republished by Repeater, UK and distributed by Penguin/Random House
worldwide in Summer 2016. She also won the 2014 Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award
for Literary Excellence and the Platform Flash Fiction competition in April
2009. She has edited two anthologies of Southeast Asian short stories: Silverfish
New Writing 6, 2006 and The Merlion and Hibiscus, 2002, and her first poetry
chapbook, The Palimpsest of Exile, was published by Rubicon Press in 2009. Her
writing appears in publications around the world including Asia Literary Review,
World Literature Today, Rhino, Chicago Quarterly Review, Postcolonial Text and South
Asian Review. She is a Contributing Editor for Jaggery and curates an
Asian/American Reading Series for the Literary Guild, Chicago. More information
at dipikamukherjee.com.
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