Stories of my Father
My father’s first death anniversary is this December 30. Processing my grief, I find that there are so many stories to share. An ocean of memories. A lifetime of emotions.
I’ll share a few below. These stories are neither Twitter sound bites nor fit for a single Facebook post. But writing them helps me process my grief. So here I am. And here you are. Thank you for reading.
It is December 1998. I had planned to spend winter break in my college dormitory at Brandeis University. I was looking forward to spending my winter break reading, working on my senior thesis, and enjoying my time with other college friends who would also be there.
But those plans changed when my paternal grandmother passed away on December 6. She had been ill for some time, and during her final days, my parents had brought her to Paris so that she could receive medical attention there. It was a blessing for her and for my parents that they were together during her final days.
Once she was no more, my father deeply yearned for his sons to be with him. He expressed losing her as one of the hardest things he had faced, and he wanted his wife and children with him as he processed his loss. I wanted to be there to support him. But as I saw his grief, I wondered about why this was so hard for him. After all, he must have seen this day coming.
I was a naive 20 year old. Twenty two years later, I understand. Even if you see this day coming, you are not prepared for it. And after it, your life has changed forever.
December 6th 2020 was the first death anniversary of my grandmother where I could fully understand and empathize with how my father felt every December 6 since 1998. And it was the first December 6 that I could not express to him my sadness that his mother was no more, for he too was no more.
My family and I lived in Bhutan in 1991. During that year, there were several times when it was only my father and me who were there.
I remember afternoons spent sitting in the sunroom, with the two of us munching on chanachur, and talking. Really talking. I was a 13 year old, coping with puberty, independence, and being a teenager. He had recently achieved a milestone in his career, Bhutan being his first Ambassadorial post. But I remember conversations where he expressed doubts and frustrations about whether he had always made the right career choices. It was clearly a moment of processing and reflection for him.
These conversations were initially difficult for me to understand. To me, my father had already made his mark. Because of the hard work that he (and my mother) had put in for many years, there we were living a pretty remarkable life. He had just completed an incredibly successful tenure as the Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and was now an Ambassador, which was a position he had worked towards for years.
Why would he have any regrets? Why would he want my opinion on whether he had made the right choices at various stages?
In hindsight, I’m very grateful that my father had opened up to me. I may have been 13 and he may have been 47, but we were friends.
Of course, we spoke about other things too. Our love for Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar. Steve Martin. Khushwant Singh jokes. Cricket. Lots of conversations about cricket, its history, and various cricket records and scores, many of which my father had committed to memory. Patterns in math that I found fascinating. Ideas in zoology that he found fascinating. (He had become a diplomat just as he was considering a PhD in Zoology). World leaders that he admired and why.
Years later, I am thankful for these conversations, and for the vulnerability my father showed me at those moments. I see now that even if one’s career is in a position where one feels extremely thankful for how things are, one invariably faces choices that are difficult. There are what-if or existential questions that linger in one’s mind, with no answers or wind to blow them away, but I can do what my father did: bring out a couple of bowls of chanachur, sit with my children, and talk.
On the day that my father’s life ended, I felt that mine had as well. And in a sense, part of it did. That lifelong certainty that I would see him soon was replaced with a certainty that I would not. That knowledge that he would crack jokes (some hilarious, some irreverent, some not-so-funny) in his deep resonant tone, wear bold and occasionally flamboyant clothing, tell me that I work too hard and ask me if I was happy…truly happy…was replaced with a knowledge that none of those would ever happen again. Cherishing the memories one has of all these great times that he and I shared doesn’t remove the desire to form new ones.
I don’t have a neat conclusion to wrap this up. His life has concluded, but my journey to process that loss has not. I have found strength in family and friendships. I have drawn inspiration from the resilience of my mother who lost the love of her life. But as many of you who have gone through loss already know, finding strength doesn’t dull pain. It just helps one live with it.
Syed Muazzem Ali passed away on December 30, 2019. He was a career diplomat for the Bangladesh government. He was an avid lover of many things, but most of all, his family. We miss him.
