By Reva Dixit, Sabrina Eager, and Ishika Jha
Art by Sabrina Eager
Reva: Purple
Sabrina: Blue
Ishika: Green
It’s the most heartbreaking thing to see your father cry.
I had just finished a two hour long midterm and was enjoying some chai in my cozy Vermont spring-term housing when he Facetimed me. “All done with your exams? Did you do well?” my father asked me. A Miami thunderstorm lurked outside his window, washing him in gray light, muting all colors like an ancient family photo. “I have to tell you something. This morning, your grandmother was going to the hospital because of COVID, but she had a heart attack. Nahi rahi.”
He told me not to cry, that she wouldn’t have wanted me to cry, but I couldn’t stop the tears. Seeing me cry made him cry. It made him sob. He ducked his face from the camera to wipe away his tears. I heard his hitching breaths. I had always wondered about it with a morbid curiosity — I thought that I would probably see him cry at the impending funerals of my grandparents, who all live in India. But it wasn’t really about him and his hypermasculine stoicism. Despite knowing my father was not the infallible beacon of strength as he seemed to be to an awestruck younger-me, it was still shocking to see him cry.
There are few things that make me cry as much as my mother’s tears. Growing up, it was always the two of us. I am strong only because she was strong my whole childhood. I’d never seen her cry as much as she did after losing her father. It was October 2020, almost a year since the last time we’d seen him.
When I was home during the two weeks after his death, we took turns swapping tears. When she drove me back to my grandparents house from the airport the day before his funeral, we cried together in the car. We cried sharing stories about him on my grandma’s yellow leather couches in the living room, while writing our obituaries in the guest bedroom atop the bed’s scarlet-colored comforter. Two months later, on New Year’s Eve, I saw her cry while cooking dinner when the song “A Long December” came on and she heard the line, “Maybe this year will be better than the last.”
Last year was not easy for anyone, but it is impossible to ignore all the pain of the past 20 months when I look my mother in the face.
The looming certainty of their deaths and the havoc of grief and tragedy it would wreak upon our little bubble in America has always troubled me. I’ve always wanted a connection to my culture and my extended family. One way I strengthened this was by learning about Hinduism and spirituality, despite being more or less agnostic. Growing up in America made India feel so plastic-fake, not only in the way other Americans treat India, but in the way I feel complicit in its exoticization when I compare India to America. This feeling was especially true for religion — New Age spirituality in America is a bastardization of Asian philosophies that made any faith I might have possessed feel tacky and simply unbelievable. I had the same existential questions about mortality and death that any child asks, the same fears of aging and knowing your parents and grandparents will grow old, get sick, and die. I also had questions about reincarnation and moksha, and if we will find our loved ones again in the next life. Death anxiety is not anything new. What felt sharpest to me in those silent, contemplative hours between consciousness and sleep was the prospect of living multiple lifetimes without the souls I loved by my side.
I think I’ve become death-obsessed. I started working in the cemetery on campus. It’s become my physical connection to the dead. It feels like my only connection. My grandpa is buried in Florida. I couldn’t go to his unveiling. I don’t know how to mourn for him without a religion to teach me how. As a Jew, tradition tells me to light Yahrzeit candles and say Yizkor prayers, but doing that feels like a lie. Adonai knows that he’s a fictional character in my mind. And even Papa never believed in God. Well, he didn’t believe in an afterlife at least. Am I betraying him by hoping that his soul exists somewhere, that he can see me venture through the old cemetery?
This year saw my anxieties boil over into reality. My father had just returned from India after a month-long stay to visit his mother, sick with cancer. On the way, he had contracted COVID-19 and was isolating from my brother, who was finishing his senior year of high school virtually from the same house. My mother had just left for India to tend to her own ailing mother. The four of us, the people I loved most in the world, were physically unable to hold each other in the wake of my grandmother’s passing.
Actually, “passing” is a Western euphemism. Soft and transient. My dad put it like this: nahi rahi, she’s no more, that’s that. There was nothing to do but carry on. Our grief was interrupted, but our lives weren’t.
The past year and a half has brought on an onslaught of moments of grief and mourning: losing friends and classmates, hearing about extended family and family friends abroad who have passed, and preemptively grieving for family members that I might never be able to see again in full health because of COVID-19 complications. These instances have been difficult to process and have become even more unbearable when combined with the relentless pressure to be productive, to successfully navigate college for the first time, to make friends and be social, and to stay on top of classes, as assignments, commitments, and extracurriculars pile up.
With this consistent pressure, there is no spare time to grieve. After Dartmouth lost four students during the 2020–2021 academic year, a vigil was planned for the end of Spring Term. Student Assembly requested that the Administration allow students to take the day of the vigil off, ensuring that, “the Class of 2024 are excused from classes and academic work on Wednesday, May 26, as they mourn the loss of a third member of their class.” The request was denied by the Administration out of “concern about the impact on student learning.”
“I have reached a point where I can only be happy if I pretend the world does not exist outside of bubbles.” I said this once to a friend while sitting on the front porch of the house I’d been living in for five weeks, up in Callicoon, NY, the house I was leaving in a mere three weeks, once finals were over. I didn’t know how to work, how to write, read, study. So I’d spend time on the porch and try not to cry.
The sun was long gone for the day, and the waxing moon’s light reflected turquoise onto its frame of clouds, and we sat admiring the fireflies sparkling over the algae-coated pond that sat at the bottom of the hill. It was early June 2021. It was the hottest it had been since the summer before, the summer I barely left my house, and I was wearing a white dress to celebrate.
I tried to explain what I meant by bubbles. The Dartmouth bubble. The bubble that is a house of six friends in upstate New York. The bubble of fake lives posted on social media. Somewhere to pretend that we live somewhere less painful. At the time, we had already lost 3,489,677 lives worldwide to COVID-19. Dartmouth alone lost four members of our student community.
The denial of the request to keep students focused on our studies was ridiculous — as if grieving and emotional exhaustion weren’t impacting our academics and lives in general. This response represents an expectation that is forced upon us: that grief must be contained and palatable, something we must tuck into the corner of our minds so we can keep moving through our normal routines. But absolutely nothing feels normal.
At the cemetery, we walk over cavities filled with rotten bones and mark down the quality of eroded headstones. They’re improperly marked. I cannot help but think about the bodies that probably lie directly below my feet while weaving around the rubble of forgotten names. I respond to emails with the subject line “Cemetery Party” to schedule my hours. I hear about the funny stories of the dead that people wrote in private journals centuries ago, private journals now preserved in Special Collections.
It feels wrong to laugh when people are resting, but I do so anyway.
Sometimes I think about springtime, about how I did a good job of holding in my grief — as if that was the goal I was supposed to achieve. I spent the majority of nights locked in my room, lying on my bed, and skipping meals because at times I couldn’t even stomach the idea of making my way to the dining hall and being around people without feeling anxious. Yet I still did the majority of my assignments, mostly made it through my finals, and it almost felt like a win.
It has not been until months later, returning to campus with everything restarting, that I feel the consequences of not allowing myself to process my emotions. My head constantly feels cloudy; sometimes the same memories that make me laugh also make me want to cry; it feels as though I’m stuck in a sea of constant dread, unable to deal with or control the swirl of emotions under the surface that has been festering for months. I want to start working through those feelings, to slow down, and really let myself feel what’s happening around me. I don’t know exactly how or when to accomplish this, but I know it starts with prioritizing time for myself and giving myself room to breathe.
I know I can’t forget about the world outside the moonlit porch, speckled green with pollen and stained yellow by the carpenter bees that live in the banisters. I know that this loss must be remembered. I know that the pain of the past year and the fear for what’s to come are now as much a part of me as they are a part of all those mourning around me. But crying to the rhythm of the bird songs and brushing leaves as I sit on the porch in the twilight isn’t going to save me. Or anyone else.
Throughout that night, I Facetimed various family members across the country and across the world. My grandmother was cremated, all alone, in the hospital. There was a small virtual funeral attended by my father, my uncle, and my grandfather. It was nowhere near the kind of grand funeral a woman as mighty and dominating as herself deserved, and also nowhere near the funeral that I expected I would attend as a child. I felt like I would need to “collect” cultural milestones due to the limited time I spent back in the motherland. I’d been to an Indian wedding — which involved a congregation of extended family, many long poojas, and a lot of singing and dancing — but I’d never attended an Indian funeral, where everyone would wear white, and the body would be cremated on a funeral pyre, and then the ashes would be spread at the Ganges.
I wore white the next day. My father shaved his head in accordance with the mundan ritual. I haven’t seen him cry since.
Comments