Dread

It was the dead of the night. Or was it? It could just as easily be the silence of the wee hours of the morning. She had flows halfway across the world and after a full day of being out and about she had crashed on the upper bunk of her niece's bunk bed. She had felt her niece being unhappy and heard her objections about not being asked faintly and as much as she wanted to respond she felt unable to open her eyes. Slipping into the abyss of exhaustion and jet lag and ...escape?

At that point who could tell and who cared. This time in life was not about asking a lot of questions and soul searching. This was about keeping one foot in front of the other and rolling with the punches.

So in that bone weary tiredness there was a piercing ring of a bell that got through the haze of her consciousness. It was her sister's cell. She wasn't sure whose. She had two. Sisters that is. She heard muffled conversation from across the walls. Her eyes flew open. In a few minutes her sister walked in and said get ready, we have to go to the hospital.

Cold sweat...

Dread...

She got up and down from the upper bunk is a swift efficient motion. If this was anything other than the out of body experience, she would have exclaimed at her brilliant landing and made a big show of it. But it was as if she was observing herself brush her teeth, slip into khakis (well technically olives if you go by the color), t-shirt and she grabbed a cardigan on her way out and her wallet. Even though she was not sure how much local currency she has at that point. She had been here less than 24 hours and has not found time to withdraw local currency. It amazing what all the brain tends to focus on when it does not want to cut to the chase. The three sisters squeezed into the back of the three-wheeler and none of them spoke a word. She did not ask any questions or made any conversation. This was not a celebration and she would rather wait as long as it possible before finding out how bad it was. No good was going to come out of finding out the specifics. As long as she did not know better there was still hope. If there was not hope at least there was denial or willful ignorance. The ride lasted over thirty minutes or a lifetime. Who could tell. It was an artificial construct. 

She was driving to the hospital to join her mother where her father was fighting off the big C. He had been fighting it off and on for a couple of years now. But that was not what she focused on. He was her father. He was someone who had come back from having a brain hemorrhage relatively unscathed and well. He was her father. These kinds of melodramatic losses happened to other people in stories. She could not imagine her life without her father in it. She had to hang on to the ambiguity of not knowing the details of the phone call.

If she could, she would rather continue to ride in that three wheeler for a few hours. Anything to prolong knowing the inevitable. Anything.

She had been living on her own in another country for the past 10 hears and living out of the house for the past fourteen. But her father was her person. He could tell how her day was going by the first hello on the line. He called her when she was sick and she had told no one asking if she was doing ok. She called him when he was sick without being told. There was a connection between them that was beyond any other that she was aware of.

Not knowing how he was doing was better than knowing. At least today. She finally reached the destination. They climbed the stairs and made their way across the big hospital, with each step she was moving towards a certain knowledge that she was not prepared to handle. She was not grown up enough. He was not irrelevant yet to her life. This was too soon. With each step that she was taking towards the waiting room there was a deep sense of dread. Deep sense of hope? Deep dark abyss.

Finally, they were at the threshold. Her mother was surrounded by she- no-longer-remembers-who and then their eyes met and she said he is gone. He was gone. Just like that. final. A point of no return. It had happened. There was a hug. Four women holding on to each other each enveloped in their own sense of loss trying to shield one another. Trying to hold on to what was left. Trying to not be and be at the same time. There was an emptiness that settled where there was dread. There was nothing anymore. The pain would come and so would the grief and the anger and regret and a deep sense of loss. Right now there was nothing. Not even dread.