To Be Borne Witness To
34 days ago, my younger brother died. I discuss some of my feelings about it. There will be more later.
When I told anyone that my 20 year-old brother had died, speechlessness was the standard response. Of course. Nobody knows what to say. Nobody knows what it feels like. Nobody would want to know either and it is better that way.
The fluctuating terrain of my emotions and thoughts suggests that I am not much wiser as to what such unexpectable bereavement entails. Even though I can describe my feelings in a variety of poignant metaphors, I do not have a general theory of grief to offer. They are all rendered coarse by their variability. We can describe the shapes and patterns of the water as it rushes past in a creek but cannot predict the location and pattern of shapes before the fact. “Everyone grieves differently” is then just a pithy platitude, so general as to be meaningless, and a tacit admission of helplessness.
Yet it does help to hear platitudes from the right people. Receiving them from the wrong people is infuriating. And there is no avoiding them. As with everything in Pakistan, all major life events are a public spectacle. My father, being the well-connected, well-respected man in his village community, drew many well-wishers from afar for his son’s funeral. Many distant relatives attended, far-flung acquaintances called him to express condolences; there was even a memorial prayer arranged among the military officers serving under his cousin’s command. I saw many of these people for the first time in over 13 years. Everyone was there for my father, my grandmother, and even my mother.
I stood as the sentinel of their grief, the dutiful son. Holding my mother as she wailed over her son’s body, unable to support herself. Her shrieks upon witnessing his body in that shroud, replete with religious symbolism, an image she never expected to see, ring in my ears from time to time. And when the body was brought to the men, I stood by as my father broke down time and again, repeating the same few sentences about his youth, about how much he loved him, about how he had prayed for him to be born, about all the plans he had to spend time with him on his first visit to Pakistan. After arriving exactly 13 years after I left Pakistan, my brother dragged me to that village I hated being forced to visit annually during Muharram, just one week later. And that too to his own funeral.
But though I attended his funeral, though I participated in not one but two funeral prayers before his burial (one in my father’s village and another in Islamabad where he was buried), I never got to mourn him during the event. I mourned him for at most a few minutes when I had a private audience in the ambulance his body was being transported in. I got to converse with him in whatever limited way one converses with the dead. And in those few moments, there was nobody present to bear witness to me. There was nobody to listen to the anguish in my voice. Nobody trying to hold me upright when I stumbled. On that long day of my labour, those moments in the ambulance became the final memory forged between my brother and me. Everything that happened before and after that interlude, was the fulfilment of duties as a brother and a son.
Almost nobody who attended both events that day, was there to mourn for my brother. I simply do not accept it is possible to mourn sincerely for a person you never really knew and would not recognise if they passed you on the street after such a long absence. But many such people cried and lamented. Their sombre, distressed faces were sincere. Sincere in their empathetic grief for my parents. When people met me and learned that I was the older brother, nobody really mustered much care for me but were keen to emphasise how I must look after my parents. I was offered the conventional “sorry for your loss”.
All of which is explicable if not acceptable. I do not begrudge my parents for having so many people bear witness to their pain. I hope that they felt seen. What else explains the wailing, the crying, the shrieking, the beseeching to god in the heavens, if not a desire to be seen. What else explains the sudden devotion to religion in the aftermath, if not a desire for god himself to acknowledge your pain. It is all a desperate cry for an affirmation that eludes. It helps move the process of grieving along its course nonetheless.
I feel a greed for similar affirmation. I too want people, near and distant to focus their attention on me. Because while you are borne witness to, time is on pause, encased like an insect in amber resin; and the totality of loss is briefly suspended. In that period of unmoving time you can surface for some air, before being plunged back into the turbulent sea of grief. When time resumes, you continue with the motions of life as long as the lungs allow. And if you are lucky, whenever you need to resurface, there are people present to support your head above the water for as long as you need, as frequently as you need. More realistically, its not in your best interests to become reliant on people to hold your head above the water. You need to grow some gills or find a way to surface without assistance. To affirm your self, yourself.
It is so difficult.
I am better prepared for emotional distress than most. I learned to self-soothe from a young age, I learned enough about human psychology over the years to understand what recovering from such a bereavement might entail. I am blessed with sincere friends and a loving partner to support me through “this difficult time”. Regardless, there is no remedy for the crushing loneliness that overtakes me from time to time. A loneliness whose irruptions will undoubtedly become less frequent with time but also one that is occasionally yearned for. That loneliness is an affirmation of a fictitiously unique suffering, incomparable to that suffered by any other human on earth. Moments of fictitious existence thus serve as necessary refuges from the true banality of grief.
I wrote these words as they came to me in a busy café. All around me life went on. I unsuccessfully suppressed tears on a few occasions. Did anyone notice? Does anyone care? Should they? Isn’t life difficult enough without taking on a share of the burdens from every weeping stranger you encounter in life?
On this pale blue dot in an unimaginably vast universe, on a cold, sunny afternoon, wrote one man about the particularities of experiencing the death of his young brother. Though everything fades into insignificance in the backdrop of human experience, itself rendered minuscule by the vastness of the universe, these feelings are all that save him from being buried alive in the shadow of existence. It is these feelings, simultaneously singular and commonplace, that remind him of the marvelousness of existence.
Thank you, dear brother for making me feel so alive through your sudden, permanent absence. It would have been better to have died before seeing your lifeless corpse. Alas, beggars cannot be choosers.
Only just seen this now - Jesus, man, I'm so, so sorry. I can't even begin imagine to what you must be going through. Please reach out if you need someone to talk to.