Seeing in the Dark
By Nicole Magabo
My misery has never sought company. For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to spend my bleakest moments in seclusion without the interruption of another’s heartbeat. One particular chilly night in October 2015, I sat in my apartment ignoring a persistent dull ache in my stomach. I had just torn the red wrapper of my eleventh mini Kit Kat bar. My eyes were drooping and I could feel my facial skin giving in to gravity’s pull. Ten wafered bars in, the law of diminishing returns had firmly set in. Yet, my set of jaws continued moving as if on autopilot. I was haemorrhaging endorphins and this chocolate drip could not save me.
They say you never get used to death happening to someone you intimately know. But no one ever talks about his friends. As Death fetches your loved one and disappears into God-knows-where, his friends linger. They pick at their rotten teeth, watching you with slits for eyes, like starved hawks waiting to pounce at any sign of devastation. Overstaying their welcome, his friends bring pronounced discomfort to your everyday life. They are the guests for whom you push the coffee table aside to make room for an air mattress. When I lost one parent, it took me two years to accept that I had a parasite living inside me. The ever-present Dread of losing the one I had left. Among Death’s friends, Dread is the most demanding of them all.
Nearly every night since my father’s death, there comes a moment in-between episodes of the show I’m binging, when my eyeballs swivel and land on the beige paint of the living room wall. I mentally time travel to a place that has become so familiar that I have redecorated it one too many times. My memory of that day remains untainted and always at the ready to be replayed. It’s a hot afternoon on the 18th of August 2013. I am standing upright and rigid before him. The only time I’ll ever be taller than Dad. I can’t lock eyes with him. Yes, it’s painful and the curtains are drawn over his eyes, but that’s not the reason. Someone has stuffed every hole on his face with white cotton balls that he looks like a caricature of himself. A bit of an inappropriate moment to chuckle, I hastily decide. He’s slightly over 24 hours into his permanent slumber, resting in a shiny yellowish-brown wooden coffin. The wet rubberiness of the banana leaves in my hands is a silent reminder that I am about to clean him. I don’t understand the tradition, but I’m going with it anyway. I never touched my father much when he lived, so I wasn’t going to pass up on this last opportunity. The official mourner seems to be practicing outside the room. Her screeching and wailing rivals that of a baby dolphin. Inside, there is a sea of women: his mother, his daughters, his wife and his mistress.
When some people find out that my father died, the second thing they usually say stumps me. The first is almost always, “so sorry for your loss.” The next? “Were you close?” Hmm. I never know what to say to that. The real answer is not cooked, packaged and ready-to-serve at request. Kin relationships are rarely deciphered with such ease. But I get it - death injects a formulaic compound into the atmosphere called Awkward. The resulting chemical reaction is not so easily diffused with sorrowful phrases. In response, I settle for, “Um, yeah.” A half-truth that seems to paralyse my interrogator’s need to dig further. I imagine my brilliant polygamous father thought that he would be alive to spend quality time with his breed for a very long time. But road accidents, especially ones that condemn you to a coma and leave you paralysed, do not send Save The Date cards in the mail.
Hours after my siblings and I wiped my Dad from head to toe with banana sap, the Master of Ceremony begins reading out letters from well-wishers. Less than an hour in, my tear-induced blindness instantly ceases when the MC concludes a letter I was barely paying attention to with the words, “I’ll miss you Dad. Your son, Allan from North Dakota.” For siblings who hardly spend time together, my sisters and I lifted our heads in unison and glared questioningly at the MC. He didn't realise that his words had just stopped time. At least for me. My world of already claustrophobic emotions seemed to reach and zoom past their boiling point. A canon ball of questions shot out of me but never made it past my vocal chords. A brother? Dad, can you wake up and make him stop inventing siblings? Why is this happening? Why didn’t you tell us about each other, Dad? Ever since I was eight - the age my father almost died, I had been introduced to ten siblings. I really wanted to love my new brother. Heck, I wanted to love the sisters seated next to me. Instead, I was filled with rage so deep that there was only space for pretence.
It’s taken me about six months to finally confront and understand that experiencing darkness is okay. For the contrast between light to exist, the dark must cut so deep every now and then. Someone or something must reject you. Someone you care about lies to you, and worse, by omission. A potential employer ignores your meticulously written cover letter and résumé, even after two follow-up emails. A crush doesn’t acknowledge your absence. It now makes sense why Death leaves his friends, Grief and Dread, behind. Their fluctuating and untimely presence is marked with talons clawing over heart chambers. At first, the tightness is suffocating. Then, the ensuing release prompts a reboot to the core. A harsh reminder that you cannot be too comfortable with how you choose to live. If you choose life every day, engage with purpose. Like clockwork, when you experience happiness, sadness is not so far behind. These twins must coexist for the human condition to be richly experienced. Let’s face it, we’re all infected with the messy business of being human. We might as well start the healing process by first acknowledging the last step - acceptance. If we’re lucky, the time we spend groping in the dark weaves different threads of colours and textures within us to ignite our imagination with ways we can express the shades of our humanity.
I sat in the front row before my father’s coffin and cried. Cried for the father I could not question. Cried for the empty response to my unanswered rage. Mostly, I cried because I no longer had a Dad to make memories with. Now at 25, in place of pretense, I have chosen to embrace a willingness to let love grow. No matter how long it takes.
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Nicole Amani Magabo is a Ugandan American who loves crafting stories about the human condition due to a lifelong fascination with people and the way we do this thing called life.