12/12/22

a dash of mortality

Photo by Alexandru Acea

This is a small note about my heart.

Last week my Turkish grandmother had a stroke.

She survived, but can no longer speak.

This is a note about her heart.

When I got the news, I had just finished speaking at a conference.

This is a note about my art.

I was speaking new poems—most of my sonnet sequence, Upon Finding the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Dante’s Inferno.

When I saw her in the hospital, I prayed. And prayed. I haven’t stopped praying. My heart is one long stuttering prayer and it will only stop when I die, which will be sooner than any of us imagine.

In the auditorium, I had the strangest feeling the poems were escaping me, that they were finding no purchase, that they might leave and never return, that I wasn’t even in the room—a ribbon of unreality warped the hour—and I might have given into this feeling except for one thing, not a thing at all in fact, but a man, brown and beautiful, who sat near the front row, his hair as mass of dark curls, and who I felt catching each word. Afterward, this queer Arab asked me to sign his copy of my book as if he wasn’t the whole purpose for my speaking, my poems, my ailing prayers.

This is a note… aligning two experiences and excluding a hundred others, which either makes this exceptionally true or exceptionally false, and I can never decide which, but I do want to mention how green the hills were between Canberra and Sydney, and how each minute of the day is made greater by love, according to my infant son, who I listen to more than anyone, given he has the most to teach.

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Days later, I woke up near midnight with my heart squeezed by an invisible fist. Nauseous. Unable to lie down, unable to sleep. I stayed like that until dawn, the fist opening and squeezing, the pressure unrelenting. Eventually, I went to hospital, and was soon wired up to machines, just the same as my grandma, my dear Babanne; the test results have been a little concerning, or at least confusing—there is no certainty, beyond that I have a heart and my family has a history of heart disease.

When I sought out diagnosis for autism, my therapist asked “What do you want from this?” and when I said “Certainty”, his face cleared like a field of snow, which is odd because it’s not like I was conscious of it as muddied with thought, but it had been, I knew that now. I got my diagnosis but I am still and will forever be seeking certainty.

She is the last of my grandparents, the last of her generation alive. I still remember kissing my Arab teyta’s cold forehead as she lay on the floor that first morning of her death. To lose a grandparent is to lose part of your purchase on earth, part of your gravity. This is why I loathe language, look how paltry it is, how inadequate. Honestly, I can only be disgusted.

I wonder now if I wanted to be in a hospital bed, to feel closer to my unspeaking beloved. So often she says to me, “You my heart. Others I love yes but you my heart”. Naturally, I am crushed. Naturally, I am in excruciating pain. This is what it is to be alive.

I am crafting this meaning deliberately because today I once again felt the tightness in my chest, the palpitations, the signs I should go back to emergency—as if I have not been in an emergency this whole time—and I want it all to be a metaphor. I held my son, his babbling head, his warm gushing his outrageous beauty, and understood that I might not get to see him grow up. The unfairness of that is galling. I grew up without a father. I know what it is like to walk this world with a hole inside you, constantly crafting fathers out of everyone, a manufacturer of masculinities that can never and will never satisfy. The idea, the possibility that I might be the cause of that wound in my son, that I might replicate my experience in him is shattering.

I have an anxiety disorder, and too many reasons to be anxious. My grandmother is still in hospital; my heart remains a mystery; my aunty has spinal surgery coming up; my father-in-law has two cancers; my son is six months old and everything is capable of killing him; I’m running out of money and I have long since run out of fuel; fascists are gaining power around the world, and the world, which I need to be around for my son, is burning; I could go on for days. I have my hands on a hundred sore spots, and I push on them resolutely, because the pain tells me that I care or that I am alive, and I don’t know what it feels like to live without hurting, the ache is all I know, so I push and push and push and I am certain of two things: that without it I will die, and that it is killing me.

I have another truth, one I have told before and will tell again: writing saved my life. I have fought off suicide more times than I can count and it is writing that has pulled me through more than any pill or therapist. More accurately, it was learning to speak, to unravel the silences crushing my chest, it was finding my voice and through it, my loves, that has enabled me to survive. It is the only way I know how to breathe, and I haven’t been able to breathe all week so I am hoping this note will grant me some Air even as it makes known to me the reason my grandmother’s partial recovery has been so painful to witness: that the power of speech might be lost to her, and I may never again hear her say that I am her heart—and therefore her continuance, her ongoing prayer. I should be content in that last muddied thought, but I admit to my greed, and to wanting more.

La illaha illAllahu Muhammad r-Rasul Allah.

Please keep us in your prayers.