Babajun died
on a morning in July. His life was simply over, suddenly and
irrevocably,
like the
dropping and breaking of a teacup.
He had not
expected to die on the morning that he died—had not planned it,
had not
desired it,
had not foreseen it. There was no mounting evidence to suggest that his
death was
imminent.
There was no single precipitating factor, and no traceable chain of
cause and effect.
Even in
hindsight, it was difficult to settle upon a satisfactory explanation.
Babajun’s
final night on this earth was imprinted in the minds of his wife,
children, and
grandchildren
in a series of images that had the clarity and precision of
video-graphic recordings.
They could
not have known as they stored these images away that they were destined
to play
them over and
over again in their imaginations, with varying sequence and intensity,
for such a
long time to
come.
It was odd
how dissimilar and disconnected their images were. The oldest grandson
Kamran had
helped Babajun into the shower that evening, and would forever picture
the scar on
his
grandfather’s chest, a remnant of his bypass surgery. Although
the surgery had taken place
several years
before, the scar, which was two inches wide and bright pink, looked
fresh and
alive—almost
angry. Kamran had known the scar existed, but was shocked and disturbed
to see
it at such
close range. Long after the ordeal, whenever Kamran attempted to
picture his
grandfather,
the image that pushed itself forward was of the sunken and scarred
chest.
The final
image that Babajun’s oldest granddaughter Ariane was to record of
her
grandfather
was tinged with guilt. He was sitting on the couch, and she was passing
in and out of
the room with
a telephone in her hand. He was calling out to her each time she
passed, trying in
vain to get
her attention with affectionate verbal jabs. She was politely
attempting to hide her
annoyance,
but it emanated from her and she was keenly aware that her grandfather
felt it.
For
Babajun’s young grandson Darius, who was seven, the final image
was a eerily
tender one:
his grandfather was calling him forward, asking him to remove his wool
hat—the one
he had worn
for as long as Darius could remember—and demanding a kiss on the
top of his bald
head. Babajun
had taught him the Farsi word for hat: “kola.” For months
to come, Darius would
continually
replay the sound of his grandfather’s voice uttering the word
“kola” and would
simultaneously
relive the sensation of his own lips on his grandfather’s cold,
hairless head.
Shahin,
Babajun’s only son, would not retain a concrete image of his
father on the night
before he
died. Instead, he would dwell on his own behavior that night—his
excessive drinking,
his erratic
mood, and his furtive escapes to the dark basement where he had
assembled a
makeshift
opium den and where the pipe sat warming on a hotplate.
Babajun’s
daughter Roshan, in whose home in Virginia all of this transpired,
recorded an
incoherent
mixture of sound and image: the awkward way her father looked as he sat
on the
couch with
his bird-thin legs defensively crossed beneath him; the blaring of the
television set at
which he
stared blankly; the disorder in the kitchen where the dinner was being
haphazardly
prepared
between drinks; the cacaphony of voices which failed to form meaning.
For
Babajun’s wife Jane, fifty years of images coalesced into a
single picture of her
husband
sitting hunched over on a couch. This image was accompanied by the echo
of his
repeated and
increasingly querulous demands for another vodka. As always, she had
protested
half-heartedly,
and then complied.
Wife,
daughter, son, grandchildren—all would replay the sound of his
voice traveling
across the
house from the room where they had abandoned him. At first he shouted
out to
them—but
then, after he realized they were on another wavelength, he began to
mutter to
himself. His
tone was plaintive, then sarcastic, then hostile, then
desperate—and finally, barely
audible.
And then, of
course, the sudden image of his fallen body on the living room floor,
his
forehead
bloodied and his legs twisted awkwardly to one side. When his son
lifted him from the
floor and
carried him to the bedroom, the role reversal was shocking,
incomprehensible.
And next, the
springing into action: the mustering of sobriety, the perfunctory family
council and
the collective decision to avoid the emergency room, the expeditious
trip to CVS to
buy gauze and
peroxide and butterfly clamps, the gentle dressing of the wound, the
delicate
removal of
shoes and belt and trademark hat and newly-purchased jeans and cowboy
shirt, the
slipping on
of the pajamas without which he could not sleep, the careful
arrangement of the
pillows
around the injured head.
And after he
was safely in bed, the heedless, empty, continuation of merriment: the
repetition of
jokes everyone already knew, the corny songs dredged up from decades
past, the
giggles and
cackles and croons, the indifferent rise in volume in one room while in
the next room
he silently
descended.
And finally,
Jane’s voice waking them up in the half-light with the simplest,
yet most
important,
sentence she had ever uttered: “Children, I think your father is
dying.”
It was not
until after they had rubbed their swollen eyes and massaged their
pounding
temples and
heaved their sodden bodies out of bed that the stark reality of their
mother’s
statement
dawned on them. Only then did they recall the scene of Babajun’s
crumpled body on
the floor and
begin, groggily, to connect that picture to the words that drifted
together from the
tiny,
pathetic sound of their mother’s voice.
He was not
dead when they came into the room, and he was not dead when they called
the
ambulance—on the contrary, he burst forth with sudden venomous
lucidity.
“It’s
just an abrasion! Just an abrasion!” he sputtered. He was not
dead when the paramedic
ripped open
his pajama shirt and listened to his failing heart. “Who are
you?” he snarled at the
grotesque
crew-cut figure leaning over him with a stethoscope. “Where did
you get your medical
degree?”
He was alive enough notice the rolls of fat bulging beneath the
paramedic’s uniform,
alive enough
to smell the mixture of coffee and ketchup on his breath.
He was still
alive when they strapped him to the gurney and drove him away.
There must
have been a precise moment, as in all deaths, when his life
ended—when the
impact came
and the teacup shattered. But the clocks in the hospital where he died
continued
their
dutiful, omniscient ticking throughout the event, without a discernible
pause or a rise or fall
in pitch or
volume. The nurses and orderlies moved through the hospital rooms
soundlessly, as
they had been
trained to do in such moments. They spoke in whispers and adopted
other-worldly
expressions
to suit the occasion. It was pronounced: “He is dead.” The
death certificate was
signed and
submitted, and their work was over. Everything was clean, professional,
and
appropriate.
***
Greenlawn Cemetery is a sprawling oasis wedged between a gas station
and a Wal-Mart
on one end
and a liquor store and car dealership on the other. The green grass the
cemetery’s
name promises
is incongruously lush, considering the asphalt that encroaches upon it
from all
sides.
Flowers of every season and clime bloom simultaneously in a garish
effusion of color, and
stone angels
and flags intermingle in the solemn duty of watching over the dead. The
literature of
Greenlawn
Cemetery does not lie when it claims to tailor-make its burials to suit
the wishes of
the bereaved
family: Muslims and Hindus and Catholics and Protestants have all been
accommodated
there, and lie peacefully side by side.
The funeral
director was polite and solicitous: he had performed every imaginable
kind of
rite, he
assured them, and he understood and respected their desires. He even
provided, free of
charge, a
temporary marker to place over the mound and donated a bouquet of
plastic
geraniums—a
favorite, he knew, among Muslims—to place in the complementary
vase.
Babajun was
wrapped in a shroud and the simple pine box that served as his casket
was
hinged on one
side so that his body could fall into the earth according to Muslim
custom. And so
he died, and
so he was buried.
***
But this was not his death: not the alternating drunkenness and
hilarity and confusion and
neglect and
solitude of his final night; not the hematoma from his fall against the
wooden chest;
not the
failure to take him to an emergency room; not the hour and minute and
second recorded
on his death
certificate; not even the suffocation of dirt and the covering over
with grass and
plastic.
As his body
tumbled into the earth, his children had the sensation that Babajun was
tumbling not
down, but backwards through time. The teacup that was his life had
fallen through
another part
of the space-time continuum—a part that defied ticking clocks and
death certificates
and numerical
measurements. He had been falling toward death for a long
time—forever, it
seemed.
He had
probably begun to die a few years earlier, they thought. Perhaps it was
when he
first started
to feel that his children had ceased to care about him, understand him,
or even hear
him; when he
began to feel irrelevant; when he retired and his status as a brilliant
doctor no
longer
carried weight; when he first looked in the mirror and saw how hollow
his eyes had
become; when
he began to need assistance to get into or out of a car.
But in their
hearts, they knew that it had begun earlier than that. He had begun to
die
years and
years ago, maybe as far back as the time when they had returned from
abroad with
degrees in
Philosophy and Anthropology and Music, boasted of their alternative
sexual
orientation,
and brought home blond “partners” whose English even his
non-native ears detected
as improper.
It was even
possible, they thought, that he had begun to die slowly during the
years when
they were
abroad, studying at the finest and most expensive American
universities, at Stanford
and Duke and
Columbia, and they squandered the monthly allowance checks he sent them
on
trips to
Yosemite and the Grand Canyon—they, who had grown up surrounded
by the Alborz
and Zagros
Mountains! Each letter they sent home about their trips to Denver and
Boston and
Philadelphia
must have been a death blow to their father, they now realized. They
remembered,
with a stab
of guilt, how insensibly they had blared Bob Dylan and Santana in the
car while
driving with
their father to Persepolis and Isfahan and Qom and Hamedan, through the
Iranian
landscape he
wanted them to love.
But certainly
his descent into death had begun even earlier than that. He had begun
dying
when, as
adolescents living in Iran, they insisted on wearing patches on their
faded jeans and
growing their
sandy-colored bangs over their eyes and walking with a gait that to him
seem
lopsided and
aggressive and weak. American.
Or was it
even earlier, when his elegant Farsi was muffled, even to his own ears,
by the
nasal sounds
of their American English?
Did he begin
to die as a much younger man? Could his death have begun when he
returned to
Iran triumphantly after thirteen years in the United States; returned
with a medical
degree and an
American wife—their mother—and she persisted in walking
barefoot, letting her
fingernails
get dirty, wearing her hair loose around her shoulders, refusing to put
on lipstick, and
laughing with
her head thrown back, in direct defiance of all the social customs and
rules of
propriety he
had grown up with?
It was very
likely that his death went back even farther that that—that it
went all the way
back to the
moment when he left Iran to go to America, abandoning the father he
revered and the
mother he
adored, forever compromising and confusing his sense of himself.
No, it was
not possible to pinpoint Babajun’s death, although they would
never stop
trying to do
so. They would sweep up the jagged pieces of the broken teacup and move
on, but
Babajun would
die, again and again, for the rest of their lives.
