Caught In A Loop

While I do write extensively about revisiting the same ‘scene’ over and over again, this post has nothing to do with picture editing.

Today, as I approach the one year mark of my father’s passing from Covid, I cross the surreal anniversary of the last time I was with him face-to-face.

Because of the monotonous blur of days spent indoors last year, anything outside that pattern became an outstanding memory.

Pre-vaccine, the handful of occasions I saw my family are easy to count, precisely because they were so few. Even though we formed a bubble (and limited ourselves to mostly outdoor visits anyways) it still feels like a cruel joke that having followed the best guidelines, of staying apart, meant we had so few memories together last year. On the flip side, making the decision to limit our in-person interactions throughout the year was clearly the right call; tragically, there’s no further justification needed.

On September 13th, my father drove me, mask on, to the downtown Brampton GO Bus station in the late afternoon so that I could return home to Toronto after a quick visit.

It was such a normal activity - over the past decade of living in Toronto, Dad had perhaps driven me over a hundred times to that station, basically anytime I’d visit. The 10 minute drive was a final chance to wrap up our conversations of the day, or start random ones. Sometimes we’d veer into heavy topics. Occasionally, we’d vent about politics. Often, my dad would be giving me a pep talk of some sort, even if I had just finished saying everything was going great.

I said the pandemic made remembering easy for moments outside the house. However, maybe because this activity felt so instantly routine again, I don’t really have any memory what we talked about on that ride.

Safety paramount, I didn’t hug him. But I did shout our usual ‘love ya!’ through the mask. And while these weren’t the last words we ever spoke to each other, it was the final time we’d be in each other’s presence.

—

What is a happy death? What would a welcomed and fair goodbye look like for those left behind?

When I quickly came to realize that day would be our last together, too much time had already passed to remember anything from it. After a bit of reading, I learned what happened next was a common reaction to death: my brain would not let that memory go. It haunted me. Without prompting, I’d revisit it over and over and over again. That same route. To the same bus stop. For months it played in my head; the subconscious trying to scrape any additional detail it could from that day.

I felt anger and a strange guilt over having such a trivial moment as the final bit of time together. Why did I waste it? All the questions I have for my dad…why didn’t I bother asking them then?

At some point I got fed up. I asked myself if I could have that single car ride back, what would I say?

The next time the memory intruded on my day, I decided to bend it just a little. I put myself back in the passenger seat. I then ran simulations, as often as the memory plagued me.

At first, I went straight to asking Dad what were the big life lessons I needed to know. What should I remember first and foremost about him? Is there something he felt I didn’t know about himself? What should I tell mom to comfort her once he’s gone? How can I keep a link to my Indian heritage for my future children? How about the thousands of little details in the 64 years of his life that I didn’t know about?

In taking this exercise seriously, I came to the (perhaps obvious) recognition all of that was unnecessary. If I didn’t know the man - who was always open with me - after 30 years, I don’t think a few questions in a 10 minute car ride was going to change much.

So then the exercise transformed. “If there’s nothing you need to be told in that ride…what is it you need to say?”

Which was, plainly, to tell dad how much I love him. To share what it’s meant to have a man of outstanding moral depth and warmth be my father. To say thank you.

I thought this was the mature place land on. And it might be. Those are all important words to say. I wish I had said them more directly and overtly. But, again, in taking this exercise seriously, I knew that saying all that would only make me a blubbering mess in the car. Dad would have been confused. He may have even been distracted and, surprised by my sudden and hysterical wailing, swerved and caused a massive car accident. Who knows!?

Jokes aside, the point is saying all those kind ‘goodbye’ words with the weight of it actually being the end is an impossible lens to view the everyday. To have magically sensed that burden on that particular day would be to rob it of what it was, in its own moment. The little exercise told me what we all already know. Just accept it.

Would I have preferred, many (many) years from now, to have had my dad in the hospital bed, still happily conscious and fighting whatever ailment he might have, so that I could brace myself, and say goodbye and thank you in-person? Yeah, obviously. And I’m sure my teenage little sister rightfully feels even more robbed that she doesn’t have her father to see her through childhood. But so many people get that “happy” ending, and they’re still grieving terribly. While Dad was hours from death, I journaled that I felt guilt that I could not grow up fast enough to make it an ‘okay’ time for him to leave. After a brief reflection, I had to admit that there’s no such thing as an okay time.

In that long roundabout way, I’ve come to be grateful for having my final memory be the simple one that it is.

Something routine.

Something we shared.

Something calm.

Something comforting.

Put another way: how lovely it is that my final memory is an afternoon drive together.

—

Goodbyes suck.

But in their distant approach and in their long wake, they are also what fills a 10 minute ride to the bus station with so much meaning.