I’m sorry, baba.. The first dead body I ever saw was my…
By: Salsabel Almanssori
Tags: Love, Grief And Loss, Grief, Fathers

The first dead body I ever saw was my father’s. I was 27 years old. “I watched his heart rate go to 0,” I would repeat over and over again to everyone who I loved, everyone who loved him. It was the most heart wrenching experience of my life, one that made me feel like I couldn’t go on living. I knew life would never be the same, that I would always have a hole in my heart that flared with pain to any touch.

For a month I watched my father nearly dead on the bed at the hospital. The ICU staff would tell me to talk to him, that he could hear me. All I could think to say, and whisper and sob and scream, was “I’m sorry.” What I was sorry for I couldn’t exactly pinpoint. Watching someone I love with all my heart suffer tremendously while fighting for his life, and ultimately lose it, has got to be one of the greatest trials of my life. For me, it seemed impossible and unbearable. I knew life had to go on. I just didn’t know how. All I knew was that I was so, so sorry.

For some reason, in the couple years prior to my father’s death, I had read two books — memoirs of two young people who had died from cancer. The past two-three years had been the happiest of my life: I got engaged, fell deeply in love, got married, travelled, and got pregnant. Yet it was these years that my mind was occupied with thoughts about death and dying, and the meaning of life given that fundamental truth. Still, I never imagined that my father would get sick, let alone die.

October 11. My father was diagnosed with cancer.

I have always carried my father’s pain in my body and I did everything in my power to make his life better. Much of my life decisions and plans stemmed back to that goal. He was always so proud of me, so happy to be around me. I carried his pain even when he let it go. I could never let it go; I carry it still. I wish I knew why he cried when he saw me the day after I gave birth, when I walked from the maternity unit to the oncology unit to visit him. I didn’t sleep that night. Even then, I didn’t think his end was near. My mother seems to think he cried because he was worried about me. I had just undergone surgery — an emergency cesarean section.

I had always meditated Imam Ali’s thought, ““Life consists of two days, one for you one against you. So when it’s for you don’t be proud or reckless, and when it’s against you be patient, for both days are test for you.” However, I hadn’t thought of those two days as consecutive calendar days.

Tuesday, December 4. It was a happy day. My water broke. I called my husband calmly and said “We need to go to the hospital.” My father was at home recovering from his latest chemotherapy session. He laid in a twin bed in the corner of the living room. Still. He could barely move from the pain of his cancer, let alone the added misery of chemo. Still. Hope and denial are tightly bound. When the person you love with all of your being is dying, denial often masquerades as hope. I had hope. I had faith that God would save him. For now, he was safe at home in the twin bed in the corner of the living room.

Wednesday, December 5. I was still in labour. Four centimeters. We didn’t tell my mother and father — we didn’t want to stress them out given all they were going through. My mother called me in the morning to tell me that my father had a fever and was on his way to the emergency room. When he arrived, I told my husband to go to check on him. While he was gone my baby’s heart rate dropped for a prolonged period of time. He was in distress and I had to have surgery. I couldn’t reach my husband because of the bad reception in the ER so the nurses called him using the PA system, a call that my father had heard. He said that a few minutes later he heard the music that’s played whenever a baby is born and was relieved. I left the hospital two days later with a new life in my arms. My father left on January 11 without his life.

They say everything happens for a reason, but I was always reluctant to believe that. They say God gives and He takes away. Tell me that God took my father and gave me my son at the same time, but how can my mind accept that when all I can think of when I see him is I wish I my father can see how you’re growing up. I wish he can see me as a mother. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you couldn’t hold him when you met him for the first and only time. I’m sorry that cancer broke your bones in two months and killed you in another. I’m sorry that your body lay still at the hospital on life support, unable to move and speak, unable to respond when I said that I loved you and that you’re okay. I’m sorry we didn’t get to say goodbye, dad, baba.

His absence is like the sky, spread over everything. I want so deeply break down and escape into a bottomless, lonely depression. It calls me all the time, but then I hear my son cry or gurgle, and I have to go.

Nina Riggs, the author of one of the memoirs I had read, wrote, “With such frequent, common examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly get rid of the thought of death; how can it not seem at every moment to be gripping us by the throat?” I am beginning to feel it gripping me intensely, and to be honest, I am not resisting its grip. When my day comes, be it in youth or frailty, I will welcome it with grace as did my father. He will live forever in my broken heart.