2 months since Maama left us.

I’ve left home for a while and settled in a place bustling with energy, noise and chaos. I assumed that the timing was right for me to leave home. I also assumed that the distraction would be immensely therapeutic for me. I suppose it has been therapeutic for me, albeit not immensely.

The good days are really good and the bad days are so overwhelmingly soul wrenching. Considering what an exceptionally larger than life person Maama was and given that I’ve always  followed her closely for the entirety of my life I guess expecting the grief to be short lived or to become weightless is naive of me.

Two weeks or so prior to Maama’s demise, we had known that bringing her back would be something close to impossible. The doctors asked us to prepare for or even brace for what seemed only inevitable. I recall the physical and mental exhaustion I felt primarily with Maama being in the state that she was in and Kaafa being admitted in the hospital on top of having to prepare for what was to come. At that time, I was new to the concept of death and grief since I had never lost a person so close to my heart. Sure, I’d seen death and the sadness it brings but never like this. The whole thing was unknown to me and I remember feeling scared, unprepared and .. vulnerable. In all that confusion, I remember what Dhombe told me about something he’d read somewhere regarding death and grieving.

Imagine you’re in a boat in the middle of nowhere and suddenly a ginormous wave comes and completely wrecks your boat. Death feels somewhat like that. Unexpected even if you’re really prepared for it. Your boat has been destroyed and all that is left is driftwood. You hold on to pieces of what your boat had been and try to stay afloat because there is no sight of land in the horizon. Somedays, hanging on is hard because on those days the waves are bigger and seas are rougher. On stormy days you can barely hang on and you’re struggling just to stay afloat. But the rest of the days, you are relatively alright without having to put much effort into holding on. That’s what grief does to you. Sometimes it gets really hard because like driftwood you’re holding on to the remnants of the life that she lived. But the rest of the time you’re relatively okay. One day eventually, you’re going to see land and you’ll swim to the shore and be able to come to a place where you’re okay just reminiscing in her memories and celebrating the life she lived.

Dhombe could not have been more right.

Even thought I may be away from home seeking a distraction and time away from where Maama’s things are as she kept them, I yearn for the lengthy phone calls we made to each other gossiping about politics, complaining about Kaafa, me asking her to make a special prayer because I was to sit for an exam … and saying ‘Maama. Love you ingey. Maama ves bunebala I love you ey’ and she responding by saying ‘Hoon. Aan. I love you. Dhen baavvaa’. Initially, the first few times she said it with a hint of annoyance and amusement because I persuaded her so much. But eventually it came only naturally to her. I also miss receiving small surprise packages of  homemade Thelli Mas, Bajiya and Gulha in the mail; packages she would pester people to take to the post office and post to me. Munching on the crispy pieces of fried tuna was the best remedy for homesickness because they tasted just like home. She made them with her own hands specially for me and double fried them so that I could keep it for months on end. A few days after she left us, I remember discovering postal receipt after receipt of the packages she sent through the mail from 2008 onwards. She had kept them just incase my surprise packages from Maama got lost in the mail.

So much driftwood.